“Perseverance” is the name of the vehicle that NASA has sent to Mars to find out if it harbored life, but it is also the word that best summarizes the story of the Colombian engineer Diana Trujillo, one of the members of the new mission to the Red Planet.
Trujillo, at 36, leads the team in charge of ensuring that the arm of the rover that left the Caño Cañaveral complex on July 30 and two of its key instruments for collecting samples on Mars work perfectly.
The path that has led her to participate in this Martian exploration began when she arrived in the United States at just 17 years of age from her native Cali and with more courage than budget.
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Her career seems to always go from the smallest to the infinite: from cleaning houses while learning English, she went to university, in 2006 she became the only Hispanic selected that year for the NASA training program, where she was later hired and has not stopped moving forward.
Today she is the mother of two little boys aged 4 and 2, she has not lost her Cali accent when speaking Spanish, she loves salsa and misses the famous food and drinks of her city, such as lulada and shampoo.
“I came alone, I did not know English, I had no more than 300 dollars in my pocket, I did not know how much it was going to reach me, I did not know anyone,” this aerospace engineer recalls in an interview with Efe of her arrival in this country.
He did so after accepting the offer made by his father in the middle of a “difficult” divorce process from his mother, who ended up financially very affected by the separation.
“You grow up with your mother giving everything to you and then when you see that your mother cannot; ah, that comes to you something from in here where you say: ‘No, forget it, I’m going to take care of you, I’m going to take care of you, “he says.
And he kept his promise. After arriving in Miami, she looked for work in her first week and the following week she had already registered to study English. Her schedule started very early and ended at dawn.
“That was the discipline that I needed at the age of 17 to realize that I was going to do whatever was put into my head,” he admits.
The next step was the University of Florida, a responsibility he shared with jobs very common among immigrants.
“I was cleaning houses and working in a bakery” and only with that he earned “good money”, but his aspirations went further, he confesses.
Almost after finishing university, he applied to the NASA training program. It was that instruction and a visit to the University of Maryland, where she finally graduated in 2007 as an aerospace engineer, that paved her way to the American aerospace agency.
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In 2008 he entered NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). After occupying different positions, he became among the leaders of the “Mars Science Laboratory” mission, which featured “Curiosity”, a rover very similar to “Perseverance”, which is expected to land on Mars in February next year.
As a Hispanic and a woman, her advice to those seeking a future in America is not to lose the north.
“My advice is that they do not forget why they came,” emphasizes Trujillo, who considers that emigrating “is a very difficult change.”
“None of us, Latino women, men who have left the land to come here have come easily. And when I refer to easy, I mean that it can be easy monetarily, but not sentimentally or easy sentimentally, but not monetarily, so it is never easy, “he says.
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Nor does he believe in the limits or stereotypes created around Latinos.
“I did not allow myself to be pigeonholed because I never saw the box,” she said, and assured that for them to be pigeonholed, she would have to “leave.”
“At some point I decided that I am what I am, regardless of what you think,” he frankly emphasizes.
But it is still not considered a “perfect” role model. “I have an accent when I speak, I am wrong when I write, all those other things, because still in English it is not the same as speaking Spanish,” he admits.
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However, while everyone was clapping or jumping when they saw “Curiosity” land on Mars in August 2012, it was she who calmly analyzed even the smallest detail to solve any possible inconvenience.
And with “Perserverance”, whose launch she witnessed with her husband sitting on the couch at home due to the pandemic, she prefers to be cautious: “We have not arrived yet, we have six months to go,” she says.
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