Famous Latinx Birthdays

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Satcha Pretto! (1980-       ) Photo from www.univisión.com  An Emmy-award winning broadcaster from Honduras, Satcha Pretto has been with the show Despierta America since 2011. She grew up in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where she attended bilingual schools and excelled academically. She  had a job with the radio station Radio Suprema Stereo 99.5 in Tegucigalpa in high school and even hosted her own show. Sadly, she lost her father to a heart attack in 1996. Nonetheless, due to her academic success, she won a scholarship to Angelo State University in Texas, where she majored in Communications. She graduated in 2001. After graduation she started working with Univisión affiliates and collaborated with CNN. She had the opportunity to interview Chilean author Isabel Allende in Dallas in 2006. Soon after, she began working for Primer Impacto: Fin de Semana . She covered the Pope's visit to the United States in 2008. She moved to Despier...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Joyce Giraud! (1975-        ) Photo from thehollywoodgossip.com, on a site dedicated to her work on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hill . Click HERE .  An actress, model, beauty pageant contestant, and film and television producer born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, Joyce Giraud was raised by a single mother (her "hero") and discovered while working at a KFC drive-thru when a photographer asked her to model for an international campaign (read more HERE ). By the age of 19, she had already earned two Bachelor's Degrees from La Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico , one in Social Work and one in Special Education. Her modeling and beauty pageant work allowed her to travel around the world, and in 2001 she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her film and television career. She has appeared in many films and television shows since then. Married to Academy Award nominated producer Michael Ohoven, Giraud lives with her family (Ohoven and t...

Photo from the Mexican Culture Institute of New York. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Mario Lavista! (1943-        ) "Yo siempre he pensado que la poesía y la música son las grandes depositarias de la memoria del hombre." Mario Lavista, who was born and raised in Mexico City, is "one of the most important Latin American composers of his generation" (read more HERE ). He grew up surrounded by music in his family and enrolled in the Taller de Composición at the National Conservatory in 1963. In 1967, he receieved a scholarship from the French government to study at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. He founded the collective improvisational music group Quanta in 1970. In 1982, he founded Pauta, one of the most important music journals in Latin America. He is still the chief editor. His first and only opera, Aura, based on a short story by Carlos Fuentes, won him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987, The premiere was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico Cit...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Roselyn Sánchez! (1973-          ) A Puerto Rican actress, model, singer/songwriter, producer, and writer, Roselyn Sánchez was born in San Juan to a family of six (she has three older brothers). Growing up, she loved dancing and putting on shows for her family. Like her brothers and father before her, she enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico to study marketing, but she left after three years to go to New York City and take acting, dancing, and singing lessons. After that, she returned to Puerto Rico, where she became well-known as the host of the Puerto Rican variety show Qué Vacilón. In 1993 she won Miss Puerto Rico Petite, and in 1994 she won Miss American Petite, bringing her international fame. Since then, she has appeared in many movies, including Rush Hour 2, Chasing Papi, Boat Trip, The Game Plan, and Act of Valor . She has also appeared in many television shows, with her most well-known roles being Elena Delgado on CBS's W...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Brook y Robin López! (1988-       ) The twins when they played for Stanford, in 2006-2007 (they both declared for the NBA draft in 2008). Photo from Getty Images UK. Click HERE .  Professional basketball players for the Los Angeles Lakers and the Chicago Bulls, respectively, Brook and Robin López are twins who were born in Los Angeles to a swimming champion mother and a professional baseball playing father. Their uncle also pitched for several major league baseball teams. Their father, a native of Cuba, was not a part of their lives after his divorce from their mother, but they kept his name. They have two other brothers, Chris and Alex, and Alex has also played professionally in Japan, New Zealand, and Spain. Brook Lopez credits his mom with doing an "excellent job" raising him and his three brothers as a single mom on a public school teacher's salary (read more HERE ). For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CL...

César Chávez Day (State Holiday) in California, Colorado, and Texas. Nationwide, though not a federal holiday, it is a day to perform service and engage in community and educational programs honoring Chávez's legacy (as proclaimed by President Barack Obama). ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... César Chávez! (1927-1993) From usnews.com. Click HERE .  An activist who used nonviolent means to bring attention to the plight of farmworkers, Chávez founded the National Farmworkers' Association (now the United Farmworkers) with Dolores Huerta in 1965. Born in Yuma, Arizona, he moved with his family to California to become migrant farm workers after they lost their house during the Great Depression. Chávez dropped out of school after the 7th grade to be able to work more to help support his family. He served in the Navy for two years after World War II but returned to California and his farmworker roots. His newly founded National Farmworkers' Association was responsible for the Grape ...

Photo from story on Ramos' contract extension with Real Madrid to 2020. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Sergio Ramos! (1986-  ) A professional soccer player from Spain (and therefore Spanish, and not "Latino," per se) who plays for Real Madrid and won the World Cup with Spain in 2010, he is considered one of the best defenders of his generation (see some of his best plays in this YouTube video compilation, HERE ). Born in Camas, Sevilla, Andalucía, he made his way through the Sevilla youth soccer system and came to Madrid in 2005. In 2012 he began a relationship with television reporter/presenter Pilar Rubio, and the two have three sons together, Sergio (May 2014), Mario (November 2015), and Alejandro (March 25, 2018). Ramos announced the birth of his third son and declared his love for his wife and family on Twitter, as seen in this story from La Liga (click here for a short video on Ramos and Rubio announcing they were expecting). In addition to playing soc...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Rigo Tovar! (1946-2005) Rigo Tovar, a Mexican singer whose free concert in 1983 in Monterrey, Mexico attracted some 400,000 (the Pope had only attracted from 350,000 two years earlier, despite Monterrey's religious population), was a well-loved musician, especially during the 1980s. Born in Matamoros, Mexico, which is on the border with the United States, he is said to have gotten his start when, while working as a waiter in a Houston nightclub, he took the microphone one night and began to sing. He supposedly married his wife, María Isabel Martínez, when she was just 14 years old. They had three children together, and he had many more with other partners. Tovar endured many hardships during his life, including extreme poverty during his childhood, the loss of his mother at the beginning of his career, an illness that caused him to go blind, vitiligo, which caused his skin to turn white in patches, and the death of his brother in Mexico's 1985 earthqua...

Photo from a 1990 interview with Vargas Llosa in The Paris Review, right after he ran for President. Click HERE   ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Mario Vargas Llosa! (1936-    ) "Escribir es un acto de rebelión contra la realidad." (Writing is an act of rebellion against reality) Vargas Llosa is a prolific Peruvian writer, journalist, and essayist who also ran for President of Peru in 1990 (he was defeated by Alberto Fujimori). He is considered one of the most important figures of the Latin Boom (other writers include Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes), and he has won numerous literary prizes and honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2010 (hear his advice to young people after winning the prize, HERE ). Vargas Llosa was the only child born to  middle class parents who separated a month before he was born. His father, who was abusive, was having an affair with a German woman (with whom he had two children). Varga...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Alejandra Espinoza! (1987-       ) Photo from huffingtonpost.com. Click HERE .  A Mexican model and TV presenter who won Univisión's Nuestra Belleza Latina in 2007 and went on to work on El Gordo y La Flaca (often stepping in for Lili Estefan) and Sábado Gigante , Espinoza was one of ten children born to mother Rosa María in Tijuana. As a teenager she worked in a McDonald's and was promoted to manager by the time she was 17. Nonetheless, she had dreams of being an actress and thus entered Nuestra Belleza México in 2006, coming in third. The next year, she entered Nuestra Belleza Latina in the first year of the competition and won (the prize was a car and $50,000, plus a contract for $40,000 a year that allowed her to pursue her dream of working in entertainment). She had just turned 20 years old. El Gordo y La Flaca and Sábado Gigante followed, along with work presenting on the shows La Banda and La Reina de La Canción . In 201...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Nacho Novo (Ignacio Javier "Nacho" Gómez Novo)! (1979-       ) Photo from dailyrecord.com. Click HERE .  A Spanish soccer player (and therefore not Latino, which is a term used to group together many different people from Latin America and the Caribbean), Novo has been a part of teams in Spain, Poland, Scotland, England, the United States, and Northern Ireland. He is best known for his time with the Rangers in the U.K. (He scored the winning goal for them in the 2009 Scottish Cup Final). He was inducted into the Rangers Hall of Fame in 2014. In February of 2015, he married long time girlfriend Donna Clark, and the two have a son, Javier, together. Though no longer together, when Novo suffered a heart attack during a game in Berlin earlier this year, he called from the ambulance to talk to his son and tell him that he loved him (click  HERE  to read more). For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE...

Photo from imdb.com. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Laz (Lázaro) Alonso! (1974-      ) An actor who has been in movies such as Avatar, Fast & Furious, Jarhead, This Christmas, Miracle at St. Anna, Detroit, and Straw Dogs , along with many television shows, Alonso was born in the United States to Cuban parents who had immigrated in 1959 (or 60), just as Fidel Castro came to power. He grew up speaking Spanish at home (hear him talk - in Spanish - about how his mom wouldn't give him cereal if he asked in English in this interview) and says he is now grateful. He also grew up raised by his mother, who worked jobs in catering, housekeeping, and even "video recoding" to help support the family, as his father was an alcoholic, and he studied business at Howard University with the goal of being able to support himself and help her after graduation. He landed a job with Merrill Lynch in New York City. "I was making money in Wall Street, but God said, you...

Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, in Argentina (since 2002) Día de La Memoria por Verdad y Justicia en Argentina (desde 2002, para conmemorar y buscar la verdad sobre el golpe de estado n 1976, los 7 años de dictadura, y la guerra sucia)  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Starlin Castro! (1990-        ) Photo from cbssports.com. Click HERE .  A professional baseball player from the Dominican Republic, Castro started his career with the Chicago Cubs in 2010. He then played with the New York Yankees (2015-2017) before moving to the  Miami Marlins this year. Castro, who is a four-time MLB All-Star and led the National League in hits in 2011, reportedly makes $7 million dollars a year under his current contract. He is married and has two children, daughter Scarlett and son Starlin Jr. In this short clip, he talks (in Spanish) of wanting to be a guide to the younger players on the team. For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK ...

Photos from myhero.com. Click HERE . ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Jorge Muñoz! (1964-      ) Jorge Muñoz, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2010 for his work feeding the hungry, is a Colombian immigrant who came to the United States in the 1980s. He was following his mother, who had come after struggling for years to support her family.  He became a permanent resident in 1987 (under the Amnesty Act signed by then President Reagan) and then a citizen of the United States in the 1990s. A school bus driver who makes just slightly over $500 a week, he nonetheless has served thousands of meals to the hungry in New York City since 2004. He cooks the meals in his own kitchen every evening after work alongside his mother and other family members. The work started when some Colombian friends in the food industry told him how much food was wasted each day, and then soon after he noticed a few day laborers on the corner and asked if they we...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Paola Andino! (1998-        ) Photo from Wikipedia.  An American actress born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico who moved to Dallas, Texas with her family when she was three years old, Andino is best known for playing Emma Alonso on the Nickelodeon series Every Witch Way in 2014 and 2015. The show's premise is that Paola's character Emma moves to Miami with her father, Francisco, where she discovers that she has special powers and is also "The Chosen One," the most powerful witch. The show is the American version of Nickelodeon's Latin American show Grachi . See Paola speaking Spanish in this short clip of the cast visiting Mexico for an awards show (the other cast members speak English), HERE , and see her interviewed (in English) for the 29th annual Imagen awards, which she attended as a nominee for Best Young Actress in 2014, HERE . In the interview, she speaks of visiting Puerto Rico every summer with her family and loving the people and...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Benito Juárez! (1806-1872) El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz. -Benito Juárez (Respect for the rights of others is peace) Benito Juárez as seen in a detail of Diego Rivera's Dream of A Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park (1947). From khanacademy.org (Readings on Modern and Contemporary Art). Click HERE ! Mexican President from 1858 to 1872 and national hero to many (he has been called " the Lincoln of Mexico "),  Juárez was born to poor, indigenous parents in Oaxaca and orphaned at the age of three. He was raised by an uncle and only spoke Zapotec until the age of 12, when he began his formal schooling. This was because Antonio Salanvera, a lay Franciscan and bookbinder, was impressed by his intelligence and desire to learn and arranged for his education. Juárez, who at first studied for the priesthood but felt no calling, excelled in school and entered into politics even before graduating. In 1843, Juárez married Margarita Maza,...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Luis Comunica (Luis Arturo Villar Sudek)! (1991-     ) Photo from eluniversal.com. Click HERE .  Luis Arturo Villar Sudek, better known as Luisito Comunica, is a Mexican vlogger who since first posting in 2012 has amassed some 1.5 billion views of his videos. Born in Puebla, Mexico, he learned to play piano at a young age and started his first YouTube channel, Piano Para Gente Cool (Piano for Cool People), to upload tutorials. He moved on from that channel (and from a job teaching at a high school in Puebla) and on to Luisito Comunica in 2012, after his friend invited him to move to Mexico City and work at the advertising agency where he worked. His videos, usually about 10 minutes in length, combine travel with humor, street interviews, and off-the-cuff insights. Though he started filming only in Mexico, now that he is famous he travels around the world and has posted videos from Spain, Bangladesh, South Korea, and more. Click HERE to ...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Mario Molina! (1943-      ) Photo from the UN Environment video highlighting Molina's work when he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from them. Click HERE for video (in English).  A Mexican chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his role in elucidating the threat of CFCs to the Earth's ozone layer, Molina has more than 30 honorary degrees from universities around the world, including Yale, Harvard, Tufts, and Duke. In addition to his Nobel Prize, he has won many prestigious awards and even has an asteroid, Asteroid 9680 Molina, named after him. In 2013 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, and he is currently the climate policy advisor to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Molina was born in Mexico City and attended UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico) before furthering his studies in Germany and then receiving his PHD from the University of Berkeley, California, in 197...

Photo from aworldofboxing.com. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Antonio Margarito! (1978-     ) A Mexican-American professional boxer from Torrance, California, he is worth some $15 million dollars, which he earned through many boxing events and championship wins (read more HERE ). He moved to Tijuana, Mexico with his family when he was two years old and grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods there, which he escaped by spending enormous amounts of time at the local boxing gym. He turned pro when he was 15 years old. Nicknamed El Tornado de Tijuana , he is known for his aggressive fighting style and "iron chin." He retired from boxing in 2012 after nearly thirty years in the ring but returned in 2016. He was married to his high school sweetheart, Michelle, for many years, though the two have now split. Hear Margarito reflect on his life of challenges in this 2011 episode of HBO Boxing: Ring Life (interviews in Spanish with English subtitles). See him ...

Photo from espn.com. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ...Federico Fazio! (1987- ) A professional soccer player from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fazio has played as a central defender for the Italian club A.S. Roma since 2016. He was a part of the Argentina Under-20 team that won the FIFA World Cup in 2007, and he helped the Olympic Team win gold at the summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008 (though a backup, he did play twice).  Fazio, whose grandfather came to Argentina from Sicily, has said that he would consider playing for Italy in international competitions if asked (see ESPN story, link above, for more).  Click HERE for a video of some of his best defensive plays from 2016/2017. For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Jorge Ramos! (1958-     ) Photo from jorgeramos.com  The anchorman for Noticiero Univisión since 1986 (along with colleague María Elena Salinas, who just recently stepped down after more than three decades), Ramos has covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, five wars (El Salvador, The Persian Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq), the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, 9/11, and the catastrophe after Hurricane Katrina (read more on Ramos' website, HERE ).  He has interviewed every U.S. president since George H.W. Bush, except for Donald Trump, who had him kicked out of his press conference in an incident that went viral in 2015 (click HERE ). Ramos, who currently lives in Miami, Florida, was born in Mexico City. He studied communications at Universidad Iberoamerica and then started his career at XEW-TV. He resigned in 1983 after the station edited a story of his that included interviews with people critical of the Mexican gover...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Eva Longoria! (1975-       ) Photo from forbes.com. Click HERE .  An actress, producer, director, model, activist, and businesswoman who was #4 on Forbes list of "Prime Time's 10 Top-Earning Women" in 2010, Longoria was born to 9th generation Mexican-American parents in Corpus Christi, Texas. When tracing her roots on PBS's show Faces of America , she discovered that her family came to Mexico from Spain in the early 1600s and received a large land grant along the Río Grande river in 1767 from the King of Spain. When the border with the United States moved south in the 1800s, her family found themselves in American territory, and thus Americans. Longoria also discovered that she has Mayan, African, and Asian ancestry, and that she is distant cousins with Chinese cellist Yo-Yo-Ma (read more HERE ).  Longoria, who is perhaps best known for her role as Gabrielle Solís on Desperate Housewives , started her career playing Isabella Br...

Photo from 50 Megs. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Merlin Santana! (1976-2002) Santana was an Afro-Latino actor best known for his roles as Stanley (Rudy Huxtable's boyfriend) on The Cosby Show , Marcus Dixon on Getting By, Marcus Henry on Under One Roof , and Romeo Santana on The Steve Harvey Show.  Santana was born to Dominican parents in New York City. After he survived being born prematurely his mother decided he needed a special name and thus named him Merlin, after Merlin the Magician. She got him into acting at age 3, and his first job was as an advertising model for a fast food chain. He then appeared on screen for the first time in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo . He attended Ascension Catholic School in the city before eventually making his way west, to Los Angeles, for his career. He kept his last name, Santana, to honor his Latino heritage, and he sometimes spoke Spanish as Romeo in The Steve Harvey Show . Tragically, Santana was fatally shot...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Ozuna (Juan Carlos Ozuna Rosado)! (1992-       ) Photo from billboard.com. Five Things You Should Know About Ozuna's Debut Album Odisea (Ozuna speaks in Spanish with English subtitles) .  Click HERE .   A recording artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico to a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother, Ozuna is a popular reggaetón and Latin trap singer who just released his first crossover hit, La Modelo (featuring Cardi B), which already has more than 160,000,000 views on YouTube (click HERE to join the crowd). Ozuna released his first album, Odisea, in 2017 and won the Premios Juventud "Best Breakthrough Artist" that same year. He grew up very poor, raised by his paternal grandmother after his father (a dancer for the reggaetón artist Vico C) was fatally shot when Ozuna was only three years old (his mother did not have the financial resources to raise him). He started writing songs when he was twelve and moved to New York...

Photo from hectorbustamante.com. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Héctor Luis Bustamante! (1972-  ) A Colombian-American actor who came to the U.S. with his family when he was twelve, Bustamante has been in multiple television shows, films, and video games. Recently, he was in Academy Award winning Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu's virtual reality project Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) , which explores the human condition of immigrants and refugees. The project premiered at Cannes in 2017 and was then featured at museums in Milan, Mexico City, and Los Angeles (click HERE for more on the Los Angeles exhibit). Participants in the short virtual reality project, which was based on extensive interviews by Iñárritu with immigrants and refugees he met, experience what immigrants from Mexico and Central America experience crossing the border while learning more about their life stories. Bustamante has said that the goal of the project was to si...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Andrés Velencoso Segura! (1978-     ) A Spanish model (and therefore Hispanic, but not Latino, which is a term used to group together many different people from South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean), Velencoso has been the face of Banana Republic, Louis Vuitton, H&M, Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nespresso (click HERE to see the making of his 2015 commercial for them), The Brubaker, (click HERE to hear him speak about his views on fashion and why he decided to team up with this Spanish company), among many others. Born in Catalonia, Spain, he speaks Spanish, English, French, and Italian. He dated Australian singer Kylie Minogue from 2008 to 2013. He has more recently ventured into acting, and his Netflix original drama Edha , produced in Argentina and directed by Daniel Burman, is set to premiere in 2018. For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE. Other March 11th events of note: 2004 - 11-...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Alfredo Zitarrosa! (1936-1989) Image from alchetron.com. Click HERE .  A Uruguayan singer, songwriter, poet, and journalist, he was a chief figure in the Nueva Canción movement, a social movement and musical genre characterized by folklore-inspired songs with socially conscious lyrics in Latin America. Because of the dictatorship in Uruguay, he lived in exile from 1976-1984 in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. His songs were banned in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the dictatorial regimes in those countries. Zitarrosa started his career as a professional singer in 1964, when a friend got him a job singing on a Peruvian television show for $50. He repeated the experience on Bolivian radio shows and returned to Uruguay a singer. Before that, he had worked as a radio announcer and a journalist. He was also a poet, having won the Premio Municipal de Poesía for his book of poems, Explicaciones , in 1959. Zitarrosa was extremely popular in Latin America a...

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Cierra Ramirez! (1995-        ) Photo from latina.com. Click HERE .  A Mexican-American actress from Houston, Texas whose maternal grandparents came to the United States to raise their family, Ramirez is currently on the television show The Fosters, which ends in the summer of 2018. Ramirez will co-star in the spin-off to be introduced in the last episode. After starting her career on The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, Ramirez went on to appear in CSI Miami and then star in The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She won a ALMA Award for her 2012 role in the movie Girl in Progress with Eva Mendes (who played her mom).  Like many Latinas, Ramirez does not speak Spanish (as seen in this ALMA Award video), and she never had a quinceañera, but she does love her grandmother's tamales, she has participated in many of the quinceañeras of her friends, and she is proud of her role representing Latinos in the media (as she discuss...