Illustrating My Immigrant Experience | Alberto Ledesma | TEDxOhloneCollegeNewark

So I'm Alberto Ledesma and I am an administrator, an illustrator, and a writer. Actually, if you had asked me when I was a little kid if I would ever become a college student or a professor, I would have said hell no. I grew up in East Oakland, not very far from here. I'm an immigrant kid. In 1974, my dad arranged to bring our entire family up, my sisters and I, from Jalisco. At first we thought that we would be visiting for the summer. The most time we spent in the U.S. to this day, more than 40 years later, I have not been back to my hometown. The 12 years that I spent living in East Oakland undocumented, I'm trying to, there we go, conditioned me in a profound way and deeply affected how I behaved as a student, an academic, and now as a Berkeley staff member. Being undocumented during my 40 years, I submit that I always lived with fear, that I thought that any misstep I took could endanger our entire family. Though my dad worked hard, though he and my mother encouraged us to do well, and always figured out honest ways to provide food and shelter, even when he was between jobs, being undocumented meant that I always had to act, that I had to be extremely careful about the way I operated. Thankfully, in 1986, my family and I were able to legalize our status through the program signed by Reagan, and while we were not illegal, while we now had permission to work and go to school, the carefulness that resulted from, I have often wondered why even to this day, we haven't heard more stories about what it meant to live as undocumented immigrants in the 1980s. After all, as with my family, more than three million people from throughout the world, a large number of these, almost 40 percent, went on to become citizens. Why is it that we have not heard more stories about their experiences? Of course, what I have come to learn after doing many years of reading is that though Amnesty made it easy for a generation of undocumented immigrants to come out, it did not remove the cultural taboo that still exists in our communities. After Amnesty, I thrived without the specter of possible deportation. I felt that there would be no limits to what I could do. Recently, I have learned that that desire to show that we are more than our lives, so many undocumented students to excel academically, to become, as Chan puts it, hyper-documented. It is from this process that the dreamer archetype has emerged, and while I do have serious questions and concerns about the dreamer archetype, particularly how it criminalizes. After Amnesty, and because of my hyper-documented anxiety, I pursued a doctoral degree in which I studied the representations of undocumented immigrants in Mexican-American narratives. What I discovered that even there, in Mexican-American fiction, there was a hierarchy of immigrant status where you should get out and not as a parent. Publicly discussing always mystified me because I strongly believe that being undocumented today, essays in short stories, in poetry, I wanted to create that. Several of my colleagues expressed some curiosity about what I was doing, but the field of undocumented immigrant studies was still in its nascent stage, not as developed as it is today. The truth is that I became impatient about initiating this dialogue. It didn't seem to work. I had waited for those three normalizations along with me. It would surely be there was only silence. I had waited for these stories because I needed them. I needed that sense of community that comes when you know that the same kind of trauma you have. For me, dealing with being undocumented was difficult. I felt guilty, sometimes angry at my parents, upset, but I kept it all in. It was a solitary experience, an ordeal that I couldn't breathe. So what happens to those undocumented stories? What happens to all the tragic, heroic, sometimes funny, or challenging overcome? Didn't amnesty mean that we were not free to talk about what we had experienced? This exploration became my project. For a while, I gave it my all. I top-classed the subject, went to professional conferences on that theme, and continued to publish. But then, when my baby daughter Sophia was born, that dialogue had not come out. I chose to take a break from my research. One of the best things about the staff job that I found was that I got to teach. It does happen about six years ago, while I was given midterms in my Summer Bridge Chicano Studies course, that my infatuation with provoking that dialogue, it emerged again. At that time, in the summer of 2012, we only had what important things were happening across the country. The DREAM Act was being again debated by Congress, and an unprecedented activism by undocumented immigrant students was emerging to support it. However, as much as I wanted to talk, I didn't want to give any more readings. They had already been complaining about how could I assign even one more article when the final was so close. So, as my students took their last midterms, a couple of weeks before the end of the semester, I grabbed a scratch piece of paper, and I doodled a quick cartoon of the things I wanted them to focus on, a day in the life of a DREAM Act student. It then hit me, why didn't I just use, all I needed was something that subject, and I could talk about it. Class meeting, I shared the finished cartoon, and I asked them, how similar do you think the strategy being used by undocumented students is? Short enough, my students immediately became interested in the subject, and many of them even decided to do research. I was so excited by what I had discovered in class, that I shared my cartoon again, using the Facebook account that I had just created a few months before. That response that I had been looking for, for so much in my professional career, that I so desperately wanted, all of a sudden became a reality. In just a few days, I went from having a couple of dozen or so friends, to hundreds, people who wanted to know about what, so I began drawing more and more, more images, crafting visual vignettes about illustrating my memory. Of course, I think that the main reason that hit the nerve, that my essays couldn't have everything to do with the form. As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words. Here, I was creating visual essays, communicating the same ideas I have been researching for more than a decade, but using cartoons. I realized also that my students were more accustomed to consuming visual text. Snapchat, Facebook, emojis, all of these have helped develop in them an increased literacy for digesting ideas and images. It did not take long for me to understand that my cartoon memoir also was effective, being a flexible narrative form. It did not have to assume, I did not have to assume, a stuffy, authorial voice to maintain my credibility, educated, omniscient narrator, as I could be a vulnerable person witness. The curious thing is that I have learned that lesson so strong that was, if it came from an overly academic point of view, I haven't even, I haven't even considered cartoons as a serious form of inquiry. All those years of academic training have, that I have received in graduate school, had led for sharing my documented experience was through dense textual analysis, and I should have known better. Here's why. In high school, I had a teacher, Ms. Wolfe. She thought that I had some academic potential, and so she nominated me for a scholarship. It was a competition. If I had known about it right there and then, because it was a scholarship to go to Washington D.C. and interact with all branches of government. When I told my dad about Ms. Wolfe's nomination, he became incensed. No way will you go, he said. You will get us all deported. You better find a way to tell him you can't do it. Several days after Ms. Wolfe had first told me the news, I received a letter inviting me to a preliminary interview with other candidates. My dad repeated his warning, you better not do it. It was at this time that I decided that the best way to avoid the danger of going to Washington, the best way that I could obey my father and keep the family safe, was by failing the interview, but doing it in such a way that Ms. Wolfe can still hear good things about me. My strategy was simple. Whenever I was asked questions, I would take the cantinflas approach, that technique pioneered by the brilliant Mexican comic of seemingly answering questions with sophisticated gibberish without really answering anything. I did not realize that what the interview committee was looking for, someone who was diplomatic, someone who was polite and would not ruffle things, I ended up winning something I wanted to do or losing something I wanted to win. I'm still confused. So I had to go to Washington D.C. and I almost died every moment I was there, a spiritual death. Every moment was distressing. The program was prestigious and so we were given access to the White House, the Capitol Building, the Smithsonian, the Supreme Court, but one particular place where we were supposed to go that cost me the most concern and terror was the FBI building. In my mind, I thought if I were going to be caught, it would surely be there, in the place with the best detectives on earth. I still remember that day. Here I was, an undocumented kid at the FBI, about to take my final tour of the program, sweating so profusely that I was shining. That's when I noticed people in the crowd, they were looking at me, pointing, grinning as I moved. I tried to walk away, hiding behind groups in the crowd, but people everywhere kept looking, grinning. Students, guards, men and women with briefcases, all staring and smirking. I thought in my father's words that his worst fears had come true and that I had finally been caught. They all knew and now they enjoyed watching me suffer. And just as I was about to go through the metal detector, as I was about to enter into the vastness of the FBI building, the kid who was my roommate walked up to me. I almost wanted to beat him to the punch, to tell him, yes, I was undocumented. He leaned close to my ear and told me that his zipper had been unzipped for most of the day. I looked down and sure enough, the cheap zipper of the black pinstripe suit that my dad bought me to go to Washington so that I could blend in was open, revealing the white through the looms like neon. I tried to pull the zipper up so fast that I broke it, but I did not care. The boy had said nothing about my immigration status. I felt relieved. I realized in that moment that the fear I had about being undocumented and being caught, that that fear resided mostly in my head. What other things had I not permitted myself to do? What opportunity I perceived to share, one that others might appreciate someday. As you can see, cartooning has allowed me to communicate these existential fears much more effectively than my writing ever could. This is the reason why I created my illustrated memoir, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer. And yet, there is only so much my little book can do. That xenophobic program that is now aiming to persecute undocumented immigrants is all too real. This program, however, is not just aimed at undocumented immigrants. It is just what the most obvious social infrastructure, the health of the labor organizing and social activism, increased access to education, health care, and legal protections for all working class and poor people. My belief is that working class and poor people today, of all ethnic backgrounds, need each other more than ever. And that we cannot let false debates based on false moralisms distract us from our common humanity. To view undocumented immigrant experience in the U.S. as a totally unredeemable experience that needs to be excised without mercy is to buy into a falseness from discerning what is lawful versus what is just. This is the reason why I have chosen to confront my fears about what it meant for me to Because I cannot ask that people show empathy unless I first show empathy for that community myself. And that is why, in spite of all my fears, I will continue to illustrate my undocumented American life. Thank you so much.