MEXICO Astronaut trainee urges youths to reach for stars

The son of migrant workers didn't learn English until he was 12.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
LA PIEDAD, Mexico -- 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 United States 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.
Though 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.
Wants to motivate kids
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, 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.
Notable accomplishments
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 farther from La Piedad, a farm town where drivers proceed slowly over the rough cobblestone street in front of his boyhood home.
Remembered roots
A youngest child, he is remembered here as "Pepito." Though most of his family has moved to the United States, 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 United States]," 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.