PHOENIX — Angel Palazuelos donned a maroon cap and gown one recent afternoon, one of two colors of his alma mater, Metro Tech High School, where almost every student is an immigrant or comes from a family of immigrants. The school is part of the Phoenix Union High School District, one of the largest in the country and one whose enrollment reflects Arizona’s impending demographic destiny as a majority Latino state.
Angel, a thoughtful and ambitious teenager, embraced the instant kinship brought by his and his classmates’ shared history, but refused to settle for the low bar set for them. “When we have representatives from universities come, it’s mainly just community colleges,” Angel said. “It’s never Columbia, Princeton, Harvard.”
That weekend afternoon, he sat in front of a laptop tethered to his smartphone, his only gateway to the internet at home. Then he cleared his throat and inhaled deeply, setting aside the anxiety and uncertainty that have defined his life in this country — not just the last eight weeks of his senior year, or the racial strife, protests and nightly curfew that followed it — to speak at a virtual graduation ceremony honoring people like him: the undocumented students in the Class of 2020.
His story is similar to those of many other young immigrants brought to the United States as children. Born in Culiacán, Mexico, a city plagued by drug violence and corruption, he entered the country with his mother and brother on a tourist visa in 2006, as a nasty battle against illegal immigration raged in Arizona and beyond.
Joe Arpaio, then the sheriff in sprawling Maricopa County, which counts Phoenix as its seat, dispatched a posse of volunteers to roam the desert in search of migrants and the guides who had sneaked them across the border. Voters, having already declared English the state’s official language, made in-state tuition at Arizona colleges and universities illegal for undocumented immigrants. In Congress, legislators debated a bill that would have made migrants’ illegal entry into the country a felony.
The message was clear: They did not belong.
Angel’s mother liked what she found, though: welcoming schools, clean streets, safe neighborhoods and a measure of possibility and hope she never even knew existed.
Angel was 4 when he arrived in Arizona. He grew up in fear.
“One time, my mother got into a car accident,” Angel told me the first time we met, days before the graduation ceremony organized by Aliento, a leadership and emotional development organization led by young immigrants, for young immigrants, where he was a fellow. “Every time I see police, even now, my heart skips a beat, like, every time, because in my eyes, I feel like their purpose is just to catch me.”
He was a rising sixth grader when President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action Program for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2012, giving certain young undocumented immigrants temporary permission to live and work in the United States. He went through middle school waiting for the day when he would be able to apply, but the Trump administration rescinded the program before that could happen.
His mother told him, “Don’t go to university. It’s a waste of money. You’re not going to be able to work after.”
Angel had every reason to give up, but he didn’t — not even after a global pandemic stole from the Class of 2020 the face-to-face traditions of a high school graduation, and not after the death of another black man in the hands of police magnified that inextricable weight in the lives of undocumented graduates: fear.
Nearly 100,000 undocumented students are expected to graduate from high school in the United States this year, about 2,000 of them in Arizona. “Inspiring and resilient” is how Reyna Montoya, the founder of Aliento and a DACA recipient, described them. “Even though so many doors have been closed in their faces,” she said, “they’re figuring out new pathways, new solutions, new ways to be themselves. That, to me, is the essence of the human spirit.”
I reached out to Angel because in the face of so much anger and despair, I needed to feel inspired. I also wanted to understand where his resilience comes from. We are both immigrants. Our skins have the color of caramel. Our names have an other-ness ring, though it’s a ring that can also represent the sound of the future in a fast-changing United States.
“What keeps you going?” I asked him as we met in the same virtual classroom where I had taught the last weeks of the spring semester.
Angel shrugged, as if going were his only choice. “My goal is to go to college. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m in the United States. I’m in the United States to be better,” he said. “I know that government funding and being low-income just won’t do it. So, I told myself, I’m going to look best on paper. I’m going to join all the clubs. I’m going to hold leadership positions. I’m going to join all honors classes, all A.P. classes, get straight As, be the best student I can possibly be.”
He did all that and more, some of it before classes moved online and some after. The change, he said, didn’t seem to hit him and his undocumented classmates as hard as it hit those who are U.S. citizens, “maybe because we have been fighting that uncertainty all our lives.”
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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