What happened to Hannah Hidalgo after the conclusion of last summer’s FIBA Under-19 Women’s World Cup championship in Madrid was nearly as impressive as her game-sealing playing near the end of regulation.
Hidalgo, a freshman on the Notre Dame women’s basketball team, got a steal with 11 seconds left in the fourth quarter of a 69-66 United States win over host Spain in the gold medal game of the international tournament, of which the Americans finished 7-0. After the game, which was packed with Spanish fans, Hidalgo and her teammates made their way back to their bus to take them away from the arena.
While sitting on the bus, Hidalgo, whose last name translates to “person of nobility” in Spanish, looked outside and noticed a crowd of people chanting. As she listened, she realized they were chanting her name.
These were the opposing fans we’re talking about here.
Hidalgo was in pure disbelief.
“I was like, ‘Wow, these people don’t know me, and I just beat their team, and they’re over here chanting my name,’ ” she recently told Andscape.
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Hidalgo is one of college basketball’s burgeoning stars, leading No. 16 Notre Dame (18-5, 8-4 ACC) in points (25.1), assists (5.6) and steals (5.1) per game, the latter of which also leads the entire nation. The 18-year-old is a three-level scorer, capable of getting bucks in the paint, mid-range, and beyond the 3-point line, where she’s shooting 36.9%.
She’s also one of the better defenders in basketball, not only evidenced by her ability to seemingly pick her opponent’s pocket with ease, but by contributing to the fifth-ranked defense in the ACC (the Fighting Irish also rank first in the conference in scoring).
This all comes on the heels of averaging nearly 30 points and 7 steals per game in high school, where she collected more hardware than your local Ace store: McDonald’s All American game co-MVP, New Jersey Player of the Year, back-to-back FIBA World Cup gold medals between 2022-23, No. 1 point guard recruit in the 2023 class.
But while it seems Hidalgo has conquered everything in her less than two decades on this Earth, there’s one thing she’s still trying to grasp and it has nothing to do with how many points she scores, steals she racks up or games the Fighting Irish win.
It’s her Puerto Rican heritage.
The Hidalgo Family
If you search “Hannah Hidalgo Puerto Rican” on X, formerly known as Twitter, not a single result will pop up. It’s almost as if no one knows that one of the top college basketball players in America is of Latina descent.
Hidalgo doesn’t appear to have ever posted about her heritage on social media, and the only evidence on the internet is from Latino culture website Our Esquina naming Hidalgo its women’s athlete of the year, though the news story never mentions that Hidalgo is of Puerto Rican descent.
But this isn’t an example of aggressive assimilation where Hidalgo is trying to hide who she is as to fit in. She’s the daughter of a Puerto Rican father and a Black mother and identifies as such. She loves Puerto Rican culture. She loves Puerto Rican food, particularly pasteles and red beans and rice. She loves the music of native musicians Daddy Yankee and Bad Bunny.
“Their music is always a vibe,” Hidalgo said.
But growing up, her father didn’t share much about his upbringing. He didn’t teach Hidalgo and her five siblings Spanish. Aside from sharing Puerto Rican food dishes, her father didn’t share much about his time living on the island.
“It was not something that was shown when I was young,” Hidalgo said. “My dad didn’t teach us a lot about his life until we got older, then he told us a little more, but my dad doesn’t talk too much about that side.”
He had his reasons.
Orlando Hidalgo was born in Camden, New Jersey, but his parents hailed from Puerto Rico. When Orlando Hidalgo was about 5 years old, the family moved to his mother’s hometown Morovis, a hillside farming town in the central area of the island. Orlando described it as being “a bit more wilderness.”
“There I got to experience some tarantulas, scorpions, snakes,” he said. “There was a lot of different things out there.”
The family lived there for just under two years before moving back to the States. But they ended up back in Puerto Rico around the time Orlando was 12, this time settling on his father’s family land in Naranjo, a barrio of Moca, located near the western coast of the island.
Orlando fondly reminisces on his time in Puerto Rico. It’s where he learned how to read and write in Spanish. It’s where he got to visit the island’s amazing beaches, particularly those in Aguadilla. The family — he’s one of seven children — would farm on the land they owned in Moca, with Orlando raising chickens and roosters and growing a variety of crops: beans, gandules (pigeon peas), corn, plantains, bananas.
Puerto Rico is where Orlando’s mother passed down her cooking traditions, teaching her son how to prepare pasteles, alcapurrias, red rice and beans, and his favorite, los pinchos (shish kabob).
But Orlando’s second stint in Puerto Rico lasted about as long as his first before the family once again returned to the States. While in high school, he met his future wife and Hannah’s mother, Tamara, and the couple married shortly after graduation.
With Orlando living in New Jersey (Puerto Ricans accounted for 4.5% of the state’s population according to the 1990 Census) and around his wife’s Black friends and family, he didn’t have to speak as much Spanish as he did with his own family. When the couple starting having kids, Orlando attempted to teach them Spanish, but he’d always catch himself reverting back to English. So he more or less gave up on that.
“I think the reason why was because it was easier to communicate with them,” he said.
He even tried to teach his wife, but Tamara didn’t want to learn at the time because she thought he’d make fun of her. She now maybe has some regrets about that.
“And then years later she’s like, ‘Why you ain’t teach me Spanish?’ ” Orlando said.
But all wasn’t lost. Orlando retained his mother’s teachings and is the family chef. And the couple’s youngest son, Judah, played basketball for Puerto Rico in the FIBA U16 Americas Championship this past summer on the island. Orlando accompanied his son to Puerto Rico for the tournament, his first visit back home in over 30 years.
Speaking of basketball.
When Orlando returned from Puerto Rico the second time in his youth, he got really into basketball. Like, really into basketball. He learned the sport from scratch, studying the game, watching shooters and dribblers. He’d spend hours — sometimes as late as 2 a.m. — at the park playing pickup games.
“I was training like I was going to the NBA,” he said.
An NBA career never panned out, but once he and Tamara started having children, he started teaching them the game as well. He eventually started training others to the point where he was coaching three AAU teams at once.
Tagging along would be little Hannah. And before she was even in middle school she was really, really good.
Orlando would have her, at 7 years old, playing against boys in a co-ed league. The boys would get so mad because Hannah was so much better than them.
“She was just dominating the boys,” Orlando said. “The same way she’s playing now but she was doing it against boys.”
Hannah had a fiery competitive spirit. Orlando tells a story of how Hannah played one-on-one with Judah when they were younger. Hannah lost the first game, but wouldn’t leave the court until she got her get-back. She beat her younger brother the second time, but that didn’t stop her from storming into the house slamming doors. Both daughter and father had the same quote when explaining it.
“I hate losing more than I love winning,” Hannah said.
Orlando added: “If she loses, she just — you can’t talk to her. She’s got to be by herself, she really takes it hard.”
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But that’s paid dividends in the end, as Hannah has become one of the best college basketball players in the nation for a storied program like Notre Dame. Through this basketball journey, Hannah is also learning more about herself.
She took it upon herself to learn Spanish, of which Orlando says she’s close to being fluent in. She said she plans to make her dad open up more about his heritage, and talk to him more about it. She won’t take it as far as playing for the Puerto Rican national team due to the fact that she’s “won a couple of gold medals” with Team USA, but she’s considered it in the past.
For Orlando, he plans to take the family to Puerto Rico next winter; only he and Judah have ever visited. Hannah’s 77-year-old grandfather still lives on the island. Orlando wants to show his kids the heritage they’re not too familiar with. He wants them to experience more than what they’ve been used to in America. He wants to show them any and everything.
“They never got to see how easy it is to just pick a banana or mango from a tree that’s nearby,” he said.
For Hannah, this journey she’s on is unique. In women’s Division I college basketball, just 2.9% of players identify as Hispanic or Latina, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. During the 2022 WNBA season, just one player identified as such.
Hannah relishes the opportunity of not being like everyone else, of being different.
“To be able to have a different type of Hispanic culture,” she said, “being able to have a small percentage of those people in professional sports, it definitely means a lot.”
