Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas to be in residence at UO

Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas to be in residence at UO / Around the O 

October 5, 2017 — At age 16, Jose Antonio Vargas went to the motor vehicles department to get a driver’s license and discovered he was in the U.S. illegally.

Jose Antonio Vargas

The green card he’d been given by family when he moved to America from the Philippines as a child was a fake. For years Vargas kept his status a secret, even as he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose writing appeared in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker.

Vargas will be telling his story to University of Oregon audiences as the 2017-18 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics. On Oct. 24, he will give a public lecture, “Define American: My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” The event begins at 7 p.m. in Room 156, Straub Hall.

In 2011, Vargas wrote a groundbreaking essay for New York Times Magazine revealing himself as undocumented and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in conjunction with a follow-up story he wrote. Some of the ramifications were immediate: He lost the driver’s license he’d finally managed to obtain, and he had to have difficult conversations with close friends to whom he’d never told his secret. His status makes it unsafe to have a fixed address, so he travels most of the time, living in hotel rooms and staying with friends. › Continue reading

Tags: CLLAS, Jose Antonio Vargas, UO, Wayne Morse Center

CLLAS Town Hall with Jose Antonio Vargas

UO campus
Crater Lake South
Erb Memorial Union (EMU)
Room 145
1222 E. 13th Ave.
Eugene, OR  97403

A conversation about undocumented America

 Jose Antonio Vargas is the 2017-2018 Morse Chair and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. In 2011, he published a story in the New York Times Magazine titled “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” Since then, he has devoted himself to changing the cultural and policy conversations about immigration through filmmaking and activism.  His organization, Define American is a non-profit media and culture organization that uses the power of story to transcend politics and shift the conversation about immigrants, identity, and citizenship in a changing America. This conversation with Vargas will be moderated by Chris Chávez (School of Journalism and Communication).

Sponsored by CLLAS, UO School of Journalism and Communication, and the School of Journalism and Communication.

Tags: CLLAS, Jose Antonio Vargas, SOJC, undocumented, UO, Wayne Morse Center