Hispanic Heritage Month Biography -Ellen Ochoa
Sonia Sotomayor, American lawyer and jurist was born to Puerto Rican born parents on June 25, 1954. Following the death of her father when she was nine years old, Sotomayor graduated from high school as valedictorian. She moved on to Princeton University where she admittedly struggled initially. Nevertheless, at Princeton she became a student activist promoting student rights, particularly issues impacting Latino students. She worked diligently to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton and went on to attend law school at Yale University, graduating in 1979. One year later, she passed the bar exam.
Sonia Sotomayor pursued a diverse career in the legal world including private practice, Assistant District Attorney of New York and work as a dedicated volunteer in the public service sector as well as pro bono activities. In 1991 a notable shift in her career came when President George W. Bush nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She was the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State and the first Puerto Rican woman to serve on a U.S. Federal Court. Subsequently, President Bill Clinton nominated Sotomayor to the U.S. Cour of Appeals. Judge Sotomayor went on to hear appeals in more than 3000 cases and wrote 380 opinions. She also taught at the New York University School of Law and Colombia Law School.
With President Barack Obama’s selection of Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court in 2009, she became the third woman to be confirmed and the first Latino woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor has been praised for her empathy in her approach to judicial decisions and for her trust in and dedication to the judicial process.
Hispanic Heritage Month Biography -Ellen Ochoa
Ellen Ochoa was born May 10, 1958, in Los Angeles, California and is a former American astronaut and the first Hispanic woman to travel into space in 1993. She later served as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center from 2013 until 2018.
Ochoa studied electrical engineering at Stanford University, earning a master’s degree in 1981 and a Doctorate in 1985. As a specialist in the development of optical systems, she worked as a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and at the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
She was selected by NASA in 1990 to participate in its astronaut Program and she became the first Hispanic female astronaut in 1991. In 1993 she served as a specialist abroad the space shuttle “Discovery”, becoming the first Latina to be launched into space. In May 1999, she was a member of the “Discovery STS-96” and a crew that executed the first docking to the International Space Station. In 2007 Ochoa became deputy director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; six years later she was promoted to Director.
Ochoa retired from the Johnson Space Center in 2018 to become Vice Chair of the National Science Board (NSB) which runs the National Science Foundation (NSF). She served as NSB Chair in 2020-22
Hispanic Heritage Month Biography – Sylvia Mendez
In 1946, eight years before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which held that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Gonzalo Mendez, an immigrant from Mexico, and his wife, Felicitas, a native of Puerto Rico, successfully challenged similar segregation policies in California on behalf of their children. When eight-year-old Sylvia and her brothers tried to enroll in a neighborhood school near their home, they were denied admission because of their dark skin and Hispanic last name. This denial prompted Sylvia’s parents to organize various sectors of the Hispanic community and eventually file a lawsuit in federal court. Mendez v. Westminster, which ultimately changed educational policy in California, inspired their daughter to commit her own life to service to others. After working thirty years as a nurse, she retired and began her second career as a civil rights activist.
Sylvia Mendez was born in 1936 in Santa Ana, California. Her parents had moved to Westminster to farm rented land at the time when their children were denied admission to the school of their choice. This school was closer to their home and much better funded than the one designated for Hispanic children. After initially failing to spark sufficient support from the Hispanic community, Gonzalo hired civil rights attorney David Marcus in 1945. Marcus filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of five Mexican-American families against four Orange County school districts and on behalf of close to 5,000 Hispanic American schoolchildren. The families were successful at the trial level, but the school districts appealed. As it progressed, the case began attracting attention and many civil rights organizations including the ACLU, American Jewish Congress, Japanese American Citizens League and the NAACP filed briefs in support of the families. Thurgood Marshall, who represented the NCCAP, also wrote a brief in the Mendez appeal. He would later argue Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, making many of the same arguments that had first been raised in Mendez v. Westminster. In 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s ruling in favor of the Mexican families and Governor Earl Warren, who was later Chief Justice when the Supreme Court decided Brown, began the process that would result in the desegregation of all California public schools and other public spaces.
After her nursing career, Sylvia Mendez began traveling around the country giving lectures to students on the importance of an education and sharing the story of her parents’ efforts to obtain equal educational opportunities for their children, and ultimately, for all children. Her work which is ongoing, has been recognized in the 2002 documentary Mendez v. Westminster: For all the Children, which aired on PBS, and won an Emmy award and a Golden Mike Award. Several schools and learning centers have been named after her and her parents and in 2004, President George W. Bush invited her to the White House for the celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month. A stamp commemorating the Mendez case was issued in 2007. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and an honorary degree from Brooklyn College in 2012. The Mendez Historic Freedom Trial and Monument opened in 2022 in Westminster, California to honor the courage of the Mendez family and to celebrate the achievement of the landmark case. The monument has two statues, one of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez and the second, of two children walking with books in their hands, bears the inscription “1947: Toward equality in our schools.”