#Hispanic heritage month notable people professional#

The prolific right fielder was born in 1934 in Puerto Rico, joined the island’s amateur baseball league when he was 16 and made the professional league two years later at 18.Īnother two years and Clemente was off to Montreal, Quebec, to play in the minor leagues in 1954. (Photo: Louis Requena/ MLB via Getty Images)Ī pioneer of the game, Roberto Clemente paved the way for Hispanic Americans in Major League Baseball. She once again won her primary in June 2020, all but ensuring her return to Congress for a second term after the general election in November. Since her arrival in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez’s vocal support of left-leaning ideas, including co-sponsoring the Green New Deal package to combat climate change, has made her a popular figure in progressive politics. “That we can continue this organizing and continue what we’ve learned.”

“I’m hoping that this is a beginning,” Ocasio-Cortez said at her victory party in 2018. Through a grassroots campaign, she became the youngest person elected into the House of Representatives during the midterm elections that year.

Ocasio-Cortez eventually challenged Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley, the first to do so since 2004, and pulled off a surprise primary win in June 2018. She visited Flint, Michigan, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota after the general election, where she attended the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and decided to run for office. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 democratic primary. She excelled through high school after her family moved to the suburbs and was in her second year at Boston College when her dad tragically died of lung cancer in 2008.Īfter graduating college in 2011, Ocasio-Cortez returned to Bronx and campaigned for Sen. In just a few short years, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the major leading voices for Hispanic Americans in politics.Īlso known by her initials AOC, Ocasio-Cortez was born in 1989 in Bronx, New York, to a Puerto Rican mother and a Bronx-born father of Puerto Rican descent. (Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Though Chavez later received criticism from within for his singular control of the union, including times in which he fired those who opposed him, the activist is still regarded as an important civil rights leader and posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom the year after his death in 1993. The two would go on to found the National Farm Workers Association, later the United Farm Workers labor union, becoming primary figures for Latin American civil rights. The defining moment in Chavez’s life came when his family moved to California during the Great Depression to become farm workers, cementing his fight for farmers rights.Īfter receiving an honorable discharge from the Navy, Chavez worked as a lumber handler in San Jose, where he helped set up a chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a pivotal civil rights organization for Latinos in California.Ĭhavez made the CSO his full-time job after he was laid off, meeting fellow activist Dolores Huerta while traveling to chapters around the state of California. (Photo: Arthur Schatz/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)īorn in Arizona to a Mexican American family, Cesar Chavez grew up around the people he later helped through his activism.

Hispanic heritage month notable people