To celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, the College Park Aviation Museum hosted its fifth annual Latinas in Aviation Global Festival on Sept. 28, featuring Latin American women who work in aviation.
Twenty-one of the 28 women who contributed to this year’s volume of Latinas in Aviation, a five-year-old book series, attended the event.
Jacqueline Ruiz, who publishes the series, said she adds to it each year to “inspire the next generation of aviators.”
“Seeing people that look like them and then having hands-on, magical ability to … communicate with the authors, and then for them to share their stories firsthand, it’s so beautiful,” Ruiz said.
This year’s festival included a three-plane fly-in to the College Park Airport, which sits next to the museum, along with vendors representing local aviation-related organizations, and children’s activities and crafts guided by the Latina aviators.
College Park is home to a large Hispanic population, museum Director Nadine Boksmati-Fattouh said. The event, she said, is designed to inspire young people to pursue their dreams, especially in fields where Latinas may be underrepresented. The event drew visitors of all ages.
“We push for representation, and we want people to come and feel welcome in the space,” Boksmati-Fattouh said.
Tailoring festival activities toward different age groups aims to increase community engagement with the museum, Boksmati-Fattouh said.
The museum held the first Latinas in Aviation Global Festival in October 2021, debuting the museum’s permanent Latinas in Aviation exhibit and celebrating the book’s first volume.
For the first edition, Ruiz spent nine months finding the 22 Latinas whose stories she featured. Now she has a waitlist for next year’s volume, she said.
“When you’re a kid, being a brown little girl, you don’t see a lot of people that look like you in these types of positions,” American Airlines video producer Vanessa Jimenez said. “It’s kind of cool to see that you could inspire … a little kid that’s like, if they could do that, maybe I can do that.”
Seventeen-year-old Leila Brown drove nine hours from Georgia with her sister and mother to attend the event. Brown’s mother, Kirby Quiles Brown, works for the Federal Aviation Administration’s civil rights section.
Brown said she intends to pursue a career that overlaps nursing and aviation. The festival exposes children to opportunities in aviation that she is just beginning to learn about, she said, adding the event was “amazing.”
Aircraft certification data analyst Carlimar Collazo-Torres, one of the Latinas featured in this year’s book, said she had been curious since childhood about a career in aviation, but didn’t realize until college that opportunities in the field extend past being a pilot.
Latinas in Aviation shares the importance of resilience for young people trying to break into aviation, she said.
“It’s so amazing to see yourself in [the kids], you know, and see how far you’ve come,” Collazo-Torres said.
Documenting stories like Collazo-Torres’ in the series brings communities together through shared experiences and struggles, Ruiz said.
“This community has been so beautiful and so embracing and so lovely,” Ruiz said. “It just touches my heart … and activates my inspiration even more.”