I don’t usually post about a movie more than once (except if it’s a classic…), but I just spent the evening watching A Million Miles Away for the second time and there’s so much that I loved about the movie and a few things that got under my skin that I felt the need for this second post. First thing, you’ll probably want to watch the movie before reading this article because I’ll be making references to elements in the movie that probably won’t make sense without viewing the movie first. Also Happy Latin-X Heritage Month¹. 

This movie is the encapsulation of the motto that I heard growing up, that no matter who you are or where your family came from, that you can become anything you dream of. That’s the American promise. But the day to day reality is a bit different, beginning with the work one’s family does and where one is from. Jose Hernandez’s family was/is a hard working family, where everyone worked to support their dreams, particularly paying for their house back in Mexico. They didn’t come looking for government hand-outs. You know those hordes streaming across the border that some media outlets continually refer to, these families came to do the jobs that those born in this country weren’t interested in doing. They were doing the job that required waking up a 4am to work the fields in the Imperial Valley and from Chino in Southern California to Stockton in Northern California, traveling to wherever they were needed. 

My mom told me stories about being a little girl and the whole family taking the long journey from San Gabriel to Stockton to work the fields in the summer. Unlike Hernandez, by the time I came around I was lucky enough to grew up with the luxury of having my summers off/not having to work the fields because my dad worked locally in landscaping for building developments in Southern California. Similar to Hernandez, I started watching the NASA launches on TV, but I’m four years older and  probably started watching going back to the Gemini flights much earlier in the 1960s. And I also dreamed about becoming an astronaut. Also like Hernandez, the dream seemed so remote. Then as I became a teenager and went to college I definitely did not go in that direction and was much more focused on exploring my religious faith. 

I was still interested in NASA and watched every Apollo mission and knew about Skylab and watched the Shuttle program as it began, but I couldn’t see how to make the connection or what I would even do for NASA. I did some Engineering/Drafting and Architecture in high school but had no interest in Engineering in college. I grew up in that era when all of the astronauts were military pilots and growing up in the late sixties no one I knew wanted to get involved with the military (something about not wanting to be cannon fodder in Vietnam). Unlike me, Hernandez was smart enough to get his college degrees in Electrical Engineering and put himself in a position were his education and work experiences could be used at NASA. Oh yeah, and he actually filled out the application(s) to become an astronaut. He didn’t just dream about it, he did something about it. 

I loved his father’s Five Ingredients to Realizing Ones Dreams. I don’t remember having those kinds of conversations with my dad and if we did, I clearly wasn’t paying attention. It’s funny how the concerns of the father can sometimes revisit the lives of the children. I know my dad wanted to get his general contractors license because that would give him more freedom to do the work he wanted to do, but he was intimidated by the math part of the test. In my family’s case we probably over-compensated, in that my siblings and I all got multiple college degrees and licensing in our fields of study. I didn’t go into landscaping or engineering, but I recognize my father’s unrealized dreams because he feared he couldn’t pass the test. Knowing Hernandez’s Five Ingredients might have helped:

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Something that annoyed me about the movie was that even though he held on to his dream to become an astronaut and told his teacher as a young boy and his future wife as a young adult AND got his degree in electrical engineering AND got an engineering job at Lawerence Livermore Labs AND filled out the NASA astronaut application multiple times (twelve times!), he seemed embarrassed with his obsession AND he couldn’t articulate to his son why going to space was so important to him. The man was actively pursuing this singular dream his whole life and when confronted he brushed it aside as nothing? That bugged me. 

But maybe the reason this bugged me so much was because I recognized this survival technique of hiding one’s true dream, even while actively pursuing it as something that I’ve tended to do… TO BE CONTINUED…

Sources:

• A First Look from A Million Miles Away | Prime Video | Prime Video (2023-08-15), https://youtu.be/J-HcUuiLzR8?si=mhuvdR8PAWc-a4TF, retrieved 2023-09-25.
• Video Fridays: A Million Miles Away – A Story from the Fields of California to Space by Joe Bustillos (2023-09-08), https://joebustillos.com/2023/09/video-fridays-a-million-miles-away-a-story-from-the-fields-of-california-to-space/, retrieved 2023-09-25. 
• How an immigrant farmworker beat the odds to become a NASA astronaut by ABC News (2021-02-18), https://youtu.be/7ACcI_Ede9o?si=JgALDCGiFBDb0uxe, retrieved 2023-09-25.
• From Farmworker to Astronaut / De Campesino a Astronauta: My Path to the Stars / Mi viaje a las estrellas by Jose M. Hernandez (2019-10-31), https://amzn.to/45IJmup, retrieved 2023-09-25.
• Astronaut José Hernández discusses new movie project | Morning in America posted by NewsNation (2022-10-22), https://youtu.be/MEhVEU5CeuQ?si=GkiTxISblUq4_Kg7, retrieved 2023-09-25.

1. I was school many decades ago when working in Hawaiian Gardens that Latinos/as, especially educated ones don’t use the term “Hispanic,” because it a made up, somewhat demeaning governmental designation…[↩]