El nueve de junio/June 9th
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| Photo from Time Magazine. Click HERE. Video interview included with article. |
A Puerto Rican gymnast who won gold in the team event and silver on the balance beam at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Hernandez was born and raised in New Jersey. She credits her Puerto Rican born parents and her siblings, sister Jelysa and brother Marcus, with inspiring her to always pursue her dreams. Seeing Shawn Johnson do gymnastics on television when Hernandez was only 5 years old was the reason she herself started to practice, at the age of 6 (read more HERE). She eventually was homeschooled so that she could train full time. In 2016, Hernandez won season 23 of Dancing With The Stars alongside parter Val Chmerkovskiy (see them dance the Cha Cha HERE). In January of 2017, she published her book I Got This: To Gold & Beyond, which would become a New York Times bestseller. Hernandez discusses the complexities of being Puerto Rican in America in this article. As she states, her mother did not teach her Spanish growing up because she wanted her English grammar to be perfect (she and Hernandez's dad had both been ridiculed growing up for being too "Spanish" for the English speaking kids and "not Spanish enough" for some other Latinos. Hernandez, too, says she has been criticized for not speaking Spanish as a Puerto Rican. That said, the Hernandez family visited Puerto Rico in February of 2018 as guests of the island's department of tourism, and in her Instagram posts Hernandez encouraged others to visit and help the island rebuild from the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria (read more HERE).
For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.
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