My parents and I nervously sat inside a large, gray federal building in downtown Los Angeles. We were there for our collective permanent residencies interview. The plastic blue chairs we were sitting on were meant to add some color to the monotone space. A portrait of a mischievously smiling George W. Bush hung on the wall. My mom and dad kept looking at my T-shirt disapprovingly. I had bought it at a Rage Against the Machine concert and emblazoned across it was a blue upside-down triangle, a purposeful reminder of what the Nazis made the Jews wear in concentration camps. The triangle in this instance was worn by foreign forced laborers and immigrants. I was proud to be making a political statement inside a federal building. My parents, however, wanted to find a rock to crawl under. Oh, did I mention that the T-shirt also had the word “ILLEGAL” spelled out inside the blue upside-down triangle? That’s right: my parents sat next to their son wearing a T-shirt that said “ILLEGAL” as they waited to speak to the United States immigration authorities. It was the spring of 2001.
After waiting for nearly an hour and a half, an African American man of great physical stature called us into his office. As was always the case when we were with English-speaking people of authority, I did most of the talking. The federal worker looked at my T-shirt and chuckled. My parents felt more at ease knowing that a representative of our potential new country got my sense of humor. My dad slid our folders across the man’s desk. They contained all our records and documentation while in this country. The federal immigration employee looked through every page. He noticed that my folder was filled with elementary school Student of the Month awards, high school honor roll certificates, my first communion certificate, my community college speech national championship title, my regional acting award, one LA County recognition for my volunteer work, and my acceptance letter to UCLA. He stopped at the acceptance letter and carefully reviewed it. His eyes met mine, and the man said: “We’re going to have to speed up this process to make sure you get to UCLA.” He smiled, knowing too well that he was changing my life for the better. But that was when things got a little complicated.
We were almost “legal,” but first we had to take a series of health tests to make sure we didn’t have any illnesses. I had no idea that one of those tests would be an STD test. I was freakin’ out because I had been recently sexually active, and—worse—I had not used a condom. Very stupid of me! The two weeks we had to wait for our STD results were the two longest, most excruciating, painful weeks of my life. My unprotected sex was about to ruin my family’s chances of becoming permanent residents of the United States. My teenage rite of passage was driving me into a neurotic spiral. I hated myself and my teenage hormones. I wished I could deport my penis. I promised God that I would never have sex again, as long as she (my God is a chola God, by the way) allowed us to become permanent residents of this country. If this wasn’t bad enough, my parents also insisted on picking up our STD results together at the doctor’s office. Could this entire experience get any more awkward?!
We were handed our results by the nurse simultaneously and time… simply… slowed… down. Everything moved in slow motion. My vision got a little blurry. I finally got my eyes to focus on my test results, and sure enough, I was negative. What an incredible relief. I had never felt so positive for being so negative! Now clear to become a permanent resident, I quickly made an addendum to my agreement with God: I would never have unprotected sex again.
Because of my lack of chlamydia and gonorrhea, our green cards arrived in the mail several months after our STD tests. My parents and I were finally permanent residents of the United States of America. It was remarkable to think that over time I would no longer be afraid to: travel, be questioned by the police, fill out a job application, drive a car, go into a federal building, enter a hospital, get a credit card, or go to a public school. I wasn’t having sex anymore, but I made a bunch of appointments at the county’s free STD clinic simply because I could!
The University of California, Los Angeles, is one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever set foot on. The most important figures of the past century—from Albert Einstein to Martin Luther King Jr.—all spoke at UCLA. Two of the greatest American athletes of the past hundred years—Jackie Robinson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—attended UCLA. Angela Davis and Judy Baca both taught there; James Dean and Jim Morrison took classes there. But more important, my dad always dreamed of working there—at UCLA Medical. Since he couldn’t reach that dream for himself, I figured that maybe I could do it for him.
I was summoned to meet with a Latino group on campus before the start of the school year. I’m pretty sure I was up for a scholarship. I sat across from three Latino college students, one guy and two girls. They were curious about my personal essay, which I’d titled “The Wetback.” The essay seemed to raise some concerns for the committee. I told them that a few years back, I discovered that I didn’t have papers, and that I hated how this derogatory term was used on people like me. The conversation was going well until one of the Latinas asked, “What are your thoughts on affirmative action?” Oh, interesting. I had never reflected much on the topic before, outside of when my high school counselor told me I was in a great position to benefit from it. But then I attended Mt. SAC and heard an older white philosophy professor say that affirmative action was flawed because two wrongs don’t make a right. I didn’t really know what either of them meant, but not knowing what else to say, I simply reiterated what my male philosophy professor said because it sounded provocative.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I said, and grinned, proud of being so quick on my feet.
The problem with plagiarizing other people’s thoughts is that you don’t have their follow-up remarks ready to go. The committee looked at each other, concerned, and then continued:
“How so?” the Latina asked me curiously.
“Oh, I don’t know. They just, kinda, don’t.”
“But you obviously have an opinion on the matter,” chimed in the Latino student. “Please elaborate.”
I had nothing left to say. The committee let out a collective sigh. I could tell that they were cheering for me, but that I wasn’t helping my own cause. I was caught red-handed pretending to be smarter than I was. Looking back, I must have sounded stupid to a group of community-focused students trying to help incoming transfers from marginalized communities achieve at UCLA. But it wasn’t my fault. I had been taught by predominantly white professors my whole life, and not all could be as progressive as Liesel and Steve. My sensibilities were mostly that of white Americans. I loved Shania Twain and Kelsey Grammer. The problem was that nobody taught me in high school that affirmative action didn’t start with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Affirmative action has existed since the founding of this nation. It’s just that for the first hundred and eighty-five years of America, it benefited those who were white and male: only white males could own property; only white males could vote; only white males could travel freely. Once affirmative action started to benefit people outside that group, the practice needed to be stopped immediately for some unknown reason. (Come on, you know the damn reason!) If I was going to plagiarize anybody, I should have plagiarized Chris Rock when he said, “I don’t think I should get accepted into a school over a white person if I get a lower mark. But if there’s a tie, fuck ’em. Shit, you had a four-hundred-year head start, mothafucker.” But don’t quote me on that. Needless to say, I never heard from that student committee again.
UCLA professor Jose Luis Valenzuela was the first Latino educator I ever had in my entire higher education career. Can you imagine? I went throughout my entire scholastic journey in Southern California before running into somebody at the college level who shared my immigrant experience in this country.
Our lives collided in a very Latino way. I had been commuting to UCLA from West Covina for my classes. I would leave my house every day at 5:30 a.m. with my mom so she could drop me off at the train station before work. I would then take the Metrolink from Covina into Union Station in downtown LA, catch the subway (the Red Line) up to Wilshire and Western, and then jump on a Metro bus that headed to UCLA so I could make my 8:00 a.m. class with five minutes to spare. This commute was precise. Nothing could go wrong. And if my mom ever had an early morning shift, I would get to UCLA before the buildings even opened. On those days, I was fortunate enough that the Spanish-speaking janitorial staff would let me into the building and allow me to sleep on the couch before they officially opened the school.
One particular fall morning, I got to UCLA so early that I even beat the janitorial staff to work. I was so exhausted from my commute that I fell asleep on a bench outside the theater building. I woke up when I felt a presence standing over me. It was Jose Luis, looking down at me with his rugged white beard. He didn’t know who I was, yet he said: “I don’t want anybody to see you sleeping out here on the bench.” Translation: I don’t want anybody to see a Latino student sleeping out here on the bench. Without knowing me, Jose Luis handed me his spare key and said: “If you ever get to school this early again, please go to my office and sleep there.” And just as quickly, Jose Luis was gone. I was shocked. Jose Luis didn’t know who I was, but I knew who he was. Every student did. He had a no BS aura about him. All the directing students always worked their hardest to impress Jose Luis. He was an intimidating presence to most students. Not to me. He just looked like my uncle! With that simple act of kindness, Jose Luis handed me the key to his kingdom—both literally and figuratively.
I left the bench and walked straight into Jose Luis’s office. His tiny work space was a goddamn disaster. He was a mad artistic genius and his office looked like a mad artistic genius’s studio. Because of my dad, I was a neat freak. Remember, my dad was a pediatric surgeon and the emergency room needed to be perfectly clean at all times for the sake of the patient’s life. My room was always as clean as an ICU. There was no way I could sleep inside Jose Luis’s office. The mess gave me anxiety. I started to clean up the place, not for him, but for me. I wasn’t going to be caught dead in a dump like this. When Jose Luis returned later that day, he was so impressed by how well I had organized and coordinated his paperwork (i.e., mess) that he made me his teacher’s assistant while I was still an undergrad. I’m sure we broke some rules doing this, but Jose Luis and I were people who always existed in the margins. For us, rules were meant to be broken. Or in my case, cleaned up very nicely, organized alphabetically, and then broken.
In all my years of schooling, I may have had one or two US-born Latino teachers before Jose Luis, but they all shared my “general market” sensibilities. Jose Luis was an immigrant and proud of it. Jose Luis was part of the Chicano theater movement, which was ignited by Luis Valdez and the work he did with Cesar Chavez to support the farmworkers of Delano. Jose Luis was a well-respected theater director in Los Angeles and always carried a lot of gravitas and respect with him around campus. Jose Luis was so freakin’ Latino that he was the artistic director of the Latino Theater Company. He was the mentor I had been longing for my whole life.
One morning, I found myself walking through the south side of the UCLA campus. I rarely made it out that far south. UCLA was big, but it was very segregated. I was always on the north side of campus with all the free liberal arts folks. The south side was where all the students were enslaved to their majors: math, engineering, computer science, and other nerdy stuff that promised to make you millions. As I was walking, I suddenly heard a commotion nearby. A bunch of students were arguing around a table where two Campus Republicans had mounted a sign that announced “Affirmative Action Cookie Sale.” The multicultural students encircling the table were not happy, but the two white frat guys behind the table were very pleased with themselves. They were trying to teach the entire student body a lesson on the evils of affirmative action by selling cookies to white students for five dollars, but to minority students for fifty cents. People were upset. The students of color did not want their damn cookies. Well, I’m sure a few did because it was a great deal, but nobody ever caved.
I auditioned for all the UCLA school plays but didn’t get cast in anything. I auditioned for Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and a bunch of other dead white dudes—but nothing. I knew the theater department at UCLA was harder to get into than Harvard Law, but this was ridiculous. I considered changing my major to sociology or something even more vague. Then somebody decided to mount a student production of Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero, which is a prison drama, and I got the lead role. I was ecstatic. I was finally going to perform on a UCLA stage. But in the middle of rehearsal one evening with the predominantly Black and brown cast, I thought: Hold up, I can’t be in Victorian England but I can be in Sing Sing! I was furious. But Short Eyes was actually directed by a talented young Black woman, Noni, who, like me, was also a Jose Luis Valenzuela protégée. So the problem was more complicated than people only being able to see me as a criminal. The problem was that unless the role was ethno-specific, directors at UCLA would not think to cast a person of color. I know this because Jose Luis was part of a faculty committee trying to address this very issue: student directors not casting minority student actors in their productions. Their responses to the problem were naive, sincere, and quite remarkably heartbreaking: “It’s not that we don’t want to cast minorities—it’s just that when we read a script, we think of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio so we cast accordingly.” This was not Hollywood. This was an institution of higher learning, and already the faculty had their hands full trying to combat internalized white supremacy caused by the entertainment industry. It was exhausting being a student from a marginalized community at UCLA. I couldn’t wait to see what the real world had in store for me. Yay.
A few weeks later it was revealed that the Affirmative Action Cookie Sale was not something the Campus Republicans had come up with on their own. It was actually a right-wing radio host who had reached out to the student group and fully funded the stunt, which ended up garnering a lot of local media attention. This was done at the height of Rush Limbaugh: a right-wing personality who was successful at conflating racism and sexism with individual patriotism. As I came to learn, this was a common theme throughout American history. The Affirmative Action Cookie Sale taught me a great lesson in life. Every time a fringe political movement arises that demands justice but does not fight for all Americans, I always find myself wondering: Who is really paying for that cookie dough?