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Reaching for the Stars

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Reaching for the Stars

The Inspiring Story of a Migrant Farmworker Turned Astronaut

Center Street,

15 min read
8 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

With family support and perseverance, the son of migrant workers realized the American dream in space.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Concrete Examples
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Mexican farmworker Salvador Hernández pursued his dreams for his family, making the risky journey to the United States in search of a better life. His son, José M. Hernández, born and raised in California’s Central Valley, helped in the fields from an early age. As he recounts, his hard-working family kept him focused on education and his future despite the prejudice he encountered. Staring at the night sky, he didn’t just dream of the stars. Inspired by the Apollo 17 mission, he knew wanted one day to fly among them as an astronaut. After earning his engineering degrees, he worked for the legendary Lawrence Livermore Labs, the US Department of Energy, and then NASA, finally becoming an astronaut. His heartwarming book is a welcome illustration of what the American dream can still mean.

Summary

José Hernández’s courageous immigrant parents are his role models.

José Hernández’s father, Salvador, came from the central Mexican state of Michoacán and went to work in the fields before he was 10 years old. Among farmworkers such as Salvador and his family, everyone planted, plowed, and harvested from dawn to dusk, with little or no time for school. Salvador never got beyond the third grade. 

Salvador realized that he couldn’t create a better life for himself amid the poverty and hopelessness in Michoacán. At 15, he ventured to the United States with a friend and only a few hundred pesos in his pocket. It took the boys a month to reach the American border. Exhausted and hungry, they met a man from their hometown who helped them cross the border and travel to the San Joaquin Valley in California, where they got work as undocumented migrant farmworkers.

The life of an undocumented migrant farmworker is arduous and precarious. But for Salvador and his friend, the United States offered them the possibility of getting ahead. In the summer, they picked strawberries and cucumbers. In the winter, they pruned trees. After...

About the Author

José Moreno Hernández is an engineer and astronaut who flew on NASA’s space shuttle mission STS-128 in August 2009.

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