Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
Aviation pioneer Olga E. Custodio was born in San Juan in 1953. She was admitted into the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Officer Candidate School and then accepted as a candidate for training as a USAF pilot. Custodio subsequently entered the Flight Screening Pilot Officer Training School in 1980. After completion of this flight screening, Custodio... Continue Reading →
John Daniel “Danny” Olivas became the first U.S.-born man of Mexican descent to travel to space. (Rodolfo Neri Vela, who was part of a NASA Space Shuttle mission in 1985, had been born in Mexico; Ellen Ochoa, whose first spaceflight took place in 1993, was the first U.S.-born person of Mexican descent to make it... Continue Reading →
Federico Peña made history when President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. secretary of transportation. This appointment made Peña the first Hispanic-American to serve in that role. Peña was born in Laredo, Texas, in 1947. He eventually settled in Colorado, serving in the state’s House of Representatives from 1979 to 1983 and as mayor of Denver... Continue Reading →
In 1928, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Henry Garcia received a U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) commission. In doing so, Puerto Rican-born Garcia made history by becoming that military branch’s first officially recognized minority officer. A decade later, he achieved another milestone when he was made the captain of the patrol boat USCG Morris. This assignment... Continue Reading →
After the U.S. entry into World War II, a number of women of Puerto Rican descent – living both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland – answered the call to serve on the home front in the global fight against the Axis powers. These women, often facing hardships such as racial discrimination while working... Continue Reading →
Friday, September 15 marks the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S. Here is the first of our commemorative posts of Hispanic transportation pioneers. In June 1991, Sidney M. Gutierrez became the first U.S.-born Hispanic astronaut to travel into outer space. (Franklin R. Chang Díaz, who in 1986 had become the first Hispanic-American... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 