Could you talk to our audience about your home, the circumstances of your upbringing. Guest yes, thank you so much for having me. I grew up in mexico and my family, theyre all entrepreneurs and they worked really, really word to be able to provide my siblings and i a better life and even when i was in mexico i was really surrounded by a really large support system because my family is really close not just emotionally experience. So i grew up in mexico from middleincome family. I use today take piano lessons and karat lessons in my small hometown and that also same with sacrificed and the biggest sacrifice that had my parents were making in order for me to have that kind of life was that we werent together. My parents lived in the u. S. And i lived in mexico and we would only see hech other every few months or i would come to the u. S. And visit them in the summers. Host tell us more about that, your participants deciding to come to the u. S. And live apart from their children, what what how did you experience that as a child . What was that were you aware that that was somewhat unusual, how did it feel . Yeah, i was definitely aware that it was unusual because i, one, missed my parents and two, i could see parents coming to children to school and my parents werent there all of the time and they like i said, they wanted us to have a better life so when i was three 3 years old they used to import sterling silver in the u. S. And sell it at trade shows all across the country and they would go back and forth as part of their business but as a little girl as a child not having your parents with you and only seeing them every few months, first of all, you feel like theyre strangers to you, when i would see my parents they would come bearing lots of presents and when i came to visit them in the u. S. It was Summer Vacation and so it was a very different experience than having parents who are with you every every single day. It was difficult being so aloin at that early age and ultimately thats when my parents decide today bring me to life with them. They had hit hard Financial Times and were unable to go mexico as much and be with me as much and because i was so young they realized that thats not the best way to raise a child and so thats when they decide today bring me to live with them permanently in the u. S. And thats where my life completely, completely changed. Well, thats a very important and very moving part of the book because it is also accompanied by the fact that you were the youngest child of the family and you were a family favorite. I love the place where you say you were a bit of a brat as a youngster because you had so much you were gregrarious and your mother has another child and then suddenly you have a younger brother and its a different dynamic . Guest yeah, my little brother and i have a great relationship. When i found out that my mom was pregnant with my little brother n mexico we have a saying when youre the favorite child you sit on the donkey and that comes from the bible of mary sitting as the donkey as they were walking through to desert of bethleham and in my mind as a 10yearold girl this baby was not only going to take my parents love from me, he or she, i didnt know it was going to be a boy, but they would get to live with my parents in america and i found out that hes a boy and things keep getting worse. Its a big deal to have a male in the mexican culture and a lot to take in and that with the fact with my sisters because they were older they were going to college and high school in a different city. Before i had my sister with me in taxco and my sisters were going to live in a different city. I felt not just abandoned by my parents but now by my sisters too. That was a lot to handle at an early age. Host in the middle of a turmoil, its very difficult to understand these things. Your parents decide that, in fact, you should come to the United States and you do you should which circumstances if one were writing a fairy tale, okay, and they lived happily ever after but we all know that reality is different and you describe a reality that is certainly different. Tell us about that reality of coming to the United States and then being here rather than in taxco with your larger family . Guest yeah, i didnt really didnt know that i was coming to live here. When i came to visit that summer i thought it was just like any other summer when i came to visit my parents and would go back to mexico once the school year started but that summer i never went back and it was it was a really difficult transition for me because i think a lot of people can relate to the fact that when youre a kid one of the most scary things to do is to go to a new school and have to make new friends and i had to do that and learn a new language and all of a sudden learn how to have parents who were with me all of the time, and i also had in my mind america was this sort of fairy tale in a way with a magical place that i experienced through my Summer Vacation of going to six flags and sea world and what i saw on television. There were a couple of show that is were dubbed in spanish that i watched in mexico, denise the menace and Beverly Hills 90210. I never realized that once i lived in san antonio there were people that looked like me that were american. But living here my experience was so different because also my parents financial situation had changed so much and drastically. And even things that i had access to before, such as lessons, we couldnt afford that anymore. It was very difficult to experience and to see my parents working so hard but at the same time it was, it was really eyeopening to me because before that i never realized just how hard and how much my parents were sacrificing in order for me to have the life that i had. Being here i could see firsthand and they were working all of the time, all of the time, they were working so hard. Host thats one of the things about being immigrants in the United States and they were in a situation where they had visas, you had a visa to come to the United States, which is a bit different than most other mexicans coming to the United States. So and they had had a successful business. What happened that made their financial circumstances change so . Guest yeah, it was interesting, this whenever i think we think of undocumented people we always think people crossing the border but the reality is that 40 of undocumenteddism grants in this country never cross the border illegally, their visas expire. My case the tourist visa that expired. What happened with my parents business is that they used to import sterling silver as i mentioned. They had a pretty good routine of getting the silver in laredo, texas and then going through customs and then bringing it to san antonio and in one of those trips the silver that was in the van was stolen and it was probably a hundred thousand dollars worth of sterling silver stolen on the u. S. Side of the border and they were never able to recover from that. Im always amazed at how much my parents accomplished with the resources that they had. My mom never graduated from high school, my dad finished high school by going tonight school and so they accomplished so much and did the best they could but there were some things that they probably didnt think about and so that the silver that was stolen wasnt insured and they were just unable to recover after that robbery and it wasnt for lack of trying, it was just a really difficult circumstances that they that they found themselves in. Host what did they do then in order to make a living . Guest so they they took out, they took out a mortgage and they tried to rebuild the silver business but it wasnt it wasnt the same and so my mom being the relentless entrepreneurial woman that she is saw an opportunity to start selling funnel cakes and start selling snow cones and all sorts of different food items in festivals in san antonio. We used to go festivals when we were little kids and she saw an opportunity to start that business and and thats what we started doing. We started selling funnel cakes in san antonio. Host and you were much part of that enterprise. In the meantime, youre in school, youre smart and youre a very studious discipline student, but school is by in large a really hard experience for you, six grade you mentioned being one of the most terrible years of your life and you become aware of being mexican. Talk about that, talk about that awareness and what it meant to be striving in school, how others treated you, tell us how that felt. Guest yeah, so i think going back to what my idea what america was and only seeing one group of people portrayed on television and feeling that i wasnt part of that and that experience came back when i was learning about the Civil Rights Movement and the history that we tell in the textbooks is a very, its from a perspective of a black and white narrative, i never learned about latinos during the civil war movement and my parents never talk today me about racism and race in america and i dont know if that was because they didnt experience it or they thought since i was growing up in america and i was learning english and i was, quote, assimilating, that i wouldnt have that experience and learning about the Civil Rights Movement impacted me deeply and i used to cry to my dad and tell him about the atrocities that i was learning about in school but i didnt see myself in that and so i didnt think that applied to me but, of course, in sixth grade as you mentioned, there was a kid who when i was placed in honorees math class asked a question and he said why is she in the honorees math class, shes a mexican and she cant even speak english and took everything i had not to cry and in my broken english i said, i dont need to learn how to speak english to do math. Math is a language a universal language and thats why i was always so drawn to it because two plus two is four in any language but that experience really each at that early age i understood the issues that are that are in our culture and i realized that i may not be i may not have been talked about in the textbooks but that it was something that i was going to experience in my life. Host yes, so thats an awareness that youre not growing into and having to deal with so youre contending with a lot of emotional pressures as well as just the social pressures of trying to make friends and and do school work and help your families and parents with their work but youre not at this point very aware of immigration status or what is to come in terms of being illegally in the country. Talk take a forward to how that came about, how did you learn that, what what were the circumstances and how did you understand that at the time . Guest so i youre right that i was not aware of immigration issues because i had really for a long time been able to go back and forth between mexico and the u. S. So that was what was normal to me and i thought that that was what would be available to me always and when my visa expired at the age of 14, my mother was reluctant to talk to me about that. She was reluctant to tell me about my visa having expired and once my visa was expired us being unable to renew it because of our financial circumstances had changed and also because it was a tourist visa and i was studying in the u. S. And granted im a 14yearold girl and i was never asked to come here and here i am now having to understand what it means that my visa is expired. My mother tells me that its because i was pushing her and pushing her about planning my quincaneara, my 15th byrd and grows up in taxco, i dreamed of this monumental thing in my life since i was like 3 years old and im pushing my mom and asking when we are going to go to mexico to have the quincaneara. I knew the financial situation has changed. I just really want to have this experience in my life and finally one day she just blurred it out that my visa had expired and on that day that she told me this, i didnt believe comprehend enormous relevation she had made to me. I couldnt have understood the way in which that one conversation was going shape and impact the rest of my life. I couldnt have known. Host no, you couldnt have known and it plays itself out then over the subsequent years and fascinating way in which you write about it in the book and its tied up with the quincaneara and you said how important its in your culture but its so hugely important in your culture that that disappointment is one cant overstate what a disappointment that would have been, but now you have this knowledge that youre not supposed to be in this country and so youre illegally in the country and thats the beginning of the big secret, the big secret being such a critical part then of your experience and of your story, try help people understand just as a High School Student now why that became, why that is such a complication . Guest theres a lot that goes into you realizing that youre undocumented and how much that changes your how much that changes your life. All of a sudden every decision that you make you have to think about your immigration status and that become it is center of every decision that yaw make and you also start to feel very ashamed, i think, thats the right word. I felt ashamed of being undocumented. I felt like that somehow made me less than and a lot of that had to do with the way of issue immigration is talked about in the media and the way that the news covered the issue. I never heard stories of undocumented people who were graduating in the top 5 of their class or entrepreneurs and employed u. S. Citizens. Those arent the stories that i was hearing. It was about illegal aliens being criminals and when i looked at my parents and i looked at myself, that narrative didnt fit me, but thats how you start to think about yourself. It does something to your psyche when somebody is calling you illegal. How can you as a person be illegal . But you start to internalize all of those things and just there were so many things that to most people are just everyday things that they dont have to think about twice. A lot of my class classmates were going to take drivers ed and you start having to tell this little lie so that nobody finds out your truth, your secret and so even things like that like not being able to get a drivers license or when all of my classmates were starting to think about college, for me thinking about college as much as it was instilled from me in an early age that education is my salvation and education is going to open doors of opportunity and my parents did Everything Possible to make sure that i had the best education that i could have, but even though i was qualified to go to any number of colleges when the time came to apply, i was rejected from all of them because of my lack of a 9digit Social Security number. Host yes, the way you describe the issue of applying and the blank that you had to leave for Social Security does capture in such a specific way the things that we assume that you and people like you could not assume, just a simple thing like being able to fill out a Social Security, but you did excel in high school and you worked extraordinarily hard and it was against some pretty difficult personal circumstances in your home and with your parents at that point. So how did you get into college . Guest well, one of the biggest things that and i keep going back to my parents because i cant thank them enough for everything and for how they how they raised me, but one of the things that my mom told me was that there are a million things that you cannot control and why focus on those things. You have to focus on the things that you can control and do your best and the rest will fall into place and so thats what i did in college. I thought, if i dont if i dont study hard and if im not disciplined about my school work, then then for sure im not going to be able to get into college or be able to go to a great school and so i graduated in the top 5 of my class and i didnt know where i was going to go to college as i walked across the stage in my cap and gown in any graduation and that was also difficult because every student that graduates and walks across the stage, theyll say over over the loud mic where theyre going to school. So and so is graduating and theyre attending such and such university in the fall and when i walked across the stage it was just julissa arce because i had no plans for college and explaining that to my classmates or teachers, why i wasnt going to college when i had the grades i had, when i had the resume that i had was i almost didnt want to there were days that i didnt wanting to to school because i didnt want to have to answer the questions again and again and again. I was really fortunate because the state of texas in 2001 became the first state in all of the u. S. To allow undocumented students to go to college, paid state tuition and 2001 was the year that i graduated from high school and that summer after graduation i learned of this new law and i got in touch with the state senator that was the sponsor for the bill. I told him i told him and his staff about my circumstances and whether or not i would be able to go to school that fall because i had gotten rejected. But luckily, they were able to send a letter to the university of texas at austin simply asking to reconsider my application given this new law and because my grades and test scores and Everything Else qualified me to be accepted, i received a letter two weeks before the semester started that i was accepted to the university of texas at austin and it was one of the one of the happiest days just knowing that finally there was some reward for the hard work that i had put in and for the hard work that my parents had put in long before i was even born. Host well, it is an incredible story and the timing and a couple of angels that were sitting on your shoulders, one being the woman in the Senators Office that took a liking to her and made it a personal project to make sure that this law that had just passed could, in fact, apply right that next school year and the other seems to me was it was your physics teacher. Just tell a little bit about because hes the one that got you to make that call and so just tell us a little bit about mr. G. It is amazing the people that are around that make all the difference. Guest yeah. I still keep in touch with him. Hes been a great mentor throughout my life and in high school he was this really corky teacher that would that would read us stories even though it was physics, every class he would begin by telling us a motivation story and we would go to physics class. He encouraginged me to apply, i never really told him out loud im undocumented, i dont have papers, i would just say, i dont think i can apply to