First Mexican female in space tells Fresno-area teens she’ll make sure ‘I am not the last.’

Being chosen for a flight mission to space is not easy.

Katya Echazarreta, the first Mexican-born woman ever to fly to space, says the journey can be even harder for some people. Her road was a long and difficult one that included migrating to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and working multiple jobs as a young adult to help her mother feed her siblings. Those are struggles she knows many young Latinos in the Central Valley understand.

But Echazarreta spoke during an assembly at Parlier High School on Thursday with the hope that the students would understand what it takes to make it out of that struggle, she said.

“I want you to listen very carefully to this,” Echazarreta told a gym packed with mostly Latino teenagers. “You can have those four jobs. You can feed your family. You can feed yourself. You can take care of yourselves by working yourselves to the bone, but you’ll never get out of that ... if you don’t seek some sort of higher education, and I’m not only talking about college.”

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Echazarreta has worked on five NASA missions, including the Mars 2020 Preserverance Rover, which seeks “signs of ancient life,” according to NASA’s website. She flew to space at 26 in 2022 as part of the Space for Humanity Citizen Spaceflight Program. People from all walks of life are able to apply to experience what the program calls the “Overview Effect: the cognitive shift in awareness that occurs when a human being looks down on the Earth from space.”

The now-29-year-old UCLA-educated electrical engineer emphasizes her Mexican ancestry because she said she felt the social gap between herself and her peers as she rose to a position with NASA. She said others avoided getting “stuck with the Mexican girl as a lab partner,” and some professors chastised Latinos for “’stealing these opportunities’” when they answered questions incorrectly.

“That’s what you’re up against,” she told the Parlier teenagers, many of them young Latinas. “You have to be the one strong enough to push past that.”

Last year, Parlier Unified School District hosted Jose Hernandez, the first ever Mexican American to fly to space. Superintendent Rafael Iniguez told The Fresno Bee the district hopes to continue to host these types of speakers each year.

The point, he said, is to “get someone who looks like our students to serve as a source of inspiration for them.”

Becoming the first

She thought she had her road mapped out when she was 17: Echazarreta knew which college she wanted to go to and what she wanted to study.

But her life was upended the same year as her parents initiated a divorce. Her father, she said, handled the situation as if he was also divorcing his children.

“From one day to the next, my family lost everything,” Echazarreta said. “At 17 years old, I had to become a partial breadwinner, along with my mom, for my three siblings.”

But she remained dedicated to her community college studies, she said, graduating with a 4.0 GPA and transferred to UCLA with two scholarships that paid her tuition in full. One day, exhausted from all of her work, she broke down in tears and asked herself, “’Is this really what you want?”

“There was nothing else I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said. “So I pushed on and I pushed on, and each day it felt harder than the day before.”

Then, she landed a job at NASA.

When she began the three-year application process for her 2022 spaceflight, Echazarreta joined 7,000 people from 120 countries also seeking the sole spot in the mission.

“The person who, in that moment and out of all of those people, was the most qualified to travel to space — I’m so, so proud to say this — was the Mexican girl,” Echazarreta said, causing the mass of Parlier High School students to break out in cheers and applause.

‘Not the last’

The first few seconds in space is one of the weirdest things to live through, Echazarreta said. Your brain thinks you are upside down when you are floating, your blood rushes to your head and you feel like a “human blood balloon,” she said.

“The first time I turned around and I saw the planet, I think that was one of the greatest shocks of my entire life,” she said. “It really changes the way you look at the world.”

There’s also the different gravitational forces you experience during a launch and free fall on the return to Earth. During free fall, she said, it’s G6, or six times stronger than the gravitational force on Earth: “You can’t move a muscle, you can’t open your eyes, you can’t move your fingers, you can hardly breathe.”

Her speech at Parlier High School was inspiring, sophomore Daniela Olivera told The Fresno Bee after the assembly.

“As someone who went through kind of the same situation, it really inspired me to try harder in school.” Olivera said. “In Mexican households, the girls are always being pushed to try harder. Seeing her being able to do it really inspired me to get through my goals and say, ‘I can do it.’”

Echazarreta has founded a nonprofit called the Katya Echazarreta Space Foundation (Fundación Espacial Katya Echazarreta), which works to provide space industry-related opportunities for people who do not have access to them. She also advocated for a constitutional amendment in Mexico — already approved by the lower house in Congress — that would allow for the country to prioritize space-related activities.

When she flew to space, it had been 37 years since Rodolfo Neri Vela, the first and only other Mexican-born astronaut had been there. But Echazarreta has not been back to space since her 2022 flight ended. Her mission today is a different one.

“The mission, after being the first Mexican woman in space, is making sure I am not the last,” she said.