Sonia Sotomayor

First-generation American Sonia Sotomayor's parents, Juan and Celina, emigrated from Puerto Rico during World War II. They met in New York, married, and lived in the Bronx housing projects where they had Sotomayor and her younger brother, Juan Jr. Her 42-year-old father, a tool-and-die maker with a third-grade education, was an alcoholic who died when she was 9. Her mother raised the two children alone on her salary from Prospect Hospital, insisting the children excel in school and become fluent in English, something Sotomayor's father had never done. She studied and worked diligently from the set of encyclopedias her mother purchased--the only set of encyclopedias in the housing project--learning to master the language of her birth country.

Julián Castro

Julián Castro was elected mayor of San Antonio, Texas, in 2009 at the age of 35. This gave him the distinction of being the youngest person ever elected mayor of a top 50 city, as measured by metro area population, in American history. Castro subsequently emerged on the national political scene in 2014 when President Barack Obama appointed him as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Since leaving that post, Castro remained active in the political area, most notably by announcing in early 2019 his intention to run for president in the 2020 election. However, on January 2, 2020, Castro removed himself from the presidential race.

Ellen Ochoa

Ellen Ochoa (born 1958) is an American scientist and former astronaut considered a specialist in optics and optical recognition in robotics. Ochoa is noted both for her distinguished work in inventions and patents and for her role in American space exploration. She is the veteran of four space shuttle flights. In 2012 Ochoa became the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Among Ochoa's optical systems innovations was a device that detected flaws and image recognition apparatus. In the late 1980s Ochoa began working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as an optical specialist. After leading a project team, Ochoa was selected for NASA's space flight program. She made her first flight on the space shuttle Discovery in April of 1993, becoming the first Hispanic woman astronaut.

Luis Munoz Marin

Widely recognized as "the father of modern-day Puerto Rico," Luis Munoz Marin served as the island's first elected governor from 1948 until early 1965, when he surrendered the governor's mansion to Popular Democratic Party protégé Robert Sanchez Vilella. Although as a young man he had set his sights on a career as a journalist and poet, Munoz Marin soon found himself drawn into island politics. He at first campaigned for independence from the United States but later modified his stand and guided the island to commonwealth status in 1952. Munoz Marin also spearheaded much-needed economic reforms for Puerto Rico and was the architect of Operation Bootstrap, which sharply accelerated economic growth on the island. Thomas Aitken Jr., in his biography of Munoz Marin, Poet in the Fortress, described the Puerto Rican statesman as a combination of opposites: "Poetry and politics, toughness and tenderheartedness, idealism and practicality, the colossal energy of the doer and the contemplative nature of the thinker."

Antonia Novello

Antonia Coello Novello was the first woman and the first Hispanic to be appointed Surgeon General of the United States. Noted for her philosophy of "good science, good sense" and for her approachability, Novello was dedicated to the prevention of AIDS, substance abuse, and smoking, as well as to the education of the American public. Her special concerns were for women, children, and Hispanics--populations often overlooked by public health services.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

Monsignor Oscar Romero y Galdamez, fourth archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated while presiding at a memorial Mass in the Carmelite chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia on March 24, 1980. The Archbishop was standing behind the altar, preparing the gifts of the offerty, when two mercenaries approached the chapel and fired a single shot from a U.S. military assault rifle. Archbishop Romero died within minutes from shock and blood loss. He died as a martyr and a prophet, as the greatest source of hope for millions of oppressed and impoverished Salvadorans, and as the greatest threat to the greed and arrogance of the oligarchy of 14 families that ruled El Salvador as if it were their own fiefdom.

Romero had undergone a Metanoia that transformed him from a timid defender of non- controversial virtues into a towering champion of the faith and of the faithful. He had discovered, in his own words: “The word of God is like the light of the sun. It illuminates beautiful things, but also things which we would rather not see.”

Sylvia Rivera

A veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising, Sylvia Rivera was a tireless advocate for those silenced and disregarded by larger movements. Throughout her life, she fought against the exclusion of transgender people, especially transgender people of color, from the larger movement for gay rights.

Rivera was born in New York City in 1951 to a father from Puerto Rico and a mother from Venezuela. She was assigned male at birth. Rivera had an incredibly difficult childhood. Her father was absent and her mother died by suicide when Rivera was 3 years old. Raised by her grandmother, Rivera began experimenting with clothing and makeup at a young age. She was beaten for doing so and, after being attacked on a school playground in sixth grade by another student, suspended from school for a week. Rivera ran away from home at age 11 and became a victim of sexual exploitation around 42nd Street.

Jorge Ramos

A powerful influence on Latinos and a star news anchor and reporter, Jorge Ramos is Spanish-language television's most durable personality. In his reporting, television appearances and debates, and freelance writing, Ramos molds opinion concerning the perils of immigrating to the United States and the importance to Americans of the growing bilingual Hispanic minority. Familiar to fans of Spanish-language evening news in Texas, California, and Florida, he nets top ratings and viewer loyalty for incisive news from Latin America and for hard-edged interviews with prime figures from politics, current events, and the arts. His two decades of on-camera work have been about more than the delivery of information: to Ramos, telecasting is a mission, a vehicle for social change.

Tito Puente

Tito Puente , byname of Ernesto Antonio Puente, Jr., (born April 20, 1923, New York, New York, U.S.—died May 31, 2000, New York City), American bandleader, composer, and musician who was one of the leading figures in Latin jazz. His bravura showmanship and string of mambo dance hits in the 1950s earned him the nickname “King of Mambo.”

The son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Puente grew up in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. At age 13 he became a professional musician, and he eventually learned to play a number of instruments, including the piano, saxophone, vibraphone, and timbales (paired high-pitched drums). After an apprenticeship in the historic Machito Orchestra (a New York-based Latin jazz group established in 1939), he served in the navy during World War II. Following his discharge, Puente studied at the Juilliard School.

Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an author and an academic whose work had a major influence on feminist theory and queer theory. She was the coeditor of the collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which is still seen as an important feminist work. Anzaldúa died in 2004 from complications related to diabetes.

Joan Baez

The voice can be a powerful instrument in music and social activism. For Joan Baez, through many years of performance, writing, and speaking out, the voice is a symbol of an individual's power to effect change. She was born in Staten Island, New York, January 9, 1941, the daughter of Dr. Albert Baez, a physicist. Baez's autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, details her childhood as a faculty child in Ithaca, New York, and in Bagdad, Redlands, and Palo Alto, California, where she attended high school and began to play the guitar. Relocated to the Boston area, where her father had joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she attended Boston University and began to perform professionally at small clubs, such as Tulla's Coffee Grinder. Her two years of apprenticeship in the Boston area brought her to the attention of Bob Gibson, who invited her to participate in the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.

Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera was acclaimed "one of the finest, most innovative, and most challenging contemporary Chicano poets," by Lauro H. Flores in Dictionary of Literary Biography. In books such as Rebozos of Love and Exiles of Desire, the award-winning Herrera gives voice to the Chicano experience, exhorting his people in a mixture of Spanish and English to be proud of their heritage, his language at once direct and sometimes playful. Herrera's more recent poetry collections for adults, while extending beyond the bounds of the Chicano movement, often hark back to the author's personal experience of growing up a Chicano. Blending poetry with narrative prose in his 1997 memoir Mayan Drifter, Herrera records a visit to the Mexico of his roots. Herrera "is a story-teller, a surrealist, and a polemicist all at once," summed up Marvin Bell in Boston Review, "and as a writer he goes beyond the sometimes brittle and insular thought model we are taught to recognize as poetry into an array of forms for play and politics."

Lizzie Velásquez

Lizzie Velásquez is an American author and motivational speaker. Velásquez was born with a unique congenital disease that prevents her from accumulating body fat. She gained fame after retaliating against a group of cyberbullies who made her the subject of a mean-spirited YouTube video dubbing her the "world's ugliest woman" when she was just 17 years old. Velásquez took to public speaking as a response to this cyberbullying. She also authored three books geared toward teenagers that detail the struggles she has experienced in a society so focused on outer beauty. Velásquez was the subject of a documentary titled A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velásquez Story, which premiered at film festivals in early 2015.

Rodolfo Gonzales

Professional boxer, 1947-55; former bail bondsman; political activist and businessperson (including ownership of a neighborhood bar), beginning in 1955. Denver Democratic Party, captain of Chicano district, 1957, coordinator of Colorado Viva Kennedy presidential campaign, 1960. Los Voluntarios (civic organization), founder, 1963; Crusade for Justice, founder, 1966; War on Poverty, chairperson, 1966, and publisher of the newspaper El Gallo.

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan is a Honduran-born, American-raised federal government official, working as the outreach and recruitment director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. A former policy adviser for the National Center for Transgender Equality, Freedman-Gurspan is the first openly transgender person to hold a White House position. Observers interpreted her hiring as part of a concerted effort on the part of President Barack Obama's administration to increase the visibility and awareness of sexual and gender minority rights issues.

Sandra Cisneros

Born in Chicago, Cisneros was the only daughter among seven children. Concerning her childhood, Cisneros recalled that because her brothers attempted to control her and expected her to assume a traditional female role, she often felt like she had "seven fathers." The family frequently moved between the United States and Mexico because of her father's homesickness for his native country and his devotion to his mother who lived there. Consequently, Cisneros often felt homeless and displaced: "Because we moved so much, and always in neighborhoods that appeared like France after World War II--empty lots and burned-out buildings--I retreated inside myself." She began to read extensively, finding comfort in such works as Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Cisneros periodically wrote poems and stories throughout her childhood and adolescence, but she did not find her literary voice until attending the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the late 1970s.

Sophie Cruz

Sophie Cruz is a young American activist. A child of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Cruz worried that her parents would be deported from the United States, so in 2015 she wrote a letter to Pope Francis asking him for help with U.S. immigration laws. In January of 2017, the young girl gave a speech at the Women's March in Washington, DC, after President Donald Trump took office.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez (born 1928) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose works earned him the reputation of being the greatest living writer of Castilian in Spain and Latin America.

Born in Aracata, Magdalena, Gabriel García Márquez received his early education and baccalaureate degree from the Liceo Nacional of Zipaquirá in 1946. That year he started working as a newspaper editor for El Universal in Cartagena. In 1948 he moved to Barranquilla, where he was editor of El Heraldo until 1952. Then he became editor of the liberal newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá during repressive eras of the conservative dictators Laureano Gómez and his successor, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.

Isabel Allende

The author of several novels and a short fiction collection, as well as plays and stories for children, Isabel Allende (born 1942) has received international acclaim for her writing.

Allende earned the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voice Award nomination for her debut novel, La casa de los espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits)--which became a best seller in Spain and West Germany in the 1980s and a 1994 movie--and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize nomination for De amor y de sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows). In 1988 Allende's third novel, Eva Luna, was voted One of the Year's Best Books by Library Journal.

Laura Esquivel

Like Water for Chocolate, a unique novel in the form of a cookbook by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, became one of the surprise literary hits of the 1990s and spawned one of the most successful foreign-language films of all time in the United States. Esquivel followed up that novel with other works that, if less consistently acclaimed, displayed equal originality. Like her Chilean contemporary Isabel Allende, Esquivel put a feminist twist on the important Latin American literary trend of "magical realism," embedding supernatural elements symbolic of deep forces inside conventionally realistic narratives. With her sense of humor and her winning way of describing family dynamics in Like Water for Chocolate, however, Esquivel merged magical realism with a storyteller's common touch.

Elizabeth Acevedo

Elizabeth Acevedo is the youngest child and only daughter of Dominican immigrants. She received her undergraduate degree in the performing arts and master's degree in writing. Acevedo is a writer, poet, fiction writer, and performer who has traveled on tour around the world and throughout the United States, including renowned venues such as Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, South Africa's State Theatre, the Bozar, or Centre for Fine Arts, in Brussels, and the National Library of Kosovo. She is noted for her slam poetry performances and is a National Slam Champion. Acevedo represented Washington, D.C., in the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam contest, placing eighth.

Eva Longoria

Eva Longoria rose to fame in 2004 with the role of Gabrielle Solis in television's runaway hit series Desperate Housewives. Once considered the ugly duckling of her family, the actress had come to be known for her beauty. And while she was enjoying the perks of her new-found celebrity, Longoria recognized how lucky she was.

America Ferrera

America Ferrera broke the mold for Latina film stars thanks to her acclaimed performance in 2002's Real Women Have Curves. Ferrera's figure perfectly embodied the title's sentiment, and she went on to appear in a number of films and her own television series Ugly Betty. The daughter of Honduran immigrants, Ferrera is happy to serve as a role model for women of all shapes and colors, especially when she recalled her own formative years. Speaking to Elizabeth Weitzman about her younger years in Interview, the actress said, "I went through a lot of self-doubt. I never turned on the TV and saw a Latina woman with an average body."

Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons

Lucy E. Parsons (c. 1851 – 1942) was an American social anarchist and later anarcho-communist. Her early life is shrouded in mystery: she herself said she was of mixed Mexican and Native American ancestry; historians believe she was born to an African-American slave, possibly in Virginia, then married a black freedman in Texas. In addition to Parsons, she went by different surnames during her life including Carter, Diaz, Gonzalez and Hull. She met Albert Parsons in Waco, Texas, and claimed to have married him although no records have been found. They moved to Chicago together around 1873 and Parsons' politics were shaped by the harsh repression of the Chicago railroad strike of 1877. She argued for labor organization and class struggle, writing polemical texts and speaking publicly at events. She joined the International Workingmen's Association and later the Knights of Labor, as well as setting up the Chicago Working Women's Union with her friend Lizzie Swank, alongside other women.

Ricky Martin

On the edge of the new millennium, Puerto Rican pop sensation Ricky Martin almost by himself gave Latino music an international face. An electrifying performance at the 1999 Grammy Awards launched Martin into worldwide super-stardom. As Entertainment Weekly's Andrew Essex reported, "his leather-pants, electro-pelvis version of 'La Copa de la Vida' single-handedly goosed a very dull [Grammy] telecast, earning him a standing ovation." It earned him a legion of fans, as well, who quickly snapped up copies of Martin's CDs the next day.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda is an American playwright, actor, composer, and performer. His 2007 play In the Heights helped to launch his career and shoot him to stardom. He became best known, however, as the creator of the critically acclaimed and popular musical Hamilton, for which he received various awards, including two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2018, he costarred in the Disney live-action musical Mary Poppins Returns. He then signed on to star in the adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy novel series His Dark Materials, scheduled for release on HBO in 2019.

Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez appeared as an overnight sensation when she burst onto the entertainment scene in the mid-1990s. She was a talented, well-rounded modern woman, with pizzazz and good looks, plus singing, dancing, and acting accomplishments to her credit. A veteran of music videos, television, live stage shows, and commercial modeling, Lopez appeared in only a handful of minor film roles before she suddenly rocketed to stardom in the role of the murdered Tejano singing sensation Selena Quintanilla Perez. When Selena was released in theaters, Lopez emerged instantly as one of Hollywood's most popular leading ladies. When Lopez released her first CD in 1998, the album sold more than two million copies by the year's end. With projects in fashion, film, philanthropy, television, and music, Lopez added American Idol judge to her long list of accomplishments when she joined the panel of celebrity judges in 2011. Lopez left the show after two seasons in 2012 only to return once more in 2014. She also released her eighth studio album that year, A.K.A. and signed on to star in the NBC crime series Shades of Blue, which premiered in 2016. Two years later, Lopez returned to the big screen with the comedy Second Act, which hit theaters in November of 2018.

Dara Torres

Every Olympics produces a star, and the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, China, made Dara Torres a household name. The 41-year-old became the only American swimmer ever to compete in five Olympics, and she also became the first woman over the age of 40 to race in an Olympic pool event. In Beijing Torres set the fastest times of her career, and went home with three new Olympic medals for a career total of 12, including a gold medal she won as a teenager as part of the U.S. women's relay team at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

Roberto Clemente

A dazzling baseball superstar of surpassing skills, Roberto Clemente (1934-1972) was the first great Latin American player to captivate the major leagues. His life was cut short when his plane, delivering relief supplies to earthquake-devastated Nicaragua, crashed on the last day of 1972.

A Puerto Rican national hero, Hall of Fame outfielder Roberto Clemente spent his sparkling 18-year baseball career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He enchanted fans with his powerful throwing arm, graceful outfield defense, and superb hitting. Clemente won Gold Glove Awards, symbolizing defensive supremacy, every year from their inception in 1961, until his death in 1972. He also was elected to the National League All-Star team 12 times. Clemente was an outspoken advocate for Hispanic rights and a humanitarian. His untimely death came while he was leading a mission of mercy.