At a San José School, a Cosmic Visit From Astronaut José Hernández

On a sunny Friday morning in San José, students and teachers at Alpha: José Hernández School stream into their cafeteria. With smiles everywhere, the excitement is palpable: Students are about to meet the person that their school — a TK–8 public charter school in the city’s Eastside — is named for.

A few minutes later, wearing his blue NASA uniform, astronaut and engineer José Hernández walks in — immediately greeted by cheers. He walks over to a lunch table with students from all different grades.

“What grade are you guys in?” he asks. “Third!” “First!” “Fourth!” students shout back all at once.

“Who’s in fifth?” Hernández asks, and several hands shoot up.

“Ah, you know that’s when I decided to be an astronaut,” he replies.

‘Yo pienso que lo puedes lograr’

In 2009, Hernández was a crew member on the STS-128 space shuttle Discovery mission, which traveled to the International Space Station (ISS.) The mission, which lasted almost two weeks and covered a total of 5.7 million miles, brought crucial maintenance supplies and scientific equipment to the ISS.

Hernández’s journey to becoming an astronaut was not easy. He was born in the small agricultural community of French Camp in San Joaquin County to a family of Mexican migrant farmworkers — and during his childhood, his family traveled back and forth between California and Michoacan, Mexico, to follow the different growing seasons.

During the school year, Hernández worked in the fields alongside his parents, picking produce on the weekends and seven days a week during the summer. But his parents always emphasized the importance of education to better oneself, he told the students assembled at the school named after him.

“When I told [my father] that I wanted to be an astronaut, he did two things,” Hernández said. “The first thing he did was empower my dream. He said to me, ‘Yo pienso que lo puedes lograr’ — ‘I know you can do it.’”

The second thing Hernández’s father did, he said, was to give him tangible advice on how to achieve that dream. “He told me, ‘You know that effort you put out picking fruits and vegetables Saturdays and Sundays, seven days during the summer?’ … and he pointed to my books on the kitchen table, and he said, ‘You put that effort there.’”

‘It’s actually a gift’

Books — and his love of reading — accompanied Hernández as he moved first through college and then the complex process of applying and training to be an astronaut. And his visit on Friday to the school that bears his name also came with good news: Gordon Philanthropies, a nonprofit organization that works to provide free books to schools in underserved communities, is donating 6,700 books to the school, alongside Hernández’s own Reaching for the Stars Foundation.

Many of the donated books are completely bilingual in English and Spanish so that students can take them home and read them together with their families. “En la casa hablábamos puro español — at home, we only spoke Spanish — and what helped me learn English era leer libros — reading books is what helped me learn English,” Hernández said.

The majority of students at the school come from Spanish-speaking families and are learning English as a second language, said Alpha: José Hernández School principal Julianna Parra. “We let students take books from our school … not all of our families live near a library, so that opportunity has been really important for our students,” she explained.

“We really want to make sure that our students and our families know that having a different primary language is not a bad thing. It’s actually a gift — a skill they can leverage,” Parra said. “Being able to provide books that come in both languages allows for our families to see that in action.”

Reading in both English and the language spoken at home has been found to help bilingual students retain and improve their home language as they mature. According to decades of research within education, students from homes where the primary language is not English tend to lose their fluency in that language over time if only English is prioritized at school, something known as “language attrition.”

And while not all students at Alpha: José Hernández School may not have the desire to follow in Hernández’s exact footsteps to become an astronaut, many of them still share his love of reading. After hearing Hernández speak, seventh grader Vernon Paul Pineda said that he especially loves reading true crime and thrillers — and when he grows up, he wants to become a photographer.

“I get really interested in what the book is talking about,” he said. “You just keep reading, and the book gets more interesting.”