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Dr. Frances Hernandez. She died of cancer on March 27, 1999. Below we include an abbreviated version of the obituary provided by her husband, Dr. John W. Hernandez. |
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Dr. Frances Hernandez shown here with Wendell Aycock at the annual CEA conference. |
Dr. Frances Hernandez, 72, died on March 27 of cancer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is survived by her husband, Dr. John Whitlock Hernandez, and by her sister and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Jack Noll Rinker of Alexandria, Virginia.
Dr. Frances Hernandez was born April 6, 1926, in Webster Groves, Missouri, the first of two children of Col. Kenneth Gerheart Baker, an electrical engineer with Wagner Electric Company, and his wife, Bertha Walton Baker, a biochemist with Eli Lilly Company. The two daughters were graduated from their parents' alma mater, Purdue University. Dr. Hernandez earned master's degrees from both Purdue and the University of New Mexico, where she also received her doctorate in comparative literature.
Dr. Hernandez's teaching career spanned more than forty years, the last thirty on the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she rose to the rank of full professor. She was appointed emerita professor in 1997 and was honored as grand marshal of Commencement at her retirement that year. During her years of teaching, Dr. Hernandez and her husband accepted teaching or research assignments in Chile, Puerto Rico, Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Peru, Brazil, New Zealand, and China. She was also invited as a visiting professor to Saint John's College in Annapolis and to the University of Maryland in College Park.
Dr. Hernandez's research and publication interests have centered on world literature, particularly on the translation of important works from Spanish into English. Two of her translations are The Catalan Chronicle of Francisco de Moncada (1975) and Only the Wind, Legends of the Onas of Tierra del Fuego (1979). In recent years, she has been a leading national authority on the Sephardic Jews who came to the Southwest as conversos with the Spanish conquistadores, culminating in her translation of the Mexican classic: The Carvajal Family: The Jews and the Inquisition of New Spain in the Sixteenth Century. She received the Distinguished Service to the Profession Award from the College English Association in 1989.
She met her husband, Dr. John Hernandez of the Civil Engineering Department in NMSU, when they were both students at the University of new Mexico; they married in 1951. She and her husband were co-recipients of UNM's Zia alumni award for their contributions to higher education.
Reading, writing, and ballroom dancing were her favorite avocations; she and her husband figured as graceful and imaginative dancers on floors from the Raffles in Singapore, to the Mandalay ballroom in Auckland, and to Art Fountain's Basin Street West in old Mesilla. Their major hobby has been the purchase and rehabilitation of old adobes to provide low-income housing for families that appreciate the historic value of their residences. In some cases, these houses have been conveyed to long-term tenants. These houses are in Rio Arriba, Sante Fe and Dona Ana counties. In Pioneer Park area of Las Cruces, they include the Knight, Bronson, and Nushbaum houses. The Hernandezes have lived in the Stern house for more than twenty-five years.
The couple have no offspring, but became guardians of the children of Mayor and Mrs. Robert C. Munson when the parents were killed twenty years ago in an airplane crash between Las Cruces and Albuquerque. The Munson children remain close to the Hernansezes, and they include Dr. James Munson and his wife, Melody, of Longmont, Colorado; Joanne Munson and her husband Dr. Dennis Essa of Seattle, Washington; John Eric Munson and his wife Lisa; and Jennifer Munson and her husband, William Harty, Jr., all of Las Cruces.
