Que pasa? : PEOPLE AND EVENTS

* Daniel Lozano could hear the pedestrians say, “Construction is all a Mexican can do,” as they walked by the building project where he worked. The remarks made him angry--and more determined. In a chilling glimpse of what could have been his future, he had heard older construction workers complain about what they might have done with their lives. At 24, he returned to school and wound up graduating first in his Whittier College class. Now 29, Lozano will enter UC San Francisco medical school on full scholarship this fall. “When I told my friends in construction what I planned to do, they were all behind me,” he said. “One of them bought books for my first semester as a way of saying, ‘Go get ‘em.’ ”

* ‘More and more Latinas are now lawyers who have been prosecutors and are very competent to assume positions of great responsibility,” said former Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lourdes G. Baird, the new U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. Based in Los Angeles, the district is the largest in the country, spanning seven counties from San Luis Obispo to Riverside. With 138 lawyers, the office handles many highly publicized drug and defense fraud cases. A bilingual native of Ecuador, Baird, 55, said she thinks her selection may be a first for a Latina, “but I hope it’s part of a changing scene.”