This EQUALibrium Live conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, activist, and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas focuses on how we define American and the immigrant narrative in a quickly changing nation.
Vargas founded the nonprofit advocacy organization Define American in 2011, the same year he revealed that he had been concealing a long-held secret. He was an undocumented immigrant, having been sent as a child to live with his grandparents in the United States — a fact he didn’t discover until he tried to obtain a driver’s license in California.
His first book, a memoir called “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen” was published in 2018, and his second book, “White Is Not a Country,” is set to publish next year.
Vargas and WFAE Senior Editor Ely Portillo discuss Vargas’s story, this country’s turbulent immigration landscape, the role of the media in shaping immigrant narratives and how we define “American” identity.