Jose Antonio Vargas

Jose Antonio Vargas
Jose Antonio Vargasis a journalist, filmmaker, and immigration rights activist. Born in the Philippines and raised in the United States from the age of twelve, he was part of The Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting online and in print. Vargas also has worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Daily News, and The Huffington Post. He wrote, produced, and directed the autobiographical 2013...
NationalityFilipino
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth3 February 1981
I can't marry my way into citizenship like straight people can. I can get married in the state of New York where I live, but because of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government, which hands out visas, won't recognize my marriage.
I found out that I was illegal when I was 16. I'm gay. I'm Filipino.
I am undoubtedly one of the more, if not the most, privileged undocumented immigrants in America. And for us at Define American, which is this culture campaign group that I founded with some friends, culture trumps politics.
I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.
Left-leaning bloggers have had a tremendous impact on the Democratic Party.
Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.
Of all the questions I get asked as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, there are two - asked in various permutations via email, social media or in person - that chill me to the bone: 'Why don't you just make yourself legal?' And: 'Why don't you get in the back of the line?'
My being gay is not a social issue; it's a fact. It's not something to be debated. It's a reality.
I'm a journalist, and I'm a filmmaker. I have an organization that's all about telling stories.
We cannot change the politics issue until we change the culture around it; until we talk about what parents do for their kids as an act of love. That's a cultural conversation.
While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at 'The Mountain View Voice,' my hometown newspaper.
To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.
When I was younger, I didn't understand how a mother could put her son on a plane and just say, you know, 'Here you go, I'll see you later.' And she never followed, she never came.
When people saw that the film was called 'White People,' many got very defensive. I've been getting some very interesting emails - and I'm used to hate mail, believe me. I think this idea that we grouped white people together is offensive to people.