An undocumented immigrant s journey from a New York City homeless shelter to the top of his Princeton class
Dan-el Padilla Peralta has lived the American dream. As a boy, he arrived in the United States legally with his family. Together they had traveled from Santo Domingo to seek medical care for his mother. Soon the family s visas lapsed, and Dan-el s father eventually returned home. But Dan-el s courageous mother decided to stay and make a better life for her bright sons in New York City.
Without papers, she faced tremendous obstacles. While Dan-el was only in grade school, the family joined the ranks of the city s homeless. Dan-el, his mother, and brother lived in a downtown shelter where Dan-el s only refuge was the meager library. At another shelter he met Jeff, a young volunteer from a wealthy family. Jeff was immediately struck by Dan-el s passion for books and learning. With Jeff s help, Dan-el was accepted on scholarship to Collegiate, the oldest private school in the country.
There, Dan-el thrived. Throughout his youth, Dan-el navigated two worlds: the rough streets of East Harlem, where he lived with his brother and his mother and tried to make friends, and the ultra-elite halls of a Manhattan private school, where he immersed himself in a world of books and rose to the top of his class.
From Collegiate, Dan-el went on to Princeton, where he made the momentous decision to come out as an undocumented student in a "Wall Street Journal" profile a few months before he gave the salutatorian s traditional address in Latin at his commencement.
"Undocumented" is essential reading for the debate on immigration, but it is also an unforgettable tale of a passionate young scholar coming of age in two very different worlds.
Praise for "Undocumented"
"Undocumented "is an impassioned counterargument to those who feel, as did some of Peralta s more xenophobic classmates, that illegals are good-for-nothings who take jobs from Americans and deserve to be kicked out of the country. No one who reads this story of a brilliant young man and his proud mother will automatically equate undocumented immigrant with idle parasite. That stereotype is something else we shouldn t take for granted. "Minneapolis Star-Tribune"
Dan-el Padilla Peralta s story is as compulsively readable as a novel, an all-American tall tale that just happens to be true. From homeless shelter to Princeton, Oxford, and Stanford, through the grace not only of his own hard work but his mother s discipline and care, he documents the America we should still aspire to be. Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of the New America Foundation"