14 Hispanic Women Who Are Pioneers in Their Field

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Hispanic women have long been a part of molding culture and history with their music, art, humanitarian efforts, activism, political involvement, and so much more. From young Latinas who have turned their hardship and struggles into action to beloved performers who have produced some of the most well-known songs that remain popular year after year, there isn’t a corner of modern civilization that pioneering Latin women haven’t touched.

In honor of Women’s History Month in March, here are 14 Hispanic women who have defied or redefined social, cultural, and gender stereotypes.

Frida Kahlo

First 20th Century Mexican Artist to be Included in the Louvre’s Collection

During her lifetime, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo didn’t achieve the level of fame she earned after her death. But for many years now, she has been a pop culture icon, with her life and work inspiring movies, art installations, and books.

Born on July 6, 1907, Kahlo is known for her self-portraits and pieces that emphasize themes of fantastical surrealness, though she wasn’t a fan of being labeled as a surreal painter—or categorizing her art under a specific style at all. “Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself,” Kahlo once wrote.

Kahlo, who was also German on her father’s side, was fiercely proud of her Mexican heritage and often dressed in the elaborate style of the Tehuana people which included donning ribbons in her braided hair.

In 1925, Kahlo was involved in a streetcar accident that left her with chronic pain and caused so much damage to her spine and legs that she needed to wear orthopedic corsets and leg braces. Eventually in 1953, she lost her lower right leg and foot to gangrene. Ever the artist, she painted decorative accents and imagery on her medical devices and added bells to her prosthetics as well as her clothing and shoes.

Her only art exhibition was in Mexico in 1953, a year before she unexpectedly died at the age of 47 due to a pulmonary embolism. Still, Kahlo’s legacy endures several decades after her death; in 2006, one of her self-portraits sold at Sotheby’s for $5.62 million. Kahlo is also the first 20th century Mexican artist to be included in the Louvre’s collection after the museum acquired her work, The Frame, around 1938.

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Sonia Sotomayor

First Latina U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Sonia Sotomayor, now 69 years old, grew up in challenging circumstances. Although she recalled regular summertime visits to Puerto Rico to see friends and family, her home life in the New York City borough of the Bronx was not a happy one. Her father was an alcoholic who died in his early 40s, and her mother kept her emotional distance from her daughter. The family lived in the housing projects, which were later overrun by gang violence.

Still, Sotomayor’s mother pushed her children to take their education seriously, which left a deep imprint on Sotomayor, who knew by age 10 that she wanted to be a lawyer. Sotomayor won a scholarship to Princeton University and graduated summa cum laude in 1976. She received her law degree from Yale.

In 1979, Sotomayor served as an assistant district attorney, which eventually paved her way to becoming a U.S. District Court judge, appointed by George H.W. Bush. Under Bill Clinton’s administration, Sotomayor made her way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1997, and a little over a decade later, Barack Obama nominated her to the nation’s highest court. In 2009, Sotomayor became the first Latina to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Since then, she has built her reputation on being an advocate for criminal justice reform and women’s rights.

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Rita Moreno

First Latina PEGOT Recipient

Puerto Rican actor Rita Moreno, 91, has built an award-winning career in movies, television, and theater that has spanned over seven decades. Famous for her supporting roles in the film adaptations of the King and I (1956) and West Side Story (1961), Moreno earned an Oscar for the latter, making her the first Latina to achieve such a feat.

In the 1970s, Moreno became a regular cast member of the beloved PBS children’s show The Electric Company and later was cast in a supporting role on the HBO hit drama Oz (1997-2003).

Her multitude of credits as an actor, singer, and dancer resulted in one of her biggest crowning achievements in 2019: She is the first Latina to be elevated to PEGOT status, a small group of entertainers who have won a Peabody, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award.

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Isabel Perón

First Latina Female President

Despite her lower-middle-class background and her fifth-grade education, former nightclub dancer Isabel Perón became Latin America’s first female president. Now 92, she led her native Argentina for almost two years in the mid-1970s.

Isabel’s rise to power was through her husband, Argentinian president Juan Perón, who was previously married to the late and beloved Eva Perón (aka Evita). Isabel was Juan’s third wife and known to her countrymen as “Isabelita.” She served as her husband’s vice president and first lady during his third presidential term, starting in 1973.

However, just a year into that term, Juan suffered from a series of heart attacks and died on July 1, 1974. Isabel took over as president, and while her nation and political allies and even some of her husband’s enemies initially showed support for her, she quickly fell out of favor after she issued a government-run suppression campaign against her adversaries, including a string of political murders and anti-left-wing policy measures and purges.

In 1976, Isabel was forced out by a military coup and remained under house arrest before being allowed to move to Spain. In 2007, an Argentinian judge issued an order for her arrest for the disappearance of an activist in 1976, but Spanish courts refused to extradite her, citing the charges didn’t fall under the category of crimes against humanity.

Ellen Ochoa

First Latina Astronaut in Space

Born in Los Angeles, Ellen Ochoa immersed herself in the sciences, graduating from San Diego State University with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1980, then from Stanford University, where she earned a master’s degree in science in 1981 and a doctorate in electrical engineering four years later.

As a doctorate student, she focused her studies primarily on optical systems involving high-tech space exploration, which eventually led her into the NASA space program in 1991. Two years later, Ochoa became the first Latina woman to fly into space, which occurred aboard the shuttle Discovery.

Ochoa, now 65, completed a total of four space missions during her career at NASA and made history once again when she became the first Latina director of the agency’s Johnson Space Center in 2013.

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Gloria Estefan

First Hispanic Woman Inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame

Gloria Estefan is a singer and actor who was born in Havana, Cuba, in the late 1950s. As a child, Estefan and her family fled the country to escape dictator Fidel Castro’s rule.

The 66-year-old started her career as the lead singer of Miami Sound Machine, who topped charts with their hit song “Conga.” Estefan later pursued a solo career and won her first Grammy in 1994 for the Best Tropical Latin Album category with Mi Tierra. Eventually, Estefan received several more Grammys, including five Latin Grammys under categories like Best Tropical Song and Best Contemporary Tropical Album. Her work also earned her entry into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June 2023. She is the first Hispanic woman to be inducted.

In March 1990, Estefan was involved in a vehicular accident that broke a vertebra in her back and required surgery and steel rods to realign the fracture. After intensive physical therapy, Estefan was ready to begin touring again to promote her new music.

In 1997, Estefan established the Gloria Estefan Foundation to promote education, health, and cultural development. She has since dabbled in several projects that include writing New York Times best-selling children’s books. On September 1, 2022, Mattel released a Gloria Estefan Barbie inspired by her look in the 1989 “Get On Your Feet” music video.

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Evangelina Rodriguez

First Dominican Female Doctor

Despite being born into poverty and facing discrimination for her African heritage, Afro-Dominican Evangelina Rodriguez became the first woman from the Dominican Republic to earn her medical degree.

Born in 1879, Rodriguez was raised by her grandmother and diligently worked her way through school, overcoming social and cultural challenges of being a poor half-Black woman who was born out of wedlock. She received her medical degree from the University of the Dominican Republic in 1909 and began building her career in small towns and giving medical care to the poorest citizens.

After scrounging her earnings for many years, Rodriguez furthered her expertise by studying gynecology and pediatrics in France in 1921 and graduated four years later. She returned to her country and cared for her patients, while also becoming a political firebrand, advocating for women’s rights and related issues, such as birth control, and speaking out against dictator Rafael Trujillo. She died in 1947 at age 67.

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Gabriela Mistral

First Latina Author to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature

Tragic love, childhood, piety, sadness, bitterness, and the politics of the times brought forth the lyrical poetry that defined Chilean poet, diplomat, and educator Gabriela Mistral. Born in 1889 as Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the poet later went by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, which she created by fusing the names of her favorite poets Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral.

While working on her poetry as a young woman, Mistral also served as a village school teacher. An intense romance with a railway worker who died by suicide, was one of several tragedies throughout her life that inspired her poetry. Her sonnets memorializing the dead, Sonetos de la muerte, published in 1914 made her famous throughout Latin America.

As an artist and intellectual who gained international fame for her poetry, Mistral was invited to travel the world as a cultural ambassador for the League of Nations and lived in France and Italy in the mid-1920s to early 1930s. She lectured and served as an educator throughout the United States, Europe, and Cuba and received honorary degrees at renowned universities. In 1945, she was the first Latin American female poet to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mistral died twelve years later at age 68.

Isabel Allende

First Latina Author Dubbed as Most Widely Read in the World

Isabel Allende, another Chilean writer, followed in Mistral’s footsteps to become “the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author.” In fact, Allende was the first woman to be awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit.

Born in Peru in 1942, Allende gained international recognition for her magical realism in novels such as The House of Spirits and City of Beasts. Drawing from historical events (her father’s first cousin was Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a military coup in 1973) and her own experience, Allende honors the stories of women in mythical fashion and is credited to have transformed nonfiction literature.

Among her many awards, the 81-year-old received Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2010 and was honored by President Barack Obama with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 as well as an honorary degree from Harvard that same year.

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Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

First Latina and Cuban-American to Serve in Congress

Political activism runs in Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s family. Born in Cuba and later immigrating to the United States at age 8, Ros-Lehtinen grew up with an anti-Fidel Castro activist father and memories of escaping the dictator’s regime. Focusing her career in education, Ros-Lehtinen earned two degrees—her bachelor’s in 1975 and master’s a decade later—from Florida International University. In 2004, she received her doctorate in education from the University of Miami.

While operating a private school in Miami in the early ’80s, Ros-Lehtinen was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, becoming the first Latina to hold public office there. She continued her groundbreaking streak by becoming the first Latina to serve in the state senate and, in 1989, the first Latina and first Cuban-American to serve in the U.S. Congress as a member of the House of Representatives. Starting in 2011, she also became the first woman to ever manage a regular standing committee, the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Now 71, the moderate Republican was considered one of the most popular bipartisan politicians before retiring her House seat in 2017. She was the first House Republican to come out in support of gay marriage and served as a member of numerous caucuses in her 30-year political career, including the LGBT Equality Caucus, the Climate Solutions Caucus, and the Congressional Pro-Life Women’s Caucus.

Dolores Huerta

Labor Activist Who Created New Protections for Agricultural Workers

Dolores Huerta, 93, is a labor leader and activist who helped create the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) in 1962. She was born in New Mexico but spent most of her youth in Stockton, California, after her parents divorced.

Huerta, who is of Spanish and Mexican descent, faced discrimination early in life when one of her teachers at Stockton High School accused her of cheating on assignments because her papers were so well-written. The bright student persevered and attended University of Pacific’s Delta College, earning a teaching degree and working as a teacher in the 1950s. After noticing that many of her students came to school hungry, Huerta was spurred to action and, in 1955, co-founded the Stockton Community Service Organization (CSO).

Around the same time, Huerta became deeply involved in her community, founding the Agricultural Workers Association and helping set up voter registration drives. Through her work with CSO, Huerta met fellow organizer and activist Cesar Chavez, and together, they founded the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually became UFW.

Huerta also led a boycott that culminated in the establishment of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975. The law allows workers to organize into unions and to negotiate their wages, hours, and working conditions. It also protects against employer retaliation for any union activity, including organizing.

For all her organizing efforts and activism, Barack Obama awarded Huerta a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

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María Elena Salinas

First Latina Journalist to Win a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award

Born in 1954, Los Angeles native María Elena Salinas is distinguished for being the longest-running female TV news anchor in the United States and the first Latina to earn a Lifetime Achievement Emmy. With a journalism career spanning over three decades, Salinas has interviewed world leaders and served as the co-anchor for Univision’s nightly news broadcast as well as its news magazine program Aquí y Ahora (Here and Now).

Known as the “Voice of Hispanic America,” Salinas retired from her role at Univision in 2017 but continues reporting as a contributor to ABC News and formerly for CBS News. She also focuses on philanthropy, which includes education, promoting women’s media, and increasing voter registration within her community. “I am grateful for having had the privilege to inform and empower the Latino community through the work my colleagues and I do with such passion,” she stated while stepping down from Univision, adding, “As long as I have a voice, I will always use it to speak on their behalf.”

Rigoberta Menchú

First Indigenous Woman to Run for President of Guatemala

Rigoberta Menchú is a 64-year-old Guatemalan human rights activist and winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her work as an indigenous rights and social justice activist.

A K’iche’ (also spelled Quiché) Mayan from the Guatemalan highlands of the same name, Menchú has been surrounded by indigenous culture all her life. As a child, she helped with farmwork by picking coffee—a crop deeply enmeshed in Guatemalan culture and history since the mid 1700s—on plantations situated along the Pacific Coast. Menchú is no stranger to violence as she lived through the tumultuous period of Guatemala’s Civil War, which spanned from November 1960 to December 1996, and during which the national army killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Tragically, Menchú’s family fell victims to the instability and violence; both her brothers and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan Army, and her father died in 1980 during an attack on the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala (also referred to as the Spanish Embassy Massacre or the Spanish Embassy Fire).

Fearing for her life, Menchú fled to Mexico in 1981 and has since worked on building a resistance against the Guatemalan government. In 1982, she helped create the United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition. Menchú has tried returning to Guatemala to speak on behalf of her people but was driven away each time by death threats. She was finally able to reenter her native country in 1988.

Menchú eventually served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords and ran for president of Guatemala in 2007 and 2011. Despite losing both times, she made history as the first indigenous Mayan woman to run for president.

Eulalia Guzmán

First Mexican Female Archaeologist

Born in 1890 in San Pedro Piedra Gorda, Eulalia Guzmán was an educator, feminist, and philosopher best known as Mexico’s first female archaeologist. She helped develop the Ixcateopan, Guerrero, archaeological project, an archive of her country’s history, as well as the National Library of Anthropology and History.

Although some of Guzmán’s archaeological work became controversial among Mexican scholars for their lack of authentication—namely her claim that she discovered the remains of the Aztec Emperor, Cuauhtémoc—she was popular among Indigenous populations who celebrated her accomplishments. Guzmán died at age 94 in 1985.

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