El doce de enero/January 12th

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¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Jeff Bezos! (1964-         )

Jeff Bezos is the billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post. His step-father, who Bezos considers his only "true, real" father, came to this country from Cuba at the age of 16 in 1962 with Operation Peter Pan (as did the mother of rapper/singer/producer Pitbull). He was then moved to a home for children in Wilmington, Delaware. He met Bezos' mother at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and married her in 1968, when Bezos was four (that's when Bezos, who had been born Jeff Jorgensen, was legally adopted by him and took his last name). Bezos grew up in Texas but moved with his family to Miami, where he attended high school. He graduated as valedictorian and attended Princeton, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science. After college he went to work on Wall Street. In 1994 he left his hedge fund job to begin Amazon, which his parents funded with $300,000 of their retirement savings. The company is now worth 90 billion. In 2000, Bezos, long interested in space travel, founded Blue Origin, a company to "help anybody go to space" (click HERE for the official site). Bezos has four children with his wife, Mackenzie. Click HERE to read about Bezos' connection to the Latino community.

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.

Other January 12th birthdays of note:

Naya Rivera (1987-        ). Actress of Puerto Rican, German, and African American descent. She became well-known on the television show Glee (2009).

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