My Nayme.......Jose Hernandez
Bill Dana finally has some new material:
From migrant picker to Mexican-American astronaut
BY HUGH DELLIOS
Chicago Tribune
LA PIEDAD, Mexico - (KRT) - During the four months each year that Jose Hernandez spent at "home" here during his youth, he would look up at the stars
and tell his family that he was going to fly up there someday.
He doesn't remember the stars being so bright over California's Central Valley, where his family went the rest of the year on the migrant circuit to
pick strawberries, cucumbers and whatever else was in season.
In the end, those difficult 1960s journeys may have led Hernandez to fulfill his dreams, maybe all the way to the moon.
Born in the U.S. by chance on one of those trips, the accomplished engineer and Houston resident was chosen by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration last month to be one of the 11 newest trainees to be astronauts.
While he would not be the first child of Mexicans to fly into space, Mexico and especially his family's hometown are ecstatic. They hope he will set
an example of hard work and achievement for youths who face the same long odds Hernandez did as a boy.
"May he fly high and take the name of La Piedad with him!" exclaimed Daniel Vazquez Zavala, administrator of this town of 100,000, where Hernandez
will be feted Monday with a daylong tribute.
The future spaceman, reached by cell phone in Los Angeles on Saturday before taking a red-eye flight to attend the event in La Piedad, said it was
"heartwarming" that the Mexicans have accepted him as one of them and that he has the opportunity to share his story with them.
"I'm trying to motivate kids out there," said Hernandez, 41, and the father of five, who has gone out of his way to emphasize his Mexican roots.
"I wanted to inspire the Mexican-Americans, but when I saw this opportunity that, hey, I could also inspire the kids in another whole country, Mexico,
we ought to jump at that chance because nothing but good can come out of it."
Hernandez spoke an hour after resigning as president of the Society of Mexican American Engineers and Scientists at its annual meeting to take up the
intensive training as a mission specialist in the next few weeks.
To his relatives, friends and La Piedad residents, Hernandez already is a hero of Buzz Lightyear proportions. After his family finally laid down roots
in Stockton, Calif., he earned college degrees in electrical engineering and went to work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
There, he and a partner developed what his NASA biography describes as "the first full-field digital mammography imaging system, a tool in the early
detection of breast cancer." The two reportedly used technology from President Reagan's Star Wars space shield program. Until his selection, he was a
NASA materials engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he helped develop new technologies for space shuttle and International Space
Station missions.
He is a long way from California's fields, where his family arrived as illegal immigrants and he didn't learn English until he was 12. And he's even
further from La Piedad, a farm town where drivers proceed slowly over the rough cobblestone street in front of his boyhood home.
A youngest child, he is remembered here as "Pepito." While most of his family has moved to the U.S., his parents, now retired in Stockton, often spend
their Christmases here with an aunt and cousins.
"Because he had such a big dream, it's better that he stayed there (in the U.S.)," said Fernando Mendez, 34, a cousin. "Here, it's so hard to get
ahead."
Hernandez's goal is to inspire Mexican and immigrant kids the way he was inspired after hearing that the Costa Rican-born Franklin Chang-Diaz was
chosen to be the first Latin American astronaut in space in 1981.
At the time, Hernandez was a high school senior in Stockton. He was in a field picking beets and remembers hearing the news on his transistor radio.
"Role models are very important to me," he said. "When I heard that Franklin Chang-Diaz got selected, that removed a lot of the perhaps self-set
barriers I had put on myself, in terms of me thinking that it wasn't possible for me to become an astronaut."
Since then, a Mexican scientist, Rodolfo Neri Vela, rode along on a space shuttle flight as a payload specialist in 1985. Among the Mexican-Americans
who have been chosen as astronauts is Ellen Ochoa, who flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1993.
Even before a full day of appearances and speeches here Monday, Hernandez already has inspired at least one Mexican youth - Mendez's son, Luis, 10,
who is Hernandez's nephew and godson.
Luis wants to be an astronaut "same as my godfather," although he has had trouble convincing his school chums that a boy from La Piedad might be the
next human to walk on the moon.
"My friends don't believe me," he said.
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