This list is just a small representation of Latinos and Hispanic Americans who have left their mark in history in some way. Latinos have contributed through art, politics, science, history and more.
Rita Moreno
Rita Moreno has been a household name for decades, ever since she captivated audiences with her fierce portrayal of Anita in 1961’s West Side Story. Moreno would go on to cement her name in history by winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role, becoming the first-ever Hispanic American woman to win an Academy Award.
Born Rosa Alverio on December 11, 1931 in Humacao, Puerto Rico, the actress later changed her last name to match her stepfather’s after she immigrated to New York City with her mom in 1936. Moreno made her Broadway debut in Skydrift at age 13, with her career taking off after that.
The pioneering actress went on to star in dozens of film, TV and stage shows through her decades-long career. She became only the third person ever to achieve the coveted EGOT, winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award by 1977. In 2019, she added a P to the achievement with a Peabody Award, one of only three performers to accomplish this feat.
Cesar Chavez
Born in Arizona to a Mexican American family, Cesar Chavez grew up around the people he later helped through his activism. 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.
After 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, a pivotal civil rights organization for Latinos in California.
Chavez 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. 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.
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. He was 66.
Roberto Clemente
A pioneer of the game, Roberto Clemente paved the way for Hispanic Americans in Major League Baseball.
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.
Another two years and Clemente was off to Montreal, Quebec, to play in the minor leagues in 1954. That same year, the Pittsburgh Pirates scouted him during training in Richmond, Virginia and Clemente was called up to the majors by November of that year in the rookie draft.
Clemente, wearing the iconic number 21, went on to become the first Latin American and Caribbean to win a World Series as a starting player in 1960.
The athlete died in a plane crash in 1972 while on his way to Nicaragua to deliver aid to earthquake victims when he was 38. In his honor, the MLB renamed the Commissioner’s Award to the Roberto Clemente Award, given to the player who all-around exemplifies sportsmanship and community outreach. He was also inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973, making him the first Latin American and Caribbean honoree.
Sonia Sotomayor
A Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent, Sonia Sotomayor became the first Hispanic American to serve as a member of the Supreme Court.
Sotomayor was born in 1954 in the New York City borough, where she grew up in a predominantly Catholic and Puerto Rican community. She quickly made education a priority through her mother’s insistence after her dad died when she was 9 years old.
"I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney, and I knew that when I was ten. Ten. That's no jest,” she told the NY Daily News in 1998.
The future judge went on to graduate valedictorian from high school and earned a full scholarship to Princeton University. She graduated in 1976 after establishing herself as a student advocate, working hard to ensure Princeton began hiring Latin American faculty. She went on to Yale Law School and graduated in 1979, earning her acceptance to the New York Bar the next year.
After working for over four years as an assistant district attorney in New York and stepping away to work in private practice, Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1997.
Twelve years later, Sotomayor made history when President Barack Obama picked her as his first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Few Hispanic Americans have made a bigger impact in recent pop culture than Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Miranda was born in 1980 in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City to Puerto Rican parents, who immigrated to New York to pursue academics. Miranda’s mother Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda is a clinical psychologist and his father Luis A. Miranda, Jr. is a Democratic Party consultant and immigrant advocate.
Miranda was raised around musicals and started writing his first title at Wesleyan University in 1999 during his sophomore year. In the Heights, loosely based on his own experiences growing up, would go on to open on Broadway in March 2008. Miranda won his first Tony Award that summer after the show received 13 nominations, earning four wins including Best Musical.
Influenced by his upbringing in the predominantly Latin Washington Heights, and his frequent vacations in Puerto Rico, the musical was heralded for featuring a largely Latin American cast with characters often singing and speaking in Spanish.
But Miranda’s largest mark on culture came when his musical Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015. Following the life of Alexander Hamilton, Miranda reimagined the beginnings of America told by all actors of color, whose ancestors didn’t have a say in how the country was built. The hip-hop musical quickly became one of the most profitable shows to ever hit Broadway.
Miranda once again won several Tony Awards for the show, including Best Musical, Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical.
Dolores Huerta
At 90 years old, Dolores Huerta still stands as a giant in the fight for Hispanic American labor rights.
Born in 1930, the New Mexico native of Mexican descent grew up in a farm worker community in Stockton, California, with her mom and two brothers. She briefly worked as an elementary school teacher after attending college before setting off on the path of civil rights activism.
She joined the Community Service Organization, where she later met fellow activist Chavez. She co-founded the Agricultural Workers Association in 1960 and collaborated with Chavez to found the National Farm Workers Association in 1962.
Her activism continued in California, where she made a name for herself by supporting and leading various strikes for workers' rights. She later stepped away from the union to focus on women’s rights after she was badly beaten by a San Francisco police officer during a peaceful raid, resulting in a long recovery.
Huerta now runs the Dolores Huerta Foundation and has received several accolades, including an inaugural Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in 1998 under President Clinton and the Presidential Medal of Freedom under President Obama in 2012.
List Source: Biography.com " 15 Influential Hispanic Americans Who Made History".
Antonia Couello Novello
Antonia Couello Novello was born August 23, 1944 in Puerto Rico. She was born with a condition called megacolon (an enlarged large intestine) that her family planned to get treated. However, her father died when she was eight years old and she ended up not receiving any treatment until the age of eighteen.
Novello studied medicine at the University of Puerto Rico, and then moved to the U.S. She did two fellowships (first at the University of Michigan and then Georgetown University), before studying public health at Johns Hopkins and graduating in 1982.
Though she was initially interested in direct care by being a pediatrician, she found the emotional toll too heavy. “When the pediatrician cries as much as the parents do, then you know it’s time to get out,” she once joked. Instead, Novello began serving in different public roles, feeling that such work could make a lasting difference.
Novello served as the deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for several years, before President George Bush nominated her to be Surgeon General in 1990.
As Surgeon General, Novello focused on children’s health and underserved communities, anti-smoking campaigns, and AIDS education and awareness. She was a popular Surgeon General and known for her empathy and advocacy.
Novello was later part of UNICEF for the United Nations and commissioner for the New York Dept. of Health, among other positions. She traveled extensively to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. She was quoted as saying,
“Someone asked me: ‘What are you doing here? Which group called you?’ I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? I’m Puerto Rican, my island needs me, I have knowledge, and I’m putting it exactly where I think it can be used.'”
– Spectrum News in Orlando
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Novello graduated from high school at only 15 years old. She took it upon herself to obtain surgery at the age of 18. Due to complications, she had to have another surgery two years later at the Mayo Clinic.
These years of unnecessary pain she endured as a child helped her make the decision to pursue a medical career. She said of her experience, ” I thought, when I grow up, no other person is going to wait 18 years.”
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz was born in Havana, Cuba, on October 21, 1925. Cruz’s was talented from a young age. She planned to become a teacher, but dropped out of teaching college to study at Havana’s National Conservatory of Music.
In 1950, she became the lead singer of the immensely popular band La Sonora Matancera, where her voice began to appear on the radio and TV, and the Tropicana Nightclub in Havana. She married the trumpet player, Pedro Knight.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Castro took over Cuba. At the time, Cruz and the band were in Mexico. She and her husband moved to the U.S. to become citizens instead of returning to Cuba. She was banned from Cuba in retribution.
In the 1960’s, Cruz joined the Tito Puente Orchestra. Together, they group rose in fame and broke in the mainstream music scene with their Afro-Cuban sound. By the 1970’s, Cruz was well-known in New York for her salsa music, vibrant performances, and elaborate costumes.
She also was part of several films and the BBC made a documentary about there (My Name is Celia Cruz). There is also an entire telenovela based on her life, named Celia.
Celia Cruz died in 2003, at 77 years old.
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Celia Cruz was one of 14 children in her family. Her real name when she was born was Úrsula Hilaria Celia Caridad Cruz Alfonso.
In an interview, Cruz once said, “My mother, Catalina, told me that at 9 or 10 months of age I’d wake up in the middle of the night, 2 or 3 in the morning, singing ‘esta muchachita va a trabajar de noche.’ Pues la viejita no se equivocó. (This little girl is is going to work nights! Well, my little mom wasn’t wrong).“
Later, many younger siblings, she would often sing them to sleep.
Ellen Ochoa
Ellen Ochoa was born May 10, 1958 in Los Angeles, California. Her parents were Mexican-American.
Ochoa studied physics at San Diego University, before earning a master’s and doctorate from Stanford in Electrical Engineering.
Ochoa was invited to join NASA in 1991 (out of more than 2,000 people, only 22 were selected– one of them Ochoa!). In 1993, she was part of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission for nine days, becoming the first Latina to go to space.
She returned to space in 1994 aboard the Atlantis, in 1999 to the International Space Station, and again in 2002. Ochoa’s hours in space total more than 950 hours.
Ocha served as a mission specialist and flight engineer, before working at the Astronaut Office. She was the first Latina and the second female to be director of the Johnson Space Center. She has also been involved in working with optical systems, and holds several patents on her inventions.
Ochoa currently lives in Texas with her husband and two sons.
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Ellen Ochoa is an accomplished flutist. She played in the Stanford Symphony Orchestra and in the marching band at San Diego. She brought her flute on her first space mission and played it in space!
Other astronauts had brought instruments into before, but she was the first one to float around while playing the flute.
Oscar de la Renta
Oscar de la Renta was born on July 22, 1932, in the Dominican Republic.
At 18, he moved to Spain to study painting but was more interested in the world of fashion. De la Renta got his first fashion job in 1961 in Paris, as assistant to Lanvin-Castillo’s head designer, Antonio del Castillo.
In 1963, he moved to New York to work for Elizabeth Arden. He launched his own label in 1965, mostly comprised of casual-luxury clothing.
De la Renta continued his line of high fashion over the next decades, and expanded into perfumes and even furniture design. He also launched a less expensive line. He was an international success, and was both the first American and the first Dominican to design for a French Couture House.
De la Renta died October 20, 2014, at the age of 82. His designs have been worn by mutiple first ladies, actresses such as Penélope Cruz , Anne Hatheway and Sarah Jessica Parker, and royalty like Meghan Markle.
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List Source: SpanishMama.com - "FAMOUS LATINOS AND HISPANIC AMERICANS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT"
As the proverb goes, when you educate a woman, you educate a family. Jovita Idár believed that wholeheartedly. While working at her father’s newspaper, La Crónica, she used the platform to speak out against racism and in support of women’s and Mexican-Americans’ rights. After writing an article condemning Woodrow Wilson’s decision to send U.S. troops to the border, the Texas Rangers showed up at her door to shut down the paper. But she refused to let them in, literally putting her body between them and the door, and they left. Although the Rangers eventually succeeded in shutting down the paper, Idár continued to stand up for women and Mexican-Americans her entire life. Idár died in San Antonio in 1946, but she lives on in spirit as one of the powerful and influential Latinas throughout history who have changed the world.
Gwen Ifill
Panamanian- and Barbadian-American journalist and author Gwen Ifill was a political correspondent and the co-anchor of PBS Newshour. Early in her career, Ifill was a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Boston Herald American, then went on to become chief political correspondent for NBC News. She moderated the vice presidential debates in 2004 and 2008 and wrote a best-selling book on race relations in America, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Over the course of her life, Ifill received more than 20 honorary doctorates and the highest honor from the National Press Club, the Fourth State Award. She passed away in November 2016 from breast and endometrial cancers. Ifill is among a long list of notable Black Americans you didn’t learn about in history class.
Jose Andres
Critically acclaimed chef José Andrés came to the United States from Spain in 1991 and began a long career of award-winning culinary innovation. After the tragic 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Andrés formed the World Central Kitchen (WCK), an organization that provides hot meals to those affected by natural disasters. After Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, he gathered 19,000 volunteers to serve 3.5 million meals to distraught residents who had limited access to electricity, clean water, and food. In 2019, Andrés fed furloughed workers during a month-long government shutdown. “We have shown that there is no place too far or disaster too great for our chefs to be there with a hot plate of food when it’s needed most,” Andrés wrote on the WCK website. Andrés has won the James Beard Award for both Outstanding Chef and Humanitarian of the Year and was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
Richard E. Cavazos
Texan and Mexican-American Richard E. Cavazos was the first Hispanic person to become a four-star general in the United States Army. He graduated from Texas Tech University and went on to serve in the Korean War as the commander of the 65th Infantry Regiment. He then served in Vietnam as commander of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Division. He became the first Hispanic four-star general of the United States Army in 1982, and received a number of military honors, including the distinguished service cross, the silver star, the bronze star, and the purple heart. Cavazos died in San Antonio in 2017.
Sylvia RIvera
“We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are. We are numerous. There are many of us out here.” Venezuelan- and Puerto Rican-American Sylvia Rivera was an LGBTQ rights pioneer. New York City’s Stonewall Inn is now a historic landmark and destination for Pride celebrations, but in 1969, brave patrons like Rivera were resisting an unlawful raid by police. The riots at Stonewall were a turning point in history for equal rights. Rivera went on to be the co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which provides legal representation and support to all those in the trans, non-binary, and non-gender conforming communities, was established in 2002 shortly after her death.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was born in Cuba in 1952 and immigrated to the United States at the age of eight. Her family settled in Miami. She was elected to the Florida House of Representatives and then to the Florida Senate, becoming the first Hispanic woman to serve in both. In 1989, she ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives against Democrat Gerald F. Richman, who used the campaign slogan, “This is an American seat.” Many viewed this as anti-Cuban and anti-Hispanic rhetoric, and in a backlash, Ros-Lehtinen won the election, making her the first Hispanic woman to ever serve in the United States Congress.
Not many know that seven years before 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling integrated America’s schools, a young California girl’s family fought for her to attend an “all-White” school. Sylvia Mendez was a small girl when she tried to register to attend school in Westminster, California. The school’s superintendent testified that those of Mexican descent were “intellectually, culturally, and morally inferior to European Americans.” Sylvia Mendez’ parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas, would have none of it. They united with other local Chicano families and hired a lawyer. They won their case, and in 1946, California schools became integrated by law.
List Source: Reader's Digest "24 Famous Hispanic Americans Who Made History"