>> those are a few of the programs you will see this thanksgiving weekend on a booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. for the complete schedule visit booktv.org. we kick off the holiday weekend with coverage from last month texas book festival. >> welcome. thank you all for joining me to celebrate these incredible books, "a dream called home" by reyna grande, and their america by jose antonio vargas. i can think of them argentine books as our president threatens to take the step of closing the southwest border. i'm going to introduce our authors.

reyna grande is the author of the best-selling memoir the distance between us and his much anticipated sequel "a dream called home." her other works include the novel across 100 mountains and dancing with butterflies. she is a recipient of an american book award, a literary award and 2015 she was honored with the award for distinction in jakarta and latino clergy. originally from mexico, reyna was nine when she crossed the border as an undocumented immigrant. through her work she advocates for the immigrant community and hopes to change hearts and minds one reader at a time. welcome. [applause] >> jose antonio vargas as a pillow to prize-winning journalist, , a leading voice fr the human rights of immigrants.

he is the founder and ceo of the fine american, the nation's leading nonprofit media and culture organization that fights injustice and at the immigrant hate to the power of storytelling. he has worked as reported at the "washington post", the "huffington post", the "san francisco chronicle" and other leadingg publications. he's produced and directed documented and autobiographical future document that aired on cnn, white people, and hour-long into the special what it means to be young and white and a changing america. currently subject to deportation at any time, he has no permanent residence. welcome. [applause] >> and i will be your moderator. i am jean guerrero. my own book a cross-border

memoir won a prize and about my quest to understand my father, and immigrant who crossed the borders. hosea josé and reyna your bookse trulybo revolutionary, self-portrait of yourself as american, an america that is long rejected you. what does it mean to be undocumented in this america? and to force america to reckon with your existence by creating your own trail of documents? >> thank you so much. i'm going to say that my experience was different from his expense because when i came i knew i was undocumented and he didn't. i knew i wasn't document because my father took me and my siblings tont the border, and he told us that we didn't have permission to come so we were breaking the law, and that was the only way that we could be together as a family since father had left us in mexico for

eight years and have finally come back for us. so when i crossed the border as a 91 half year old i knew i was risking my life. i knew i knew i was breaking the law, by also new that the stakes were very high. and the stakes is really not so much losing my life but losing my chance to have my father. when we came to l.a. and we were living here, every day of my life i i knew that we were not supposed to be e here, that we were not wanted here. and i experienced a lot of rejection, especially at my school and the community in which i lived. it was a difficult to know that at any given moment we could be deported and we could be separated again as a family. those were five years when we were undocumented and it was a traumatic moment for us.

it was different from your experience, when i became a teenager we finally got our green cards whereas when you became a teenager, you found you were undocumented. before i was 15 years old, i no longer have to be afraid. i wasn't living my life in fear after that and it was such a relief to know that finally i could start to build the future, to think of the future as a possibility, not just as something that could be taken away from me at any time. by giving me the opportunity to legalize my status, to then start really going for all the dreams i have for myself which included higher education, a higher career and being

professional one day. some other things i was able to do once i got my legal status. i will say those five years i have been undocumented were so traumatic, this is why i am always writing about that experience of being here and feeling homeless, emotionally homeless in terms of feeling i didn't belong and no matter how hard i tried, couldn't be american enough. >> you talked about finding yourself not represented even after becoming a citizen. >> one of the things i like to do with my writing is i like writing about this experience of being an immigrant and being undocumented because when i was growing up here. i always felt invisible, especially in the books i was

given, could never relate to any of those books and i would often ask myself where am i? where am i in these stories? why don't i exist in literature? if the immigrant experience part of the american experience, and if so, why am i as an immigrant not reflected in these stories. now as a writer, those are the stories i tried to write because i really do believe immigrant server place in american literature because our experiences are the american experience. [applause] >> i wanted to note kudos to the texas book festival for doing this. [applause]

>> reyna is helping lead a really important literary system that when we look back, to 20, 30, 40 years from now we could look at books in terms of what happened and more than that what happened on cable news which is so numbing but what is happening here like interior and that is what books are, the most intimate experience you can have to place yourself in someone else's place. i want to say that. as for what it is like, thank you for noting that. i didn't find out i was undocumented until i was 16, four years after i was brought here when i was 12 from the philippines. i should also note since i am in texas, 40% of the

undocumented population over say their visa, they didn't cross the border, the southern border because we never talk about the northern border and i actually think being in texas, we owed the mexican people an apology for having racialized this issue as much as we have. [applause] >> the journalism can't help but note numbers, 1.8 million undocumented people in the state of texas. and we are not allowed to drive in a state like texas so i live in california, and i do listen to them in a while. my drivers license in california is not to be used in texas where it is not allowed. i don't know what all these car-rental companies are

contributing to the economy. and is there a subway station in austin that i don't know about? how do undocumented texans get around? are you playing like driving miss daisy to a documented texan people? i saying this kind of funny but kind of not. is there anything more american than driving? 1.8 million undocumented people in the state and every time they drive off their house, to go to church, to go to walmart, to go to work, they might get arrested on the freeway. and they get deported. and the legal part of it,

interested in depression and they heard from so many undocumented people of all ages and i aged out of daca, i was a dreamer before there was a dream ask or language around it. i hear from so many undocumented people, finding out how we claim ourselves in this country, how we can psychologically feel it is okay to not just walk in the country but exist in the country, and all i could think about was bill o'reilly when he used to have a show on fox, i used to go on his show and wrote in the book about one episode what he said to be on your. they haven't deported you. thanks, bill. just so you know, you don't deserve to be here. i started thinking wait a second. what did bill o'reilly ever do

to deserve to be here? [applause] >> bill o'reilly and many other americans especially white americans who forget their own immigrant background like to say their great-great-grandparents did it the right way when in reality there was no right way. in reality there was no green card, no visa process. i don't know how many thousands of dollars his ancestors paid to get here but the master narrative, i wrote this in the book, how we talk about immigrants, how we talk about undocumented people, that is not the work authors -- how do we, how do we take that away

from what the master definitions have done and own it and describe it in our own way and our own experiences? i also must say as an undocumented person who could get deported anytime, is a consistently american to be at the texas book festival near the capital. [applause] >> is a journalist, i can hear molly ivins's ghost all around here. i'm happy to be here. [applause] >> i also wanted to talk to you guys about the trauma of family separation that you both experienced long before this became an issue along the border. or at least an issue causing so much outrage with the trump administration separating children from their parents. i really related to both of your depictions because of my own lifelong quest to search for a father i felt wasn't there. i grew up believing he had paranoid schizophrenia. even when he was in front of the i felt i couldn't quite

grasp him but you haven't seen your mother since you were a child. can you talk about that? >> know. that is why i wrote the book. because i wanted -- the trigger for me was when i got arrested in mc alan. you all know what mc alan is. i said that in wisconsin yesterday and nobody knew what it was. mc alan, i got arrested in mc alan, was detained for eight hours and they separate you by gender. i was with the boys. this was in 2014 when people didn't really care, when president obama deported 3 million people and it wasn't viewed as a crisis as it is right now and this has been a bipartisan mess. republicans and democrats are both to blame. i got arrested and was detained and looked at those boys ages 5 to 14 and i saw myself in them

because i started realizing i didn't remember the last thing my mom said to me, she gave me a sweater and said it was going to be cold, i don't remember if i hugged her or set i love you or any of that and when i was looking at those boys in the cell and it is a jail cell, not a detention center, a jail cell, we as taxpayers, undocumented people pay a lot of taxes, i should be a republican i have paid so many taxes. we all pay to detain children, like you paid to detain children. i look at them, are they going to remember what their parents said to them when they left? that was the process of this book for me, the title is "dear

america: notes of an undocumented citizen," and it's a conversation with this country but it starts and ends with her, she was the last to say anything because i thought she was the last to hear from. it has been 25 years. she can't come on a tourist visa because she doesn't have a college degree or own property and class and race comes into the equation. and to hamilton over the weekend, she could buy a ticket and overstayed her visa and that should be fine. two more years for her to come legally. if you are from the philippines, india, that is how long the wait is. by the time she could come legally donald trump may have cut legal immigration by half. since my mom is not considered a good immigrants, she is not a high skilled person. she may not make the cut. how do i talk about her? i came up with the language for

that. >> reyna writes about how the trauma lingered, you write about her relationship with her father, can you talk to us about that? >> my father left mexico when i was 2 years old. in my earliest memories are the fatherless daughter, the only reason i knew i had a father, a picture of him hanging on the wall and had more of my relationship with black and white photographs than with my real father, when i was 41/2, my mother also left, she came here to look for work. and for many years, suffering from the trial separation, what i remember of my childhood is

living in fear of being forgotten by my parents, fear of being abandoned by them and the fear of being replaced because it happened so much in families having children here when they have children back home and not long after my mother immigrated we found out she was going to have a baby here so my siblings and i were so inferior to my american-born sister and we were afraid my parents were never going to come back for us, that they didn't want us anymore and that is a difficult thing for a child to feel, unwanted, to feel that fear of being abandoned and unloved. when my father came back for us when i was 91/2 it was one of the happiest moments of my life

because i felt he hadn't forgotten me. he could come back for me and one of the things i feel was very tragic was once i got to the us, the family i had in mexico no longer existed. my parents had split up, they had each remarried. we no longer had the family anymore and one of the biggest tragedies and biggest ironies in my family is my parents immigrated to try to save the family and in the process they ended up destroying our family so we got here and did the best we could to function as a family, eight years of separation had done a lot of damage and one of the discoveries i had, arrived with that, immigration turned my parents and me into complete strangers. these are some of the things i dealt with in terms of family

separation. i have written extensively on family separation from the perspective of a child, that is how i experienced it as a child as i write about the border and immigration from a child's perspective. this summer, while we were watching in horror in the news as to what was going on at the border with all these families being separated by the trump administration, i felt the urge and it was my first time when i felt this urgent this urgency to write about the parents and speak up for the parents. it was my first time ever writing anything from the point of view of what it is like to be a parent, put in a situation where you either have to choose between leaving your children behind and leaving them to

suffer or bringing your children with you and risking their lives for a chance at something better and in a way what i wrote was an editorial for the new york times published in defense of the parents but it was almost like a love letter to my father. it was my first time acknowledging what a cool weather we live in, my father, fathers and mothers are put in that situation where they have to choose between leaving their kids are bringing them along and now that i am a mother myself and my daughter is 10 years old which is around the time i cross the border, i look at my daughter and i cannot imagine me as a mother trying to make that choice and i honestly don't know what i would choose, if i would choose to risk her life.

and i don't have to make that choice. and a stranger to my daughter, and celebrate birthdays with her and holidays with her and i can be the parent that my parents could never be to be. [applause] >> discovering that because you left, your parents left, you could be the parent -- one of the things i loved the most about your book was how you call out mainstream media coverage of immigration issues as overly simplistic, even cowardly. talk about that.

>> i should say the only reason, i found i was on document it when i was 16 and my english teacher said i asked too many annoying questions and i could do this thing called journalism. i didn't know what journalism was. i came from a family of farmers in the levine's and carpenters and construction workers, not writers. when you are a journalist you get a byline. your name is on the paper by jose antonio vargas. i figured there was no google, i couldn't google undocumented. my naïve 16-year-old thought if i can't be here because i have to write paper what if my name is on the paper, the newspaper? that was literally the only reason i wrote. now there is a book. journalism, since i was 16,

journalism is sacred to me, reporting as religion. people like molly ivins, i read all the columnists and the journalistic irresponsibility that happened the last decade i should also note colleagues in the news industry woke up to the fact, when trump got elected. i don't know why it took that long but it took that long. the simple fact most americans don't even know that there is no process, this book came out last month. i did the today show, the first question the interviewer asked is why don't you just get legal. i am a masochist, this is so much more fun. outside, there is no line.

i should wear a shirt that said no line, no process. that's why there are 11 million undocumented people who don't have a process. when we talk about immigration every day, the fact that unless you are native american who was forced to build this country, you are an immigrant whether or not you want to recognize that. the fact that most newsrooms are filled with immigrants who forget their immigrant backgrounds and don't report on this issue with the context, not just the fact that the context that it means and the humanity it demands is what i find incredibly tragic. something as simple as the fact that undocumented workers back in 2005 at the washington post, i lied my way through all the jobs, my lawyers didn't want me to say that but there is in the book. i lied through the job up washington post, got a letter from the social security administration and i was like

wait. how do they know i am here, they were finding i built into social security. were they invalid social security number? i thought we had this tacit understanding that so long as i paid the money they didn't deport me. later on i find out according to the social security administration undocumented workers like me in the past decade have contributed $100 billion into the social security fund. according to the social security people a primary source that undocumented workers keep social security solvent. how often does the new york times, the washington post, the in pr, the left-wing media even, how often do you hear that from them? it is so cemented in people's

psyche that people like me tax people like you, not only do we contribute to the economy we helped make sure the economies they now make, there is welfare. isn't that incredible? [applause] >> but that is the fact all you should know and i implore everyone to get a chance. i started organization called define american. we are about to enter thanksgiving holiday. we are firm believer in comfortable conversations. you can download the entire pdf you can share with your coworkers and family members about what the facts are when it comes to this issue. >> this idea. [applause] >> this idea of forging and existence for yourself through the trail of documents you create is so powerful and necessary in our context and

something that you do and you talk about coming-of-age as a writer and i was hoping you would talk a little bit about some of the challenges, inspiration in unexpected places you found along the way. >> inspiration and i had a lot of support also. one of the things i loved about my father when i came to live with him was my father was a big dreamer. when we arrived, he said i brought you to this country so you could get an education, so you could have a good career and the working professionals and be homeowners one day so he really had a lot of dreams for us, a lot of expectations and he demanded perfect grades from us and he would threaten to send us back to mexico if we didn't come home with straight as. my siblings and i went to school every day and worked

really hard because we didn't want my dad to send us back. we were more afraid of my dad than border patrol at that point. so we worked very hard and my father taught me how to dream because as a little girl i hadn't heard of the american dream. the reason i came here was my only dream was to have my father back in my life and he gave me all these dreams and i started working towards those dreams and i became the first person in my family to go to university. one of the reasons, i even discovered writing as a possible career option because of my community college professor, my english professor, she was the first one who ever said to me reyna, have you ever thought of being a professional writer and i said no, latinos don't write books. it is because i had never read

any books written by latinos latinas. even though i loved to write i never thought i could be a writer. so my teacher started giving me books written by latinos, the house on mongeau street by cisneros and alvarez and she said to me if they can do it you can do it too. she convinced me that i could pursue a career as a writer and by introducing me to all these books, but i could finally relate to, she taught me that i had a lot of stories that i needed to write and to share with the world and she taught me how to celebrate my latino identity through literature. thanks to her, i went to university and majored in creative writing and i had a difficult time there because my

professors were not latino and i started writing stories about what it is like to groping poverty and mexico, broken families and immigration and the trauma of being an immigrant and my teachers would say you have such a wild imagination and i had to fight so hard to get them to understand that i was writing my truth and my reality. those were some difficulties i had trying to write the kind of stories i wanted to write. but i was grateful that i also made chicano literature teacher who started to read my work and she encouraged me to keep writing and to not give up because i was tempted to drop out of the creative writing

program because i felt so out of place. i stayed out of the program and graduated and when i went into the real world to turn this dream into reality and become a professional writer i got a lot of rejection there too from the publishing business. one editor i submitted to went as far as telling me that nobody was going to care about a story of a mexican immigrant girl. >> he wanted you to change the character. >> he wanted me to change the whole story because he didn't want any stories about mexican immigration and he wanted me to write about, about american latinos, us-born latinos. he didn't want any stories that took place in mexico, he wanted them to take place in the us.

what is so important to write about these stories, it is so important to me that we hear from child immigrants and that is what i mostly write about. it is important to understand these stories, not just the children but the parents and the family unit itself. i wanted people to understand also the reality of our undocumented youth and who we are and what we have gone through especially the traumas we go through before setting foot in the united states, that was another thing that was important for me to write about. >> i really relate to the struggle of creating a home for yourselves through writing and it is something we can all relate to. i had the privilege to be born

a us citizen but my father was always an outsider, always sort of rejected by society and i saw writing as a way of creating a home for him. i think these books are important for everyone whether you are an immigrant or a citizen. i want to give the audience an opportunity to ask questions of our two fantastic authors. you need to come to the microphone so please line up to do that. in the meantime while you think of your questions i will ask one final question to reyna and josé. there is always finger-pointing about immigration, republicans blaming democrats and vice versa. you who have personally experienced the damage done by what so many people call our, quote, broken immigration policy, you who personally

lived the horrors of our detention centers, reyna, who crossed the desert where hundreds of people die every year to get here, what role do stories have to play to reduce the hatred and the no phobia that we see? can you actually -- reading your book and changing the mind? >> i actually think stories are probably what is going to change us. i think i am saying this as a gay man so i have to come out of two closets and i am totally done doing that. if you think about it, we are not coming out, we are letting people in, right? when i think about matthew shepard was justin turned yesterday at the national cathedral. when i think about how the lgbt rights movement and how that

change from ellen the generous to will and grace being the number one show on television to now you have trans women of color leading storytelling change in television and it wasn't until we saw lgbt q people as people that that became more important than the politics and the policies. so i believe cumulatively the stories we tell in books, the stories we tell in movies, the stories we tell each other about who we are is the only way forward. writing this book, i wrote it while i was traveling after trump was elected president, the building manager, i was living in la, said we are not sure what would happen if ice showed up. you might want to move out. this is february 2017. i packed everything i owned and

i was thinking of leaving. if you -- my mom is waiting, canada seems great, let me go do that. then i went through this book and it wasn't until i wrote this book that i gave myself permission because i have to give special permission to stay. because i owe it to what my mom did and i owe it to what history calls us and it is incredible to think undocumented people especially in a state like texas could wake up every day, go to work, live their lives and not succumb to what this is. it is a miracle, it is miraculous. [applause] >> and i think it is because the stories we tell each other, lastly when i wrote the book i had tony morrison at the top of my computer screen.

she gave the most important speech on the power of language when she won the nobel prize for literature in 1993 which happened to be the same year i came to this country. you should look it up on youtube. she said narrative is radical. creating us at the moment it is being created. at a time like this we need more radical storytelling to create what we need to be. [applause] >> i had an interesting experience a few years ago with my mother because through the years i tried to tell my mother what my life had been like while she was gone and what my siblings had gone through and i would tell her stories, and it never seemed to penetrate and she never seemed to understand

and capture what i was trying to tell her. when i wrote my first memoir which is about the experience, when my parents left and everything they went through when they were gone, i gave a copy of my book to my mother and she read it and called me and said now i understand and it showed me the power of storytelling and the power of books because i have spent years telling her and yet once i wrote the book and she read it and by her reading this book, she had to live through all the moments i was writing about so i went from telling my mother to actually showing my mother and it was a powerful moment for me to know that

finally my mother understood b and she understood my pain and she also understood my resentment because there was resentment too. that is something i think about with my readers. whenever i write, i think of that moment because i know we could talk all we want and tell you and tell you about our struggles and trauma and pain and emotions, but once we put them down on paper and we invite you to walk in our shoes and see the world through our eyes i feel that is a powerful connection and something as a writer i once to keep doing. i believe what i do as a writer is i built bridges with words and tear down walls with

understand and comprehend and think of the situation we are living through right now through more compassionate and deeper understanding of who we are as a society. and you become more welcoming and inclusive and everybody here in this country can feel that we belong here. >> your books are an example of the power of storytelling. one of my favorite scenes is when you talk about your mother suddenly asking you the same questions you have been asked by the audience for so many years, showing curiosity in your life after reading your books, looks like we have a question. >> a wonderful presentation.

probably -- [inaudible question] >> from your perspectives that you have policy ideas, working on the presentation in washington dc, how the system of dealing with immigration, and you thought about these things, what kind of things would you see and who this is. >> the things i want to see

changed, trump saying he wants to cut down on illegal immigration but at the same time cutting down on legal migration which i think is the opposite of what he said he wants to do because one way you cut down illegal immigration is increasing legal migration and giving more people like hose's mother to come to the united states legally. the other thing missing from our conversation most of the time is the role the united states played in the displacement of all these people coming throughout the years that are coming today, but literally at this moment walking to the border to ask asylum and we need to ask what did we do as a country? what have we done through the

years that caused all this displacement and what is our responsibility to all those people who have been forced to leave their homes and i really do believe the us makes migrants and we punish them for migrating and we need to stop that. [applause] >> something simple, not really simple but something we have to do is we spent $100 billion since border security since 9/11, protecting you from mexico. i don't know how many more billions you want to spend locking us up. i would get rid of the detention system that profits private companies. [applause] >> i used to be a political reporter for the washington post. i studied was congressional

partisanship looks like and we are living through the worst kind of it. i don't know what policies i could offer that would work. what i do know is more than ever local, all politics must be local. for example if the state of texas decided you are going to give 1.8 million people drivers licenses, i can tell you that would go a long way in improving people's quality of life. why can't we do that? something like that in a state like this could be done. >> we have time for one more question. >> oh, shoot. [inaudible question] >> from your perspective do you think dreamers, undocumented immigrants.

>> frederick douglass achieved the american dream, all those women who thought for women's suffrage, japanese were interned in the 1940s were more american than anyone could have imagined. i would argue that people who fight for full citizenship by legality or dignity, that is what the black lives matter movement is about, dignity. i would argue all of us fighting for full citizenship are defining what america is in this country. [applause] >> i agree with josé and i really do think we have the power to make sure that

everyone in this country reaches their full potential and live the life that they deserve. and i really hope you keep working hard toward your dreams, that you don't give up and someday very very soon we will all do the right thing for you and support you and continue to make sure you do achieve the dream you are working so hard for. [applause] >> unfortunately i think we only have time for one more question but there will be a book signing at 11:00 i want to remind everybody of. >> thank you both for sharing your really powerful stories with us. in addition to the question regarding policy i was wondering what would you recommend for activism among the citizenry of the population

in the united states? one thing that strikes me when we have so many issues, this being among the more important ones especially the children being detained and separated from parents and i don't see enough activism and i'm asking you for your ideas. >> great question. >> there is an election coming up. go out and vote. that is the first thing. >> let me just contextualize that a little bit more. i am undocumented and i can't vote. i was just in mississippi and it was actually wonderful. this young woman who i met at the university of southern mississippi, her mouth kept dropping when i started talking about what i wasn't who i was and finally she pulled her phone and said could you talk

to my dad? can you tell her you can't vote? her dad thinks people like me vote. with what? my bank of america debit card? what am i -- i undocumented which means we don't have the right kind of documents to vote. that is the whole point. i'm saying this because i would argue i don't think -- i think personally you are not really doing your job if you are not uncomfortable. if you are not confronting that friend or coworker or relative who says that thing about illegal people are mexico or foreigners or whatever, if you simply walk away because you don't want to engage, you are not doing your job. if i can go talk -- >> that is why it is so important for people to vote. those who can vote, vote,

especially for those people like josé who can't do it, you do it then. you have to take charge and stop taking your vote for granted. it matters so go do it. [applause] >> unfortunately we have run out of time but i want to remind everybody that 11:00 these authors will be signing their books just around the corner and please join me giving a round of applause to reyna and josé. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]