| Margarita Colmenares | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 July 1957  (age 63) |
| Alma mater | |
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Margarita Hortensia Colmenares (born July 20, 1957) is an American environmental engineer and activist for the Hispanic-American community. [1] [2] [3] In 1989 she became the first woman to serve as President of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. [4]
Colmenares grew up in Sacramento, California, the oldest of five children born to Luis and Hortensia Colmenares, Mexican immigrants who worked as laborers. She attended private Catholic schools in her childhood, and began her tertiary education at California State University, Sacramento with the intent to earn a degree in business. However, she became interested in engineering and ultimately earned her bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Stanford University in 1981. She also performed traditional Mexican dance at university. [2] [5] [6] She was co-director of the Ballet Folklórico de Stanford University. [7]
While in school, Colmenares worked for Xerox, Chevron, and the California Department of Water Resources. Upon graduation from Stanford, Colmenares continued a career with Chevron, starting as a field construction engineer and later working in Colorado and Texas before returning to California to head a major environmental cleanup at the Chevron El Segundo plant. [7] She earned a White House fellowship in 1991, the first Hispanic engineer to be selected. She spent her term at the White House working in the Department of Education, where she returned in 1996 as its director of corporate liaison. Through her leadership roles, she has advocated for Hispanic-American and women engineers. She founded the San Francisco chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. [2] [5] [6]
Sandra Cisneros is a Chicana writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature.
Ellen Ochoa is an American engineer, former astronaut and former director of the Johnson Space Center. In 1993 Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Ochoa became director of the center upon the retirement of the previous director, Michael Coats, on December 31, 2012. She was the first Hispanic director and the second female director of Johnson Space Center.
Giselle Fernández is an American television journalist and anchor for Spectrum News 1. Her appearances on network television include reporting and guest anchoring for CBS Early Show, CBS Evening News, NBC Today, NBC Nightly News, regular host for Access Hollywood, and guest on Dancing with the Stars.
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
Carmen Margarita Zapata often referred to as "The First Lady of the Hispanic Theater" was an American actress best known for her role in the PBS bilingual children's program Villa Alegre. Zapata is also the co-founder and director of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts in Los Angeles. Zapata took an active part in the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Zapata was born in New York City to Julio Zapata, a Mexican immigrant, and Ramona Roca, an Argentine immigrant.
Rodolfo "Rudy" Francisco Acuña, Ph.D., is an American historian, professor emeritus at California State University, Northridge, and a scholar of Chicano studies. He authored the 1972 book Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, approaching history of the Southwestern United States with a heavy emphasis on Mexican Americans. An eighth edition was published in 2014. Acuña has also written for the Los Angeles Times,The Los Angeles Herald-Express, La Opinión, and numerous other newspapers. His work emphasizes the struggles of Mexican American people. Acuña is an activist and he has supported numerous causes of the Chicano Movement. He currently teaches an on-line history course at California State University, Northridge.
Carmen Lomas Garza is an American artist and illustrator. She is well known for her paintings, ofrendas and for her papel picado work inspired by her Mexican-American heritage. Her work is a part of the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Mexican Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Oakland Museum of California, among other institutions.
Mari-Luci Jaramillo was an American educator and diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1977 to 1980. Upon her confirmation, Jaramillo became the first Mexican-American woman to serve as an American ambassador.
Sonya Fe is an American painter.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, is a curator, author, visual artist, and educator. She is best known for her large-scale installations that reference home altars and ofrendas. Her work engages in a conceptual exploration of Mexican American women's spiritual practices that addresses colonial and imperial histories of display, the recovery of cultural memory, and their roles in identity formation.
Francisco Xavier Alarcón was a Chicano poet and educator. He was one of the few Chicano poets to have "gained recognition while writing mostly in Spanish" within the United States. His poems have been also translated into Irish and Swedish. He made many guest appearances at public schools so that he could help inspire and influence young people to write their own poetry especially because he felt that children are "natural poets."
JoAnn Hardin Morgan is an American aerospace engineer who was a trailblazer in the United States space flight program as the first female engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) John F. Kennedy Space Center and the first woman to serve as a senior executive at Kennedy Space Center. For her work at NASA, Morgan was honored by U.S. President Bill Clinton as a Meritorious Executive in 1995 and 1998. Prior to her retirement in 2003, she held various leadership positions over 40 years in the manned space flight programs at NASA. Morgan served as the director of the External Relations and Business Development during her final years at the space center.
Arati Prabhakar is an American engineer and the former head of DARPA, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a position she held from July 30, 2012 to January 20, 2017. She is a founder and the CEO of Actuate, a nonprofit organization.
Cecilia Preciado de Burciaga was a Chicana scholar, activist and educator. Burciaga worked for over twenty years at Stanford University where she was the "highest ranking Latino administrator on campus." She advocated for the University to hire more women and people of color when she was a high-ranking administrator at Stanford. She was also extremely committed to enrolling more Chicano students, especially in graduate studies. Burciaga served on the National Advisory on Women with President Jimmy Carter and for President Bill Clinton as a member of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. An award named after her and her husband, José Antonio Burciaga, is given at Stanford to students who show significant contributions to the community.
Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto is a 1995 play by Cherríe Moraga. It is set in East Palo Alto, California, a community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Circle in the Dirt and the 1996 play Watsonville were published together in a single book by the West End Press.
Lena Lovato Archuleta was an American educator, school librarian, and administrator in New Mexico and Colorado for more than three decades. In 1976 she became the first Hispanic woman principal in the Denver Public Schools system. She was also the first Hispanic president of the Denver Classroom Teachers' Association and the Colorado Library Association, and the first female president of the Latin American Education Foundation. She was instrumental in the founding of several political and community advocacy groups for Latinos and served on numerous city and community boards. Following her retirement in 1979, she became a full-time volunteer for the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1985. In 2002 the Denver Public Schools system dedicated the Lena L. Archuleta Elementary School in northeast Denver in her honor.
Sylvia Acevedo is an American engineer and businesswoman. She was the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Girl Scouts of the USA from 2016 to 2020. A systems engineer by education, she began her career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she was on the Voyager 2 team. She has held executive roles at Apple, Dell, and Autodesk. In 2018, Acevedo was included in a Forbes list of "America's Top 50 Women In Tech". She was a founder, with 3 others of REBA Technology, an infiniband company that was sold and also the Founder and CEO of CommuniCard. As CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, Acevedo led the organization's largest release of badges, over 100 badges in STEM and Outdoors over three years.
María Elena Avila is a Mexican-born American entrepreneur, philanthropist and civic leader in California.
Sister Alicia Valladolid Cuarón is an American educator, human rights activist, women's rights activist, leadership development specialist, and Franciscan nun. Since the 1970s, she has crafted numerous initiatives benefiting low-income Latinas and Spanish-speaking immigrant families in Colorado, including the first bilingual and bicultural Head Start program in the state, the national Adelante Mujer Hispanic Employment and Training Conference, and the Bienestar Family Services Center, today a ministry of the Archdiocese of Denver. In 1992, Cuarón joined the Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity, where she continues her efforts to promote education and leadership development among Spanish-speaking families. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2008.
Hortensia Soto-Johnson is a Mexican–American mathematics educator, and a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University.