Honors Pile Up for Starry-Eyed Eighth-Grader

Asked what she wants to be when she grows up, eighth-grader Araceli Centeno first answers pediatrician, then pauses and gives her alternate plan.

“Well, this will make you laugh a lot,” she says, “I want to be the first woman to have a Martian.”

By that, the Oxnard 13-year-old explains, she wants to travel to Mars and give birth while on the planet. And no, she adds, the baby won’t be green.

The Frank Intermediate School student recently had a taste of space travel after winning an all-expense-paid trip to the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

Araceli wrote one of the top 10 essays in a nationwide contest sponsored by the Hispanic Engineers Assn., earning her the opportunity to be an astronaut on a simulated mission complete with a life-size orbiter and mock lift-off. “It was fun,” Araceli said about her weeklong journey last month.

“We got to ride in this simulator and then they had this ride similar to one in Magic Mountain.” Araceli was rocketed 200 feet in the air on a ride called Space Shot, which allows passengers to experience a few seconds of weightlessness at the apex before plummeting.

In praise of Araceli, the Oxnard mayor on Tuesday presented her with a certificate at the City Council meeting, and Oxnard school district trustees recently gave her a letter of commendation at a board meeting.

“Araceli represents all those students that have dreams and desires to do better things for themselves,” trustee Susan Alvarez said during a later interview. “She represents the majority of students that are hard workers that are supported by their parents and that we don’t hear about in the news.”

The theme of the contest was the role of Latinos in space. In Araceli’s essay, she wrote that young Latinos must fulfill the dream of those who came before them to “soar like the eagles into the cosmos.”

“Our obligation and our duty to our ancestors, [Cesar] Chavez (who woke up the Sleeping Giant, the Hispanics), the farm workers and all the Hispanics walking on the face of this earth is to get ourselves back up front with the other groups in the race for the exploration of the Last Frontier.”

Her essay concludes by asking whether young Latinos can fulfill the dream of being chosen to be the next astronaut or to design the next “perfect” aircraft. Her answer: “Of course we can!”

Araceli said she plans to attend a college in Southern California and may consider becoming an astronaut.

As they sat around the dining table, Araceli’s parents said they are very proud of their daughter. “Winning the contest means that Araceli is doing well in school and applying herself,” father Raphael Centeno said in Spanish. “She always does all her homework.”

To ease her parents’ worries about sending Araceli to Alabama unescorted, each of the five school board members dipped into the money they are allotted to attend conferences to send a science teacher along.