Saturday, May 10, 2014

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Ellen Ochoa!


AKA Ellen Lauri Ochoa* or Dr. Ellen Ochoa.

Born May 10, 1958.

She is a former astronaut and current Director of the Johnson Space Center. She became the first Hispanic woman to go into space when she went on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1993. For what it's worth, she is also half Mexican on her father's side. It is a shame she is not more famous but then most nativists like to pretend that Hispanics like her are the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

And of course, the presence of real-life astronauts like her make it a lot easier to bear the relative scarcity of Latinos in films like Star Wars. After all, who needs fictional Latin space travelers when we already have real ones we can look up to?

* Birth name.

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