Maria Minaya Astola
Maria Minaya Astola was four years old the first time a machine drew blood.
She had been pretending to be one of the workers — the way she always did when the plastic bag factory fell quiet. Her parents, immigrants from the small Andean town of Cajatambo in Peru, had a New Year’s tradition of placing flowers on the machines for prosperity. Maria used those still moments to play employee, running her small hands over the equipment. One afternoon, she wasn’t careful enough. A cut finger. The kind of resilience that doesn’t come from a classroom.
“I grew up with the factory,” she says. “Every year, I grew up with it.”
Her parents came from nothing and built it into something — a three-floor operation in the plastic bag business in Lima’s outskirts. Her father had once been an industrial engineering student himself before dropping out to start the business with his wife. This May, Maria will complete her Master’s in Engineering Management from USC Viterbi‘s Daniel J. Epstein Department, capping a journey that began with a Bachelor’s in Industrial & Systems Engineering she finished in December 2025.
