Path to the Stars

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Born in the Shadow of Mount Rushmore

  Preschool for Mario and Me

  The World Becomes a Dark and Scary Place

  She’s Not the Same

  A Head Start and a Library Card

  A Seat in the Back of the Classroom

  No One to Talk To

  Learning to Pass the Scissors

  Christmas Traditions

  Learning to Save and Budget Through Cookies

  Our Family’s Love of the Library

  A Troop for Everyone

  Planning for Survival

  Changes at School and at Home

  Hoops, Hotheads, Courts, and Cars

  Beating the Drums into High School

  Against Expectations

  Being a Rocket Scientist and Realizing My Dream of Stanford

  Epilogue

  A Note About Girl Scouts Yesterday and Today

  Acknowledgments

  Buy the Spanish Edition!/¡Compra la edición en español!

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2018 by Sylvia Acevedo

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  hmhco.com

  Cover illustration © 2018 by Ji Hyuk Kim

  Cover design by Andrea Miller

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Acevedo, Sylvia, author.

  Title: Path to the stars : my journey from Girl Scout to rocket scientist / Sylvia Acevedo.

  Description: Boston; New York : Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2018] | Audience: Age 10–12. | Audience: Grade 4 to 6.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018005790 | ISBN 9781328809568 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Acevedo, Sylvia—Juvenile literature. | Women engineers—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. | Engineers—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. | Hispanic American women—Biography—Juvenile literature. | Hispanic American scientists—Biography—Juvenile literature. | Girl Scouts of the United States of America—Officials and employees.

  Classification: LCC TA157.5 .A24 2018 | DDC 369.463092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005790

  eISBN 978-1-328-52690-8

  v1.0818

  To my mother,

  Ofelia Monge Acevedo,

  and my Tía,

  Angélica Monge

  Introduction

  When I was young, my favorite toy was a kaleidoscope. I’d stand in our backyard and hold it up to the full moon, watching the colored shapes tumble into new patterns that were never the same twice. When I tired of one combination, I’d just twist the cylinder, and a new one, totally different, would settle into view. Then I’d lower the kaleidoscope and see the bright moon shining over the New Mexico desert, so large and low it seemed I could walk over and touch it.

  Sometimes the patterns in my kaleidoscope reminded me of the colors and shapes in my world: Mami’s favorite dress, Papá’s stack of library books, the blanket in my sister Laura’s crib. At other times they were more abstract, not like anything in my day-to-day life, but beautiful all the same. When I was older, I would sometimes pick up my old toy and find that the colorful patterns called to mind the structure of molecules or a schematic plan for an electrical circuit. My understanding of the world had become more sophisticated as I had grown up; the kaleidoscope hadn’t changed, but I had.

  I’ve come a long way since those nights, standing outside in our yard under a blanket of brilliant stars. When I was in elementary school, most girls I knew wanted to grow up to raise a family and keep house. Few of them planned on going to college and finding a job they loved. If they pictured themselves earning a living, it was never as a mechanic or an engineer or a scientist, jobs they—and everyone else we knew—considered to be men’s work.

  When I was in second grade, something happened that changed my life: a classmate suggested I come with her to an after-school group for girls. I loved it from the very first moment. The group was called the Brownies, and I learned that they were part of a larger organization called the Girl Scouts.

  The Girl Scouts taught me how to organize and plan for the future. Over the years, they helped me learn the connection between cooking and science, between selling cookies and managing my money. Most important, the Girl Scouts encouraged my dreams of college and taught me that I could create my own opportunities.

  I liked math and science, so I decided to give engineering a try. I ended up working as a rocket scientist and for computer companies in the early days of the Internet. I started my own company and, eventually, even got to be on a presidential commission, attending many meetings at the White House, where I met President Obama, cabinet secretaries, senators, members of Congress, military generals and admirals, as well as members of the Supreme Court. I joined the national board of the Girl Scouts so I could help the organization that had given me so much help. Then I was invited to serve as their chief executive officer.

  I talk to young people just like you all the time—and I listen to you too. I know that even today, kids and teens are still told what you can’t do. Sometimes you’re told you can’t be good at math or other hard subjects, when all you really need is more help to understand them. Or you’re told you can’t have a fulfilling career, when you just need help applying to college. The worst is when you think you can’t realize your dreams at all, no matter how hard you work. That’s just not true. Sometimes you need a little boost to understand what you’re capable of—and to help you take responsibility for your aspirations. I hope my story helps you dream big dreams and make those dreams come true.

  Chapter 1

  Born in the Shadow of Mount Rushmore

  My Papá wasn’t much for telling stories. He liked facts and information. If you asked him about the Mexican Revolution or about the freezing point of water, he’d go on all day, sounding grown-up and important, like the men who read the news on television. Mami was the storyteller in our family—as long as the subject was people. I thought she must know everybody in the world—who their family was, where they came from, and what they did all day.

  Still, my father had one story that I always loved to hear. “Papá, tell me about the hospital!” I’d beg him. Sometimes it took a few tries, but he’d finally look up from his book.

  “The hospital,” he’d repeat, his voice thoughtful. “I drove by it every day, but I’d never gone inside. It was not far from Ellsworth Air Force Base, where we lived when I was stationed in South Dakota, less than an hour from Mount Rushmore.”

  He would always start by telling me about his time in the army. Papá was proud of his army service, so part of the story was about how he’d entered the army after the Korean War as a lieutenant in the Air Defense Artillery.

  “Your brother, Mario, was already two years old,” Papá would continue, finally getting to the important part of the story. “Once we knew the new baby was about to be born, I brought Mami to the hospital. We all went inside, even Mario.

  “The nurse told me Mami would need some time and I should come back later. So I went home to the base where we lived and left Mario with a neighbor. When I got back
to the hospital, they said it would be a while before I could see your mother.”

  In those days, fathers stayed in a waiting room while their babies were being born, and new babies were usually brought to the nursery, not kept with their mothers. It was a long time before a nurse came out to tell Papá that Mami was fine, but she was asleep. The nurse said Papá could see his baby.

  When he got to the nursery, Papá looked through a big window and saw rows of metal cribs with clear plastic sides, each crib just big enough for one tiny infant. Some of the babies had blond hair, and some had brown hair or no hair at all. Nearly all of them had fair skin. Only one baby had very dark hair.

  “That was me!” I’d say. “I wasn’t even one day old.” I knew Papá had had no trouble picking me out in the nursery because I looked like him, even though he was a grown man in an army uniform and I was a little baby wrapped in a white blanket. He knew right away I was his. And I was sure that I knew right away that he was my Papá.

  Papá would nod at that point in the story, and sometimes he’d even smile. I’d wait for him to say something else, but usually his nose would go right back into his book.

  I was always excited to hear this story, but over the years, I came to understand more about what living in South Dakota had been like for Mami. Papá’s family was from Mexico, but he had grown up in Texas. He had gotten all of his schooling, including college, in the United States, and he spoke English well. After graduation, he was fulfilling his army ROTC commitment as an officer stationed in South Dakota, and he went off to work every day at the missile battalion protecting Ellsworth Air Force Base.

  But Mami had grown up in Parral, Mexico, in the state of Chihuahua, and didn’t understand a word of English. The neighbors gave her baby clothes and thick winter coats for the brutal South Dakota winters, but they didn’t speak Spanish. Papá was often away overnight, and she was alone with two small children.

  I remember Mami singing a song about Marranito, a little pig, while counting our fingers and toes. Mario and I loved having her undivided attention, and she loved playing with us and making us laugh. But Mami had no adults to talk with except Papá.

  Even the landscape was not what Mami was used to: tree-covered hills and rolling plains instead of a desert sprinkled with cacti and spiky plants. The summers were very hot, with black flies everywhere, and the winters were freezing cold. Only the stars were the same as she remembered from home.

  Mami never liked to complain, but she must have been lonely. She was overjoyed when Papá’s tour of duty was up after two years and he was discharged from the army. Now we were free to move to a new home.

  Mami and Papá packed up their beige 1955 Ford and drove one thousand miles south to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where we moved in with Tía Alma, Papá’s older sister, and her family, the Barbas: Uncle Sam Barba and my cousins Debbie, Cathy, and Sammy. I don’t know why we used the Spanish “tía” for Tía Alma but the Anglo “uncle” for Uncle Sam. That’s just the way it was. My father’s mother, Abuelita Juanita, lived with the Barbas too. When we moved in, Mario was four years old and I was just two.

  From the first day, I remember the babble of voices, the adults speaking Spanish, a swirl of words and song and argument and stories and laughter, with my mother somehow always at the center. My cousins spoke a mix of English and Spanish, but Mario and I spoke only Spanish at that time.

  I remember eating breakfast in the family room, sitting at the table with Mario and my cousins, each of us with our small glass of juice and bowl of cereal. Mario and I slept in this room too, because all of the bedrooms were full.

  The house was crowded, but I didn’t mind, because there was always someone to play with. Every day after breakfast, we’d tumble outside and chase one another through the yard and the back alley, discovering the world. I remember running to catch up with Mario and my older cousins, running for the sheer joy of speed and the wind on my face.

  For my father, who grew up with one much older sister, the noise of five small children was a trial. He loved us, but he would often spend his afternoons at the library instead of playing with us or helping my mother around the house.

  Once he found work, rather than wearing his army uniform, Papá dressed like the other men in our new neighborhood, donning dress slacks and a button-down shirt and tie for his job at New Mexico State University, where he was a chemist in the physical science laboratories. My aunt, uncle, and grandmother went to work too. My aunt was a schoolteacher, and my uncle worked at White Sands Missile Range. My grandmother had a job at a clothing store. My mother was left to keep house and look after all the children. It was a lot of responsibility for her.

  Mami had grown up poor, with thirteen brothers and sisters. Her school days ended after the sixth grade, but she’d wanted more education. She took a typing class and made her way north to the border city of Juárez, Mexico, when she was sixteen, hoping to work as a secretary. She didn’t find a job in Juárez, but she would regularly cross the pedestrian bridge to El Paso, in Texas, where she worked cleaning homes.

  Mami made many friends in El Paso. She was only nineteen when she met Papá. By the time they moved to Las Cruces, they had been married for almost five years. Mami was twenty-four and Papá was twenty-six.

  My aunt and uncle’s house was small, but it had soft carpets, and a baby grand piano shoehorned into the living room. With her hardscrabble background, my mother thought my aunt, uncle, and grandmother put on aristocratic airs. She felt they looked down on her for having grown up in poverty. Papá was a college graduate, and his sister, Tía Alma, was too. Mami knew his family would have preferred that he’d married someone with more education than she had.

  Papá would have been content to stay at his sister’s house, as crowded as it was, but Mami wanted her own home. In the afternoons, when my grandmother returned from her job, my mother would take me for walks and look for signs that said CASA PARA RENTAR, meaning a house was for rent.

  It wasn’t long before my mother found a new house for us, and we moved out of my aunt and uncle’s home. Now we lived less than a mile away, on Solano Street, a busy thoroughfare next to an arroyo, a steep, dry gully that flooded after the heavy summer rains.

  Our new house was made of cinder blocks and painted green on the outside. It was tiny, with barely enough room for the four of us and Manchas, our dog. There were two small bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen with just enough space for a table, and a living room with a foldout couch that took up the entire room when it was open. The bedroom Mario and I shared had a closet, two small beds, and a round hooked rug where we played with our toys. We liked to go outside and play in the arroyo, where there was room to run around.

  Our new next-door neighbor raised chickens, and she sold Mami fresh eggs. Every Sunday my father would buy a chicken from her, and she’d slaughter it so Mami could cook it for dinner after church. Friends from church gave us some furniture, and Mami shopped around for more, using layaway plans at stores since we didn’t have a credit card.

  My mother was very thrifty. She budgeted carefully to be able to buy a green Formica kitchen table and chairs, as well as our other new furniture.

  Soon after we moved in, the living room became even more crowded, because my mother’s younger sister, Tía Angélica, arrived from Mexico to stay with us. She had come to help out because Mami was going to have a baby.

  Tía Angélica was young and pretty, with hair she swept up into a ponytail that swung around when she turned her head. She adored my mother, and Mami was overjoyed to have her little sister living with us. They talked and laughed and sang all day long.

  Tía Angélica didn’t want to be a burden on our family. She helped Mami and quickly found work cleaning Tía Alma’s house, as well as other people’s homes. She loved Mario and me, and she praised us, making us feel special and very smart. She’d take us to the toy store and buy us something with her earnings or treat us to a showing at the Mexican movie theater, where an actor named Cantinf
las would make us laugh and laugh.

  At night, Tía Angélica slept on the couch. There was a crib squeezed between the sofa and the coffee table, and Tía Angélica and Mami unpacked Mario’s and my old baby clothes while I watched, fascinated.

  I was four years old now, and while I didn’t much care for dolls—I had one, named Óscar, a Christmas present from my grandmother—I wanted to see the little brother or sister whose clothes were no bigger than Óscar’s. Even though I had seen pictures of me as a baby, I had trouble imagining another baby living in our house. Would it cry all day? What would it be like to have a new brother or a sister? What would its name be? Most important, would the new baby be a boy, like Mario, or a girl, like me? I thought Papá would probably prefer another boy, but I didn’t want to ask him. Mami, smiling, refused to say which kind of baby she’d like best. We would just have to wait and see.

  One morning, my mother wasn’t in the kitchen. Instead, Tía Angélica was singing to the radio while she poured my orange juice. Smiling at Mario and me, she told us we had a new baby sister named Laura. Mami and Laura would be in the hospital for a few days, and Tía Angélica would take care of us.

  Every day while Mami was gone, Tía Angélica would take Mario and me downtown to Woolworths so we could buy a toy, or she would play games with us, or sometimes she would just sit in the sun, painting her fingernails pink, while we ran in the arroyo.

  I soon came to love Tía Angélica, but even so, it seemed like a long time before Mami and Papá brought Laura home. On the day my baby sister came home from the hospital, Mario and I crowded into the living room to see her. Manchas was also very curious. As we took turns holding Laura, he sniffed her all over. I took a couple of sniffs too. She smelled a little like sour milk, I decided. She had dark hair, just like I did, but hers was curly, and she gazed at us with dark, curious eyes.

  We all loved Laura, but Manchas became my sister’s protector. At night, he would circle her crib several times before dropping down in front of it and closing his eyes. That way, he could guard the crib even while he was asleep.