Conversation with diane. On with please welcome diane and liz to the pratt library. [applause] hello. Good evening. Can you hear us . Hello. This does work. L hear u well, i just wanted to start the conversation off by having diane tell you you have probably know of her as an actress but maybe you dont know her back story. So, i wanted to ask her to give us the briefest of instructions about her story, just to sort of structure and who she is. Thank you. Thank you, liz, thank you, judy, and thank you pratt library, and thank you to all of you foring here today. Feel so honored that you guys came out to hear me speak. Ill try my best. My name is diane guerrero. My parents are colombian immigrants. Was born in new jersey but i was raised in boston. Boston. Anybody . No. Yay my parents came here with a visa in hopes i mean, this story changes sometimes between me and my dad. Sometimes they say we were just going to see how check out the states or my mother had hopes of staying and making a family here, and making her dreams come true, of course. And eventually their visa expired, and they wanted to try to figure out a way to become citizens. So that was their journey and their quest. So day were undocumented for as long as i can remember. And my childhood was shaped by that, by that fact. My parents were very honest with me. Ha as a young girl i knew what their status was and i knew very clearly what my status was. I was an american citizen and they werent. So, they i had something that they wanted very das platly and made it clear they needed that so we could stay together. So, i remember every prayer, every wish was that my parents got these papers they needed so that we could stay together. We managed to live our lives but it was certainly scary, and i know anybody who has been through this experience knows how intensities, and how interesting your life can become when youre living in the shadows. So, i grew up with this dream but i also had another dream. I had the dream of maybe one day becoming an entertainer, performer, an artist, and so when my parents my parents were deported because of their lack of documents. I decided to stay, and pursue my dream, which was to stay here and finish my education and try to live out my own dream in the country we love. Its corny, but i always put that in there. Yesterday i was like, making this video for this event, and i put that in there. I said in the country we love and then i winked because i felt embarrassed. And my friend was like, own it. It is a country you love so own it. So now im not winking. Im saying so it i can say in the country we love and pursue my dreams and form my own life. And then i so here we are. I think 14, 15 years passed, and i wasnt dealing with the huge cloud over my life, which was this whole issue of immigration, and i started seeing the topic come up a lot in the news, and people daytoday conversations. So the word immigration wouldd come up and my ears would like, start, ringing, and i would want to talk about it but i couldnt because i felt all sorts of stuff. I had a lot of issues with it because my parents were deported and i didnt want to really deal with that. But then i saw there was a need to use my voice in this way, and so i it started little by little. I wrote an oped just kind of feeling the waters out. I didnt think anybody would read the oped, of course. I thought im going to do this but no one is going to read it. So its all good. Ive lived my life by trying things out and telling myself that no one is ever going to see it. Nothing is ever going to come of it but im just going to try it. Right . And i tried, and people did read it, anded did get some sort of attention, and then i realized it was such an important issue that i had to talk about it, and i had to talk about it because i had been through this experience, and i knew that millions of people were going through the same thing, and our country needed voices like minimum, people who had been through it first hand and could share a human story, and kind of be part of the conversation. Then la la la, lots of stuff happened, and then i wrote this book. And now im here. So, was that too long . No. O. It was great. I think one of the really interesting things about the book is that ive worked a lot on stories about immigration in the last year, so one of the really interesting things is that we hear so much about the s journeys to america, from people all over the world, but we dont always hear what happens once theyre here. We dont always hear the voice of the child whose parents are deported. We dont hear how is it, if youre an iraqi girl and you arrive in baltimore, what happens after you get here . And so i think those voices are really important to be heard more. I wanted to ask diane to read a crucial moment in the book, her book, when i ill just set this up a little. She objects her parents were taken out of the house they were detained for a while in prison. So, she could go and visit them. So, she went to sort of say goodbye to her mom, and ill let you start from there. This is in the prison. Ay yes. Okay. Excuse me if i flub or anything. I have some learning disabilities. Its not funny but its true. Here we go. Know, not the best professional. Want to be an actor. Just always challenging myself. Here goes. Are you ready . Amelia asked. I stood and perspective posted so i could avoid mommys fate. As much as alonged to see her i didnt want to remember her like this. Not with her wrists chained up, not in an orange jump suit. The person behind bat barrier wasnt my mother. She was a stranger to me. With hardly a sound the group shuffled back down the corer to. Amelia held my hand while we walked. This isnt the end for you, diane, she said, as she tried t reassure me, put it felt like the end. At devastated as i was for my mom i was even more scared for myself. She and my dad were going home to family. I was stepping into a future i prayed would never come. Outside amelia peered out over the lot, trying to recall where she parked her camry. C a few hundred feet away from us near the prison side entrance, a white police van pulled up. Amelia and i exchanged a look. Seconds later, two guards herded some inmates out into the my mother was among them. Just as my mother was stepping into the paddy wagon, she turned around and caught a glimpse of me. She froze. I could tell she wanted to Say Something. To run to me. But before she could make a move, a guard rushed her into the van. Lets go he snapped. The engine rumbled on. From her seat in the rear, mommy twisted herself around so she could see me through the bars on the windows. She was trying to tell me something but i couldnt figure out what it was. Then all at once i understood. I love you. She was mouthing. I love you. I love you. D i love you. I love you. She repeated the three words until the van turned from the lot and disappeared. I smiled. That was the only thing that i could be sure of, that my mother loved me. E sure of fuck anyone who tried to come between us. Thats my teenage years. Anyon the summer i lost my parents it was the strangest kind of heartache. No friend gathered to grieve over the departed. No flowers were sent. No Memorial Service was planned. And yet, the two people i cherished the most were gone. Not from the world itself but gone from me. Wed find a way to move forward to carry on, just not with the m promise of one anothers presence. Thank you. [applause] sorry if there were any children in the audience for the fword. One of the things i think is not well understood outside of the latino immigrant community is the extent of the divisions that the immigration experience has on families. Ti in my work as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun i spend six or eight months at Patterson High School in east baltimore and wrote a series about profiling three students, one of them was a latino boy, but again and again during the reporting experience, i heard particularly the boys, the undocumented boys who had made it across the border, he told stories about their mothers or fathers disappearing from them. Usually their parents didnt tell them they were going to leave honduras or el salvador. They left sometimes in the middle of the light or middle of the night or while they were at school and couldnt bear to say goodbye to their children so they just left. And in one case, one of the boys said he came home from school and realized his mother was gone, and everyone was crying, and he couldnt figure it out. In another case a boy told me that he knew his he was told his mother was going to just take a breath, to another town, but he knew michigan was terribly wrong and he ran with all his might to see her before she got on the bus, and he did just barely glimpse her leaving, and she was crying, and he was crying, and he didnt see her for eight years. That happens so often, i think, and when the kids are reunited you would think that, my gosh, this is the most wonderful thing in the world to be reunited with my mom i havent seen, but in fact its terribly difficultin because you dont really know them. Theyre really strangers to you. And many this is such a problem in the latino immigrant community that they have now the teachers have started developing curriculum that helps parents and their children who theyve been apart from for a long time, reunite, because until you reunite you really cant move on in many ways in your new country. So i think dianes story is a little bit different but its a twist on that same theme of having years and years apart and not being able to communicate in a real way, and having to sort of separate, and i think diane i would ask you to tell a little bit about that separation for you and what it did for you and your insides, and then how you came back around. All right. Well, yeah, its very difficult to when i went through that, that separation from your folks, because, like i said, my family unit for you, its like a death. But no one treats it as that because theyre alive. Obviously your parents are alive put your family unit has died. You move on or go back. Fa chose to move on and stay here and continue my life in the states. Mo in the way that i figured out, all i knew was that i needed my education and this is what my parents taught me, you need your education and if you work really hard, youll make something out of yourself and that is what i believed as a kid, growing up in the states. This was where i could do that. O i knew that i could do this here. I and i could be resourceful, and if i was savvy enough and determined enough that something could happen, could make something happen. But what i guess i didnt realize at that age was what the relationship was going to be with my folks. Ha for some reason i thought, okay, well figure that out, too. But i didnt realize was the huge strain that it had on us, and what it had on our emotional life and our psychological the psychological impact it would have on me. So, i wanted to talk about that in the book, that just the strained relationships and that the effects it has on a family to be separated like that. No one talks about the psychological and emotional damage because no one sees this as really when you hear it on the news and hear a politician talk about it you never hear it as an immigrant issue. Its all political. But its important to realize these are real people and real families and there are real effects, and i was lucky enough to sort of come back from that, but i was like is was in a very deep hole for a very long time. I didnt speak to my parents or didnt see them for maybe eight years because the pain was it was too much. Didnt know how to handle it. I would go back to colombia and visit them and i didnt know what to do because i was growing and they were growing, and i figured, those are my parents, theyll stay the same. But they grow, too. They change. Will stay th and your mother didnt give up. She kept calling and calling and calling, and you would, like a teenager would, just said, imm not going to deal with you. Yeah. There was a point where i didnt know how to handle it so i haden to separate myself, and i feel like sometimes in a way that sort of gave me legs to continue. I did the best i could. I didnt know how to i always look at you. Yeah, yeah, get it. I didnt really know how to be an adult and handle things correctly. So i just did the best i could, and sometimes shutting down was the only way i could move forward. And i think the way that dish mean, it took me 14, 15 just until a few years ago, my family relationship still, have to work at it every day. My mother was pissed at me yesterday for something. For me not being responsive enough or me not showing her the kind of emotion she wanted from me. So its work every day, and sometimes we i mean i think thats the only thing yeah, being apart but its the relationship that was so strained and that i wish i could get back. But you have to do the best you can. We were talking about technology and how that has been a part of has played a huge part in us kind of reconnecting, and obviously my work with Immigration Reform has helped mw mind and my heart sort of heal, so that i could accept my life and accept our relationship the way it is and just love it for c what it is, and continue thatt way and just you got just adjust to whatever life has given you and try to make the best out of that. Ju and thats what i tried to do with this work and i sort of have done this. So obviously so i could help others and share with others but alsold so i could help me and my family because we needed something. I needed like, in my fashion, i always i go big or go home so i had to do this so that i could try to salvage the relationship with my parents. I needed to open my heart toon this work so that could i also, you needed to repair the relationships until you could go on with your life in a productive way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a big deal when youh went to see your mom and repair that relationship after so long. Uhhuh. Like i said its repairing every day. She was really mat at me yesterday. Mad at me yesterday. I wanted you to talk about becoming an a an actress and if you thought the grit and perseverance you needed to get through the years without your parents had then helped you become an actress . That you were willing to sort of stick it out through a lot of auditions that didnt work out or long times between work. Yeah. This kind of work is very up and down. Et mean, i still, like, every day i get a call, trying to figure out my life and what my next move is, because its gig by gig. Its not a sure thing. Gi this business is not a showerng. Thing not a sure thing. Knew that. The reason i didnt want to take the chance in the beginning, what i was scared of was because i didnt have that foundation or that base that i know that you need to pursue anything. You need that support from yours family members but, yeah, i think youre right. I feel like at the time that tied pursue what i wanted to do, i had to say i just had to say, as if. Ive already been through so much. What people are going to say no to me . Whatever. Say no to me. Wh i already lost my parents and lost the one thing that meant the world to me. So i felt like it totally just present me for the amount of tht rejections i got, and you just i grew up. I grew up, but i think that everything that i went through in high school and after that, like, everything like, going to college was huge miracle for me. I didnt even know how it happened and i still dont know. But doing that and then, like, doing the thing is got to do, and having the support in my community i got, i dont know how it happened but i know that i was in need, and i needed to be resourceful, i needed to be respectful. I needed to when i say respectful, meaning keep my place, you know, be grateful to others who are helping me and that all served me. Its all served me. And i dont think you need to good through Something Like this to carry that with you, being resourceful, being respectful, being whats the other r . I need another r. Ill remember. Boom, girl, you got it, resilience. Thats a good one. Im like, whats the other one n do all the time . Yes, resilient. Knew i had to do those. So it really has served me. So, during so, from the time that your parents left to fairly recently, actually, the fact that your parents were had undocumented and had been deported, you kept a complete secret, even from people you were pretty close to in your lives. And so i wondered what the transition was like, sort of suddenly baring all of this. Well can i think that well, for a long time i feel like my immediate friends knew like the kids i grew up with knew some of them knew what happened to me, and i dont know. Sometimes it felt like it held me back. First of all im a very happy person, a very outgoing person, so i felt like if i ever told the story people would look at me differently. Was ashamed also. In this culture, your taught or from the images you see on tv or the sort of rhetoric you hear from people is just like if youre an immigrant, youre a bad person. If youre deported, then you are failure. So i was ashamed and didnt wan to share that and didnt want people to look at me differently. And then once things started escalating, like the topic started coming up more and more dish feel like its come up now, obviously more than ever,re which is why i was compelled to talk about it. But it was like an explosionon when i would hear like i said, i would hear somebody talk about and it i would want to Say Something or Say Something really bold and people would be like, where did that come from . Im like, what . No, nothing, i didnt know you are passionate about that. Nation of immigrants. No biggy. And so when i basically shared that with people and the way i did, i felt that the response was very it was cool. It was really open and people were accepting, and i learned that day that if you just theres no shame in your story. Theres no shame where you come from or who you are. And you need to use that. So, if you find yourself in a place where youre unhappy and you want to youre unhappy with the Current System or something is not right and youre, im not into the raids happening now there should be a path for citizenship. Dont really understand the immigration system. It seems a little foggy. I feel like the majority of this people in the country dont understand it. And then you decide to be a part of a solution or trying to find a solution, and then so i felt it was just worth it to share my story at that point. There are a lot of things going on in immigration right now, and one of the things i we discussed earlier was i felt that social media has really changed immigration in this country. If you think back 100 years agor people came to the United States and they got off the boat and that was it. They didnt talk to their family accept through letters, and those letters took a long time getting here and back. Today, the new immigrants i speak with, like the refugees who left iraq or theyve left any country, really, are still so connected through facebook and twitter and texting and its really free to be in touch with your friends. Its rea so, they never in a way its a wonderful confident wonderful c