September 15 begins Hispanic Heritage Month — we’re kicking off the month by honoring a number of figures who historically have blazed a trail for the Hispanic American community
Fernando Valenzuela is a former MLB pitcher most famous for his time with the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1980-90. A Mexican immigrant, Valenzuela’s raw talent & colorful personality made him an instant hit with the Dodgers’ significant Latinx fanbase. The ensuing media frenzy became known as ‘Fernandomania’ and represented one of the first times in MLB history that a Hispanic player was a face of baseball. Valenzuela retired in 1997. In 2015, he became a naturalized American citizen.
Sonia Sotomayor is the first Latinx Supreme Court justice in U.S. history, having served since 2009. The daughter of Puerto Rican-born Americans, Sotomayor spent the bulk of her childhood being raised by a single mom in the Bronx, NY. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1976 and earned a law degree from Yale Law School in 1979. Prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, she was a federal judge for 17 years. Her SCOTUS tenure has been characterized by decisions emphasizing criminal justice reform and the civil rights of both defendants and minority communities.
Sylvia Mendez was just 8 years old when she became a civil rights icon. Growing up in 1940s California as the daughter of Mexican & Puerto Rican immigrants, Mendez was a central figure in the landmark 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case Mendez v. Westminster. The decision found that segregating Mexican American students into separate schools in California was unconstitutional and led to the desegregation of all public schools in the state. The arguments used in Mendez v. Westminster later served as a precursor for the 1954 landmark SCOTUS segregation case Brown v. Board of Ed. After childhood, Mendez went on to work as a nurse & a public speaker, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
In 2015, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan made history as the first openly transgender person to serve in the White House in U.S. history. A longtime activist & expert on matters pertaining to LGBTQ+ civil rights and gender equality, Freedman-Gurspan was born in Honduras and raised by adoptive parents in Massachusetts. After graduating college in 2009, she pursued activism on the state level in MA for a few years before being hired as a policy adviser at the National Center for Transgender Equality. Her work focused on a number of issues impacting trans Americans, including homelessness, immigration, & incarceration. From there, she served 2 years in the Obama admin, first as an outreach & recruitment director and then as the White House’s LGBT liaison.
Ellen Ochoa is an icon for Latinx women in STEM. An engineer, astronaut, and former director of the Johnson Space Center, Ochoa made history in 1993 when she became the first Hispanic woman to travel to space while aboard the space shuttle Discovery. In her career as an astronaut, Ochoa logged approx 1,000 hours in space across 4 missions. Ochoa, who is a recipient of NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal, was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2017.
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938) was an author, historian, activist, and leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance. Schomburg was an Afro Latino of Puerto Rican, Black, and German heritage. Over his career, he worked tirelessly to identify, document, and preserve elements of Black history & culture, including art, manuscripts, slave narratives, and other artifacts. The works he amassed are now a collection in the New York Public Library at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Schomburg was once quoted as saying, ‘Pride of race is the antidote to prejudice.’
At 88 years young, Rita Moreno remains a treasure of the stage and screen. She is the only Hispanic actor in history to complete the hallowed EGOT, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award between 1962 and 1977. Her Oscar win, for the supporting role of Anita in 1961’s ‘West Side Story,’ remains her most iconic part. In recent decades, Moreno is perhaps best known for starring in the Netflix reboot of ‘One Day at a Time.’ In addition to her acting awards, Moreno has also been a Kennedy Center honoree and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.
Sylvia Rivera was an American icon of the early LGBTQ+ liberation movement, with a specific focus on activism for LGBTQ+ people of color and LGBTQ+ people experiencing homelessness. Together with her friend Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera was a fixture in New York City’s radical activist and cultural scene in the 1970s and ‘80s. Rivera & Johnson founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a local collective that provided housing and aid to young LGBTQ+ New Yorkers at the time. Rivera, who was of Venezuelan & Puerto Rican descent, died in 2002 at the age of 50. In 2005, the corner of Hudson & Christopher streets in NYC’s Greenwich Village was renamed Sylvia Rivera Way.
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