El cinco de marzo/March 5th

¡Feliz cumpleaños ... Eva Mendes! (1974-      )

From etonline.com. Click HERE (includes video about how
giving birth to her second daughter, Amada, the same week as
her brother's funeral was "beyond heartbreaking"
but also "kind of beautiful, too." 

A Cuban-American actress, model, and businesswoman, Mendes' breakout movie was Training Day in 2001 (she had been in a series of B-movies before that). She has since appeared in All About the Benjamins, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Hitch, Ghost Rider, Knocked Up, Girl in Progress, and many more. Mendes also represents or has represented a plethora of companies and organizations as spokeswoman, including Revlon, Pantene, Calvin Klein, PETA, and Reebok. She has a line of home goods for Macy's. Born in Miami, Florida to Cuban parents, Mendes was raised in a suburb outside Los Angeles after her parents divorced. She was raised Roman Catholic and at one point considered becoming a nun. In 2012 she visited Sierra Leone and was featured in the PBS Documentary Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (see this People Magazine article/video). She and partner Ryan Gosling have been together since 2011 and have two daughters, Esmeralda (September 2014) and Amada Lee (April 2016) (she talks about working with him as a director, and her changing views on success, in this clip from Variety Latino (in Spanish)). Mendes speaks to her children in both English and Spanish and plays Cuban music for them, as she wants to raise them in a multicultural home like the one she grew up in (from this Telemundo clip).

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