To Alicia Baturoni Cortez, education is the great equalizer
For Hispanic Heritage Month 2015 (Mes de la Herencia Hispana 2015), Johnson Space Center is honoring an employee whose character and culture embodies the theme of the month, “Honoring Our Heritage, Building Our Future.”
At night, Alicia Baturoni Cortez dreams in either Spanish or English, not the “Spanglish” she joked can happen during the daytime in her home. But no matter the language, Baturoni Cortez—daughter of a Mexican father who emigrated to America and a mother from Detroit, Michigan—believes that scoring your dream career is entirely in reach with the golden ticket of a good education.
Her dad, who had been through a lot of struggle and loss, made sure Baturoni Cortez understood what should be treasured.
“My dad especially, growing up, not very well off—kept reminding me of the value of education,” Baturoni Cortez said. “You can lose everything, but no one can take away your education. That was always impressed upon me from a very early age.”
Smartly heeding this advice, Baturoni Cortez became the first one in her immediate family to complete college and get a degree. But even though she got her golden ticket, it did not come easily.
“I was really trying to figure it out on my own,” Baturoni Cortez said. “One of the things that I struggled to understand was the connection between a degree and a career. To me, it only made sense if there was an obvious connection. So if you want be a lawyer, you go to law school. If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. I still had this very vocational kind of framework for how to think about it.”
As the NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) program manager in Johnson Space Center’s Office of Education, Baturoni Cortez now motivates students with a more circuitous path through college to aim for careers that really speak to their passions. Sharing a similar blue-collar background allows her to easily connect with the community college students in the program.
“They are very limited in their understanding, just like I was, thinking, ‘Well, NASA must only hire people to be astronauts or engineers—or they only hire the smartest people from the best universities,’” Baturoni Cortez said. “And that’s not true. What I try to do with NCAS is show people that there are multiple pathways to getting here at NASA, and what skills they bring to NASA as a community college student are really more the skills that NASA is looking for. They are able to juggle multiple, competing priorities, they often have work and family responsibilities outside of school and they know how to work for something over a long-term goal, because many of them can’t get their degree in two years and out. Some of them take a long time because they have to work to support themselves.”
Baturoni Cortez loves to inspire young adults to believe in themselves and know that they are capable of attaining their dreams.
“We have the Aerospace Scholars program here, for the high school students, but those tend to be the top 10 percent (of their class), they’re going on to a four-year university, they’re already very motivated, and they already have the academic support and a culture of academia pushing them toward those goals,” Baturoni Cortez said. “The community college students, more often than not, don’t have that. Many of them are the first generation trying to do something past high school. So when we tell them, ‘You can do this,’ they’re like, ‘Really?’ And then we find that they do!”
Baturoni Cortez not only gives back in her regular day job, but also volunteers for outreach activities with the Hispanic Employee Resource Group at JSC. Within the confines of the center, her purpose is more aligned with sharing the beauty of the Hispanic culture.
“I’m a chair for their Language and Translation Committee, and we have a great committee of people who love the Spanish language, with varying levels of proficiency,” Baturoni Cortez said. “The big project we’ve been working on this year is a game based off a Mexican bingo game called Loteria, and we made a NASA version of it.”
Using the center’s six top communication priorities as a guide, the group repurposed the Loteria game with 52 icons and terms in both English and Spanish, as well as some NASA fun facts.
“It’s little bits of information that can help us tell NASA’s story, but to tell it in a culturally relevant way,” Baturoni Cortez explained.
Keeping close to her Hispanic roots is important to Baturoni Cortez, whose husband is also from Mexico. At home, they mainly speak Spanish with their two kids, who are bilingual.
“We both have family in Mexico now, and we go back to visit them every year,” Baturoni Cortez said. “I want my children to be able to communicate with their relatives in their native language, so that’s been a priority for us to make that happen.”
Even with her penchant for Salsa dancing, the educator at heart has a tough side, too. Some of her hobbies, pre-kids, included playing women’s hockey for the Green Bay Dragons and riding her two motorcycles.
To learn more about NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars, visit: http://nas.okstate.edu/ncas/
Catherine Ragin Williams
NASA Johnson Space Center