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From sports to science to government and the arts, Hispanic leaders have shared their talents and visions to set the bar high in all spheres of American life. At 62.1 million strong, Latinos now make up 19 percent of the U.S. population — nearly one in five of all Americans — and have often made history along the way. Here are some firsts to remember.
1947: The first challenge to racial segregation in schools
Growing up in California in the 1940s, Sylvia Méndez remembers walking past the tidy stucco elementary school for white children on her way to the ramshackle “Mexican school” for dark-skinned children like her. Her father, a Mexican immigrant named Gonzalo Méndez, was so infuriated at the unequal treatment of his children that he rallied other Mexican families, hired an attorney and launched a legal battle that would eventually abolish segregation in public schools not just in California, but in the entire nation. The 1947 ruling in Mendez v. Westminster — argued successfully by an up-and-coming lawyer named Thurgood Marshall — would pave the way for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling declaring racial segregation in schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. Eight-year-old Sylvia Méndez, meanwhile, would go on to excel in academics and enjoy a 30-year career in nursing. She would also continue to share her family’s experience and become an advocate for advancing civil rights. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
1981: The first Latino astronaut
One of Franklin Chang-Díaz’s earliest memories is of lying inside a very large cardboard box with his friends and cousins and pretending to count down and blast off into space. Chang-Díaz, who was born in Costa Rica and whose father was of Chinese descent, grew up during the Cold War and was fascinated by space exploration. To pursue his dream, he headed to the United States in his teens, eventually earning a Ph.D. in plasma physics from MIT and applying to NASA’s Space Program, where he became the first Hispanic astronaut in 1981. In his 25-year career at NASA, Chang-Díaz equaled the record seven space shuttle flights, helped build the International Space Station and logged more than 1,601 hours in space, including 19 hours and 31 minutes in three spacewalks. Upon retiring from NASA in 2005, Chang-Díaz, who envisions a day when humanity will live and travel throughout the solar system, founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company, where he is developing a plasma rocket engine that claims 10 times the performance of a chemical rocket while using one-tenth the amount of fuel.
1981: The first major league pitcher to win both the Rookie of the Year Award and the Cy Young Award in the same season
In 1981, U.S. baseball fans would be introduced to one of the game’s great pitchers, whose prowess ignited Fernandomania from the moment he first stepped onto the mound at Dodger Stadium. Twenty-year-old Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela went on to win the National League Rookie of the Year Award and the Cy Young Award, the first pitcher in major league history to win both during the same season. Nicknamed El Toro (“the bull”), Valenzuela went on to help the Los Angeles Dodgers clinch the 1981 World Series against the New York Yankees — and best all National League pitchers to win the 1981 Silver Slugger Award. That was just the beginning. Fabulous Fernando would continue to confound batters with his signature screwball pitch throughout a 17-year career in the majors.
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