Opinion | What You Can Learn From a Dreamer in Arizona

Adversity has many faces, I know. It may be that you lost a job, or lost the home you lived in. It may be that you lost a parent, as my daughter did two years ago, when my husband died of pancreatic cancer. As sad as we were (still are), we clung (still cling) to the very real possibility that things will get better someday. As tough as the going is at times, it has never felt as permanent as the predicament of millions of young immigrants like Angel, who don’t have legal papers, and those clinging to the provisional shield that is DACA, whose fate the Supreme Court should decide any day now.

On the day Angel and I spoke, I wrote random phrases on a yellow notepad as he told me about the scholarship fund he started in his junior year to help undocumented students he feared would be left behind, as they so often are; the program he ran to remove school safety officers from the Metro Tech campus and, with that, the threat of deportation as punishment for misbehavior; and the 40 scholarships for which he applied, resulting in enough awards to cover his costs at Arizona State University, where he’ll be studying biomedical engineering in the fall.

After our meeting, I looked over the notepad. The random phrases I’d written amounted to a list of practical advice.

No. 1: Don’t dwell on the negativity.

No. 2: Focus your energies on something you care deeply about.

No. 3: Be strategic.

No. 4: Believe.

I wrote No. 5 as I watched him speak at the virtual graduation ceremony from my home on the opposite side of Phoenix, a side that is more white, though no less American than the side he lives in: “Embrace who you are.”

This is what he said: “Despite how hard it may be to believe, you are not your hardships, you are not your expectations, and you are certainly not your undocumented status. What you are is a treasure of potential: It has never been about the circumstances that you are born in, but the opportunities you make for yourself. Therefore, we have to be the ones to step up, not only to see that our families and communities are safe, but to make sure that gaps become bridged.”

It’s a message that feels especially meaningful these days.

Fernanda Santos (@ByFernandaS) is a writer and a professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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