Hispanic Heritage Month
Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York. Her desire to be a
judge was first inspired by the TV showPerry Mason. She graduated from
Yale Law School. She became a U.S. District Court Judge in 1992 and was
elevated to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998. In 2009, she
became the first Latina Supreme Court Justice in U.S. history.
Carlos Santana
Carlos Santana is a Mexican and American musician who became famous
with his band, Santana, which pioneered a fusion of rock and Latin
American music. The band's sound featured his melodic, blues-based
guitar lines set against Latin and African. He experienced a resurgence of
popularity and critical acclaim in the late 1990s. In 2003 Rolling Stone
magazine listed Santana at number 20 on their list of the 100 Greatest
Guitarists of All Time. He has won 10 Grammy Awards and three Latin
Grammy Awards.
FRANKLIN R. CHANG-DÍAZ, PH.D.
FORMER NASA ASTRONAUT
PERSONAL DATA: Born in Costa Rica, He enjoys music, glider planes,
soccer, scuba diving and hiking.
NASA EXPERIENCE: Selected by NASA in May 1980, Dr. Chang-Díaz became
an astronaut. In late 1982, he was designated as support crew for the first
Spacelab mission and served as in-orbit Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM)
during that flight. He was leader of the astronaut support team at
Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
William Levy
William Levy is a Cuban-American actor and former model.
His debut on the Spanish-language channel Univision was in the
Venevision International production of Olvidarte Jamás. He later appeared
in Mi Vida Eres Tu and Acorralada. In 2008, he appeared in his first film,
Retazos de Vida, directed by Viviana Cordero.
Andy Garcia
Andres Garcia is professionally known as Andy Garcia, is a Cuban
American actor. He became known in the late 1980s and 1990s, having
appeared in several successful Hollywood films, including The Godfather
Part III, The Untouchables, Internal Affairs and When a Man Loves a
Woman. More recently, he has starred in Ocean's Eleven and its sequels,
Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen, and The Lost City.
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz was a Cuban-American salsa performer. One of the most
popular salsa artists of the 20th century, she earned twenty-three gold
albums and was renowned internationally as the "Queen of Salsa" as well
as "La Guarachera de Cuba.“
She spent much of her career living in New Jersey, and working in the
United States and several Latin American countries.
Shakira
Shakira is a Colombian singer-songwriter, dancer, record producer,
choreographer, and model.
She has won many awards including five MTV Video Music Awards, two
Grammy Awards, ten Latin Grammy Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards,
twenty-eight Billboard Latin Music Awards and has been Golden Globenominated.
She is also involved in philanthropic activities through charity work and
benefit concerts, notably her Pies Descalzos Foundation, her performance
at the "Clinton Global Initiative" created by former U.S. President Bill
Clinton, and her invitation to the Oval Office by President Barack Obama in
February 2010 to discuss early childhood development.
Dani Valencia
Dani Valencia is an Cuban- American professional baseball third baseman
for the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball. He has also played for
the Minnesota Twins and Boston Red Sox.
Valencia made his major league debut with the Twins in June 2010. He was
named the third baseman on Baseball America's 2010 All-Rookie Team, and
on the 2010 Topps Major League Rookie All-Star Team. In 2011, he led the
Twins in RBIs, and led all major league third basemen in assists.
Pau Gasol
Pau Gasol Sáez is a Spanish professional basketball player for the Los
Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is a fourtime All-Star, and a three-time All-NBA selection, once on the second team
and twice on the third team. He has won two NBA championships, both
with the Lakers. He was the NBA Rookie of the Year in 2002 with the
Memphis Grizzlies.
Jessica Sanchez
Jessica Sanchez is an American singer originally from California. Her father
is a Mexican American, originally from Texas, and is a US Navy veteran. Her
mother is a Filipina from Samal, Bataan in the Philippines She was the
runner-up on the eleventh season of the reality show American Idol. Prior
to appearing on American Idol, Sanchez competed in the first season of
America's Got Talent at the age of 11.
Penelope Cruz
Penélope Cruz is a Spanish actress and model. She made her acting debut
at 16 on television and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón,
jamón (1992), to critical acclaim. Her subsequent roles in the 1990s and
2000s included Open Your Eyes (1997), The Hi-Lo Country (1999), The Girl
of Your Dreams. Cruz achieved recognition for her lead roles in the 2001
films Vanilla Sky and Blow.
SOFIA VERGARA
Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, Sofía Vergara got her acting star as a
television personality in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, she became
known as a film actress, following the 2002 film Big Trouble, starring
alongside Tim Allen and Rene Russo; and 2003's Chasing Papi, in which
Vergara plays one of Thomas Fuentes's three girlfriends.
Gloria Estefán
Gloria Estefán is a Cuban-born American singer, songwriter, actress and
entrepreneur. She is in the top 100 best selling music artists with an
estimated 100 million records sold worldwide. She has won seven Grammy
Awards and is the most successful crossover performer in Latin music to
date.
Mario Molina
Mario Molina is a Mexican chemist and one of the most
prominent precursors to the discovery of the Antarctic ozone
hole. He was a co-recipient (along with Paul J. Crutzen and F.
Sherwood Rowland) of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his
role in elucidating the threat to the Earth's ozone layer of
chlorofluorocarbon gases (or CFCs), becoming the first Mexicanborn citizen to ever receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Antonio Banderas
Antonio Banderas, is a Spanish film actor, film director, film producer and
singer. He began his acting career with a series of films by director Pedro
Almodóvar and then appeared in high-profile Hollywood movies, especially
in the 1990s, including Assassins, Evita, Interview with the Vampire,
Philadelphia, Desperado, The Mask of Zorro and Spy Kids. Banderas is also a
voice artist, portraying the voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek sequels and
Puss in Boots.
Salma Hayek
Salma Hayek is a Mexican American film actress, director and producer. She
began her career in Mexico starring in the telenovela Teresa and went on to
star in the film El Callejón de los Milagros (Miracle Alley) for which she was
nominated for an Ariel Award. In 1991 Hayek moved to Hollywood and
came to prominence with roles in Hollywood movies such as Desperado
(1995), Dogma (1999), and Wild Wild West (1999).
Enrique Iglesias
Enrique Iglesias is a Spanish singer-songwriter, actor, and record producer
based in America. Iglesias started his career in the mid-1990s on an
American Spanish Language record label Fonovisa which helped turn him
into one of the biggest stars in Latin America and the Hispanic Market in the
United States becoming the biggest seller of Spanish-language albums of
that decade.
Ellen Ochoa
Ellen Ochoa is a former astronaut and current Director of the Johnson
Space Center. Ochoa became director of the center.
Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman in the world to go to space[when
she served on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1993.
The astronauts were studying the Earth's ozone layer. In her honor, Pasco
School District # 1 in Pasco, Washington, and Ellen Ochoa Elementary
School in Cudahy, CA had named their newest schools after her.
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes
contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such
as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) and City of the
Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias, 2002), which have been commercially
successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanishlanguage author". In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National
Literature Prize.
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, who is best known for her selfportraits.
Mexican culture and Amerindian cultural tradition are important in her
work, which has been sometimes characterized as Naïve art or folk art.
Her work has also been described as "surrealist“.
Bibliografía
Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Allende
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sof%C3%ADa_Vergara
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Ochoa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakira
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Iglesias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salma_Hayek
http://www.biography.com/people/sonia-sotomayor-453906
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Santana
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chang.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Levy_(actor)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Garc%C3%ADa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia_Cruz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo