Jose Antonio Vargas, Revisited: Making Change One Story at a Time

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I am Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. You are listening to the FOST podcast. Four years ago, I sat down for a conversation with Jose Antonio Vargas, founder of the nonprofit organization Define American. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, and Tony-nominated Broadway producer, Jose deeply understands the power of storytelling to affect hearts and minds. That’s why, in a 2011 essay in the New York Times magazine, he publicly revealed his own status as an undocumented immigrant. His story and the conversation it started have contributed in no small part to advancing immigrant rights and to the Obama administration’s creation of the DACA program, which allows undocumented immigrants who, like Jose, were brought to the US as children to remain legally in the country on a two year renewal basis. Through research partnerships and engagement with storytellers, Define American is dedicated to humanizing the narrative around immigration in the U.S. Whether by providing resources to creatives to help them tell authentic immigrant stories or conducting studies on representation in the media, Define American advocates tirelessly for Americans who just don’t have the right papers.

With President Joe Biden, having recently taken executive action to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens, and as immigration is at the center of another divisive presidential election season, we thought it would be an excellent time to revisit this conversation and reaffirm our support for the important storytelling work Jose is doing through Define American.

Jose, it’s such an honor to have you on the Future of Storytelling podcast. Thank you for joining me.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Charlie Melcher:

First of all, it’s nice to be back in touch with you. It was really exciting to have you at the Future of StoryTelling back in 2017.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Wait, wait. Was that 2017? It feels like I’ve gone to a lot of conferences in the past, what, nine years? Almost nine years of doing the work that I do. That was one of those conferences where I feel like, okay, this is where I should be. It was just very, because I was surrounded by storytellers who work in different mediums, it felt like the kind of place that people who do the work that I do should be doing a lot more of, which is interacting with people in the storytelling marketing realm. So it was great.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you. So let’s start with your story now. I’ve been social distancing up here in Connecticut, and this is where I first got my driver’s license, my learner’s permit when I was 16. And wow, what a breath of freedom it was for a teenage boy to get his driver’s license and his permit. What was your experience like when you went to try to get yours at 16?

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Well, first of all, coming here from the Philippines when I was 12, I thought that there was nothing more American than driving a car. So I was excited about getting a driver’s license and I went to the DMV without telling my grandparents. I lived with my grandparents. My mom sent me here when I was 12 from the Philippines to live with her parents and my grandparents are both naturalized American citizens. My grandfather was a security guard, grandmother was a food server. And then one afternoon after school, without telling them, because I figured I don’t need their permission, I went to the DMV to get a driver’s permit. I brought my Mountain View High School ID and a green card that I got from the manila folder that my grandfather kept at his filing cabinet in his bedroom. When the woman called my name out, I went to the booth, I gave her my green card, I gave her my school ID.

She looked at my school ID, didn’t really give that any attention, but looked at the green card, and I remember she looked kind of confused. She flipped it around twice, and then she lowered herself in the booth. She had curly hair and glasses–white woman–and she said, this is fake. And in many ways, that woman was the very first person to kind of save me. She said, “this is fake, don’t come back here again.” And I didn’t really know what that second part meant until I got home and confronted my grandfather and said, “I went to the DMV, this woman said this was fake. What does this mean?” And my grandfather, who–his favorite karaoke song was Frank Sinatra’s My Way. So that should tell you a lot about his personality–in his Tagalog-accented English was like, “what are you doing showing that to people?” The green card. Then my grandfather said, “you’re not supposed to be here.” So I think for me, that was the beginning of, “you are a problem that nobody can solve.”

Charlie Melcher:

So then you hid this secret throughout high school, you graduated, but you were not sure whether you were going to go to college. How did you make that decision?

Jose Antonio Vargas:

I graduated high school, 2000. That was, what? A year before the Dream Act was introduced in Congress. Even back then, there was really no language around this. The only person that I told was my high school principal, Pat Hyland, because she was the one asking me why I wasn’t applying to colleges. I was so involved in school, I did everything there was to do at school. Pat was very like, what’s wrong with you? Why are you not applying? So I told her, and what was interesting about Pat, she was also the first adult that I told outside of my household that I was gay. I came out as gay about a year after I found that I was here illegally. So I told Pat Hyland about it. So that’s how she and I got close. But then two years later in high school, she was like, well, okay, then why are you not applying to colleges? So then I told her I was here illegally. She and the high school superintendent, Rich Fisher, found a venture capitalist to send me to college who didn’t care about my immigration status. So that’s how I got to college.

Charlie Melcher:

I’ve heard you describe it as this second family that stepped in and supported you.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

From the woman at the DMV who said, don’t come back here again, to my high school principal, to my high school superintendent, to the college counselor, to all of these mentors who didn’t really know what they were doing. And if the teachers and the administrators of Mountain View High School didn’t step up, I would not have known what to do. I mean, I didn’t have choices. They were the ones that created choices.

Charlie Melcher:

So you went to college?

Jose Antonio Vargas:

I went to college,

Charlie Melcher:

You did well there. And then when you came out, you decided to become a journalist. Tell me about that decision.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

I thought if I could just write my way into America by putting my name on news articles–I thought that was existing. When you’re a journalist, you get a byline, so your name gets to be on a piece of paper writing a story. It was the only reason why I started writing for newspapers. So I did that at the local newspaper, and then at the Philadelphia Daily News, the San Francisco Chronicle, then I got to the Washington Post, and then I ended up writing for the New Yorker, for Rolling Stone. And then when I hit 30, which is when the driver’s license I got was expiring, I ended up going to the state of Oregon. There were only two states in the country that allowed undocumented people to go to their states and get licenses, and one of them was Oregon. My support network helped me get this license, and then it was valid for eight years from 2003 till 2011, and it was the only piece of ID that I had. People forget, you can’t enter government buildings anywhere without ID. So that driver’s license, I remember I dropped it once at a club [laugher] in New York– I dropped the ID at a urinal and freaked out thinking, oh, shhh– you know. That was when I had to make a decision of, what do I do now? This is expiring. There’s this whole immigration reform movement that’s been happening since 2005. So then I decided that I had to tell my story clearly. That’s what I ended up doing.

Charlie Melcher:

You did miss one little piece of your own journey, which is you were part of a team that received a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

It’s sad that I don’t think about it that much. When the Pulitzer thing happened, it was like a nice little award thing, but it was only piece of paper. And so I didn’t really… and I remember when I was getting ready to do what I’m doing now, one of my friends said to me, “Jose, the only reason people are going to care about you is because you have that.” And I remember thinking how angry I was about that. If I had come out as undocumented farmer or undocumented security guard or undocumented grocery clerk worker, nobody would care. But since I’m an undocumented Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist would had worked for the Washington Post, all of a sudden I matter more. I really resented that.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell us about the article you wrote for the New York Times, your coming out story.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

I’m privileged enough that when I was getting ready to say, okay, I’m going to tell my story. I had options to where to tell it to. So I called Katharine Weymouth, who was the publisher at the Washington Post. I thought I owed the Washington Post the story, and she connected me to the editor, Marcus Brauchli who used to be at the Wall Street Journal. But then Marcus Brauchli decided that basically, how do you trust a liar, right? I had lied my way through journalism to get jobs. So they spiked the story. And so thankfully, one of my friends is a guy named Peter Baker, who I used to sit across from when I was at the Washington Post, he’s at the The New York Times. So I called Peter and I came out to him on the phone and I said, I wrote this essay. And then Peter connected me to the editor of the New York Times Sunday magazine, and then they wanted the story.

I remember somebody telling me that it was one of those rare instances where a story that was copy edited and fact-checked by the Washington Post ended up being published in the New York Times, but that’s where it was published. So again, a journalist, right? So in my head, I am publishing this one very specific story about an undocumented gay Filipino who happens to be a journalist. Now, to me, this is really important. We live in a time in which we are dealing with extremes all the time, and there’s a big call out culture, cancel culture, all of that and nuance and complexity get left out. To me, the beauty of stories is the best stories are about nuance and complexity. They’re not black and white.

Charlie Melcher:

And then you ended up testifying in front of Congress as part of the hearings that led to the Dream Act.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

This is when Obama was president and– people forget, President Obama deported 400,000 immigrants. So I testified in 2013, and at the time, I was one of the first undocumented people to testify in Congress. And actually, I’ll never forget this: Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz both served in the committee, and Ted Cruz didn’t even listen to the testimony. He got up and left. And then Jeff Sessions was the first person to ask me a question after I gave my testimony. And Jeff Sessions’ was, do you believe that we should have a law that people should follow or something like that. I said, yes, and that was it.

Charlie Melcher:

I just want to encourage our listeners to look it up on YouTube because it’s a beautiful speech. I’ve listened to it a couple of times, and every time I’m in tears, it’s so moving that you had both sets of family there with you to support you when you gave that.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Yeah, my grandmother was right behind me, and I could actually feel her nervousness. I could feel her nervousness.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, when I say both sets of families, it was clear the pride, your school family and the pride that your genetic family both had in you, but also just the emotional power and beauty of your presentation and how you made the whole issue so real, so human, so specific, but also universal at the same time.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Which is to me what storytelling is supposed to do, right? That’s what we do. That’s why my high school principal, my high school superintendent, the guy who sent me to college, were both sitting right behind me. My story doesn’t make sense without theirs. And we talk a lot about now about privilege, white privilege, and privilege just comes up a lot. And to me, privilege is always a question of, well, what are you willing to risk for it? They did. They took very specific risks to help somebody out. There are some states that want to pass laws that would make it illegal for you as citizens to harbor or help undocumented people. And I think that’s the conversation. And to me, this gets us to this question of mutuality, which to me really fundamentally is what storytelling should be about. We should tell stories so we can actually see that we have mutual interests and we share a mutual humanity. You know what I mean?

Charlie Melcher:

Yes, absolutely. I also think that one of the things you did so beautifully in that speech and that you’ve done many times since, is to remind us of the role that immigration plays in the founding and the blood of our nation. In fact, I remember in that testimony you gave to Congress, you specifically referenced JFK’s book.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Oh, yeah. A Nation of Immigrants.

Charlie Melcher:

A Nation of Immigrants. Yeah.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

I mean, okay, this is what the journalism comes into play here. So this country, between 1776 and 1963, during basically the Ellis Island era, 42 million people moved to this country between 1776 and 1963. That’s like, 42 million people from Europe who were Germans, Italians, Polish, and then they got here and then they got to be white. And then after what the Kennedy brothers advocated for, which is the opening of the way we think about immigration in this country, 45 million immigrants has moved to this country from 1966 to 2016. 45 million. Mostly Latin people and Asian people and Black immigrants, 11 million of whom are undocumented. So think about that. 42 million in a span of 187 years and then 45 million in a span of 50 years. I mean, that’s why it’s not a surprise to me that Donald Trump— to pick immigration as the central issue. When he went down that elevator, at Trump tower in 2015 and announced he was running for president, what did he talk about? The Mexicans and the borders and the wall.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s talk about that because you’re so specific about language. You’ve really pushed back against this idea of calling it “illegal immigrants.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jose Antonio Vargas:

So a workforce made of migrants… even that phrase kind of seeps humanity out of the equation. So meaning it totally makes sense then that you consider immigrants as essential workers, but you wouldn’t think of them as essential people. So even the term “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” or just “illegal” makes it this very kind of other foreign thing that has nothing to do with us. Maya Angelou used to give this great, great speech where she said that words are things and the words you say dictate how you think and how you act.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell us a little bit more about the work that you’re doing with Define American.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

The shortest explanation is to say that we are changing the immigrant narrative once story at a time. So we use story to change the overall narrative of this issue. And how do we do that? We do that to two kind of main ways, is entertainment media, so meaning Hollywood. So we’ve consulted on over 70 television shows and movies. So now we’ve become the place that a lot of producers and writers go to when they have that kind of content. And then the journalism front— I’ll never forget when Donald Trump first started using the phrase “chain migration,” and then you had news articles just using the phrase without pushing back. And so we were the organization that we contacted 5,000 journalists and basically said, look, at the very least, if you’re even going to use the phrase, use quotation marks. Question it, don’t just accept it for what it is. So those are the two avenues that most people understand what the issue is. So our job is how do we help storytellers tell a more accurate, more factual, more truthful and more human stories about immigrants?

Charlie Melcher:

And it makes total sense and super smart to focus on the storytellers in Hollywood, the ones who make the shows, and then films and the journalists who are out there putting out the newspapers and the stories and social media. If you can influence the way they think about the issue, you can have an amplified impact.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Absolutely. There was this great report in the New York Times after the 2016 election of Donald Trump that the television show you watch is a greater indicator of who you voted for than the political party you belong to. And Gray’s Anatomy is one of the top 10 most popular shows for Trump voters. So when Donald Trump ended DACA, one of the very first people to reach out to me, to us at Define American was Shonda Rhimes, because she’s amazing. And Shonda was like, how can I help? She was horrified that what was happening at the time, we knew about a hundred undocumented medical students. And so she said, send them to our writer’s room. So we worked with an organization that–PhD Dreamers is the name of the group. So we sent, I think four or five undocumented medical students to her writer’s room, and then that’s how her writers created this character of an undocumented intern.

And then in an episode of Gray’s Anatomy, ICE shows up at the hospital to get her. So we reached more people in that one episode than say an MSNBC or a CNN hit. But that’s why it’s important for us, especially now in the golden age of streaming and television, that a lot of people get what they think of this issue from television and from movies. The reality is there are so many undocumented white people and undocumented Asian people and undocumented Black people that we don’t talk about. If I were just to count the undocumented white people I meet at Starbucks all across the country, it’s way more than 11 million undocumented people in this country.

Charlie Melcher:

My assistant for several years was a Caucasian Dreamer who came from Eastern Europe. So this is something I lived through daily with her, listening up and down every day with the political winds blowing for DACA and Dreamers.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

And I’m sure the anxiety of that, the anxiety of—that’s why I mentor quite a few Dreamers. And so… mental health to me, which is something I’m so glad that we’re living in a time when people are more openly talking about mental health issues a lot more, because I really am so anxious for what’s going to happen with DACA. Can you imagine? I mean, it’s hard to think of even of a historical parallel where you have 900,000 people that have legal status and then that status will be taken away. So then what happens?

Charlie Melcher:

And have built lives and have been so productive in contributing to our country and literally thought they had this path and now very likely won’t

Jose Antonio Vargas:

And then what? 200,000 of them are essential workers, right? There was a study by CAP that just came out that undocumented medical workers, undocumented grocery workers, so again, they’re essential people. Mind you, I don’t know if you know much about—I’m sure you do, but—DACA recipients have to pay this government—the very government that wants to deport them? They have to pay the government, what, $500 every two years so that the government doesn’t deport them. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The deferred part is actually about deferral from deportation. I mean, that’s what it says. So I don’t know what’s going to happen if the Supreme Court doesn’t save it. In this country, legalizing marijuana is considered a higher priority than legalizing immigrants. Which by the way, I am really glad, especially considering all of the criminal justice issues as it relates to marijuana and drugs, I’m glad that we’re thinking through that in a much more progressive way. But there are states that have legalized marijuana that don’t allow undocumented people to drive. So how can we actually talk about that?

Charlie Melcher:

We can legalize a plant before we can legalize people.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Or climate change, right? So climate change is always one of the top concerns of progressives, and yet we’re not connecting the dots between climate change and immigration and the fact that a lot of people are going to have to migrate because of climate change. I’m from the Philippines– what, 7,107 islands? Some of those islands are going to disappear. So then where are people going to go? To me, we have to really connect these dots and we have to figure out how these issues actually intersect and clash with one another.

Charlie Melcher:

So Jose, tell me a little bit about this study that you’ve been working on.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

So at Define American, we’ve been kind of at the forefront of figuring out, well, wait a second, how do we actually know what we’re doing and how does it work? So we have really funded research work. So we’re about to release a report later this fall. So please check it out. Go to defineamerican.com and just sign up for our email so you’ll get it when it comes out. This is with the Norman Lear Center, and basically what we’ve done is to look at when immigrants are represented on television, how is their representation affecting how people, how the viewers behave by watching that representation. What we found is viewers who felt sadness or anger or fear while watching a show were more empathetic, but they were not moved into any sort of action. But when viewers felt happy when they see a character, they’re more likely to write their newspaper, their elected official, or volunteer locally. So again, creating more positive immigration storylines instead of the doom and gloom narratives that we often see is actually the way to go.

Charlie Melcher:

And this research really supports that. This is now scientifically proven.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

It supports that. And again, for us, that’s why partnering with the Norman Lear Center was important because they’re basically considered the top organization that does independent rigorous research. And for us, we’ve been studying this year to year to year. I think—I did an interview actually with Bill Maher on his show on HBO, and we were on a commercial break, and he turned to me and he goes, “you can’t just fix this thing?” And I’m thinking to myself, “if Bill Maher is asking me of this question of why can’t I just go fix this– what, does he think? I go in a bathroom and turn on a light and poof, I’m an American. Is that how it works?” So even people who know what the issue is, don’t know how the process works. That’s why there are more than 11 million people who can’t legalize.

Charlie Melcher:

Or lack of process. Yeah.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Lack of process. I’ve been really thinking a lot about citizenship. What that asks of us. Watching people who don’t want to put their masks on because you’re impinging on their liberty, watching the people who are not practicing social distancing, all of that—they’re not practicing citizenship. Because citizenship actually means that you have a responsibility to each other. Yeah, you’re a human being and you’re entitled to your what, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But to be a citizen means you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. So I actually think undocumented people in this country actually are challenging the very notion of citizenship because even though we don’t have papers or we’re not here legally, by our actions, we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. I remember I gave the speech once in Minneapolis and I was really angry, and I try as much as possible not to be angry when I’m in front of people. [laughter] ‘Cause doesn’t work, you know, all of a sudden I’m the angry illegal, right? And so I just don’t want to be angry. But for some reason, I was angry that night and somebody asked me a question about am I deserving of citizenship? And I turned the question around to the gentleman and I said, “well, sir, are you? What have you done to earn it?” He was like, “what do you mean?” And I was like, “well, sir, how are you a citizen?” “Oh, I’m born here.” “Oh, is that enough?” Is that how the country got to be so great? Because you’re just born here and all of a sudden you’re entitled? That’s not how people like us think about it. What is that great Baldwin quote: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for that reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Charlie Melcher:

Powerful quote. Jose, thank you so much for your work and for your spending time with me today. This has been a real pleasure.

Jose Antonio Vargas:

Oh, thank you for having me. And I really look forward for Define American and the Future of StoryTelling to do more work together. So thank you for having me.

Charlie Melcher:

We will. Thank you.

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST Podcast. Thanks for joining me. For more information about Jose Antonio Vargas’s work and Define American, please visit the links in this episode’s description. And to learn more about the Future of StoryTelling, visit us online at FOST.org. On our site you can subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought, and learn more about our annual membership program, the FoST Explorers Club. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.