El primero de marzo/March 1st

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¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Lupita Nyong'o! (1983-         )

Lupita Nyong'o on the October 2016 cover of Vogue. Click HERE. 
A Kenyan-Mexican actress who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her first feature film role (as Patsey, in the 2013 historical drama 12 Years a Slave), a "Personality of the Year" Award from MTV Africa Music Awards (in 2014), and a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut (as a teenage orphan in the 2015 play The Eclipsed), Nyong'o has also graced the cover of numerous magazines, including Vogue four times (Click HERE for a full list of her awards, which are too numerous to list here). Nyong'o, whose name, "Lupita," is the diminutive form of Guadalupe, was born in Mexico, where her father was teaching political science, to Kenyan parents. She returned with her parents to Kenya at the age of one, but when she was 16, her parents sent her back to Mexico to learn Spanish. She holds dual Mexican-Kenyan citizenship and considers both countries to be an important part of her identity (read more about how both Mexico and Kenya like to claim her as their own, HERE). Nyong'o attended Hampshire College, where she studied Film and Theater Studies, in the United States, worked on the production crew for several Hollywood films, and then returned to Kenya to appear in the television series Shuga, an MTV Base Africa/UNICEF drama about HIV/AIDS prevention. After several other projects, she enrolled in a master's degree program in acting at Yale, where she appeared in many stage productions. It was almost immediately after graduating that she landed her breakout role in 12 Years a Slave. Multiple projects followed, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 and Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017 (hear her speak Spanish while visiting Mexico to promote the movies, HERE). She plays Nakia in the record-setting, critically acclaimed 2018 movie The Black Panther (click HERE to read a reflection about what the movie means to African fans, including Nyongo's father), and will play Trevor Noah's heroic mother in a movie based on his 2016 autobiography, Born a Crime. She is also currently developing a television series based on Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi's 2013 novel, which she will produce and star in.

Watch this video (in English) to hear her say that moving to Mexico at the age of 16 (without her parents) was the "greatest learning experience of [her] life" (minute 2:42 of the video).

Watch this video (in Spanish) to hear her talk about her memories of Mexico.

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

Other March 1st birthdays:

Javier Bardem (1969-       ): Spanish actor who has starred in multiple films in both Spanish and English (including No Country for Old Men, Pirates of the Caribbean, Skyfall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Sea Inside, Eat Pray Love, etc). Married to Spanish actress Penelope Cruz (pictured, in photo to right, from Vanity Fair Spain. Click HERE).

Other March 1st events of note:

1954- Puerto Rican nationalists attack Congress and shoot five people (nobody dies). They are sentenced to life in prison. In 1978 their sentences were commuted by President Jimmy Carter and they returned to Puerto Rico to live.

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