Former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, the father of state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, received a shout-out today in President Obama’s speech on immigration and border security. The speech was delivered in El Paso, Texas.
Sen. Chang-Diaz is a Jamaica Plain Democrat who represents parts of Dorchester and Roxbury. Her father, the first Latino-American to make it into space, was born in Costa Rica and retired from NASA in 2005.
Below is a portion of the speech, as prepared for delivery.
We need Washington to know that there is a movement for reform gathering strength from coast to coast. That’s how we’ll get this done. That’s how we can ensure that in the years ahead we are welcoming the talents of all who can contribute to this country; and that we are living up to that basic American idea: you can make it if you try.
That idea is what gave hope to José Hernández, who is here today. José’s parents were migrant farm workers. And so, growing up, he was too. He was born in California, though he could have just as easily been born on the other side of the border, had it been a different time of year, because his family moved with the seasons. Two of his siblings were actually born in Mexico.
They traveled a lot and José joined his parents picking cucumbers and strawberries. He missed part of the school year when they returned to Mexico each winter. He didn’t learn English until he was 12. But José was good at math, and he liked it. The great thing about math was that it’s the same in every school, and it’s the same in Spanish.
So he studied hard. And one day, standing in the fields, collecting sugar beets, he heard on a transistor radio that a man named Franklin Chang-Diaz – a man with a name like his – was going to be an astronaut for NASA.
José decided that he could be an astronaut, too.
So he kept studying, and graduated high school. He kept studying, earning an engineering degree and a graduate degree. He kept working hard, ending up at a national laboratory, helping to develop a new kind of digital medical imaging system.
And a few years later, he found himself more than 100 miles above the surface of the earth, staring out the window of the Shuttle Discovery, remembering the boy in the California fields with a crazy dream and an unshakable belief that everything was possible in America.
