A Quote by Jose Antonio Vargas
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.
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One of the things I had to really wrap my head around is I have no control over what people call me: advocate, activist, gay, Filipino, undocumented person, gay person with an Asian face and Latino name.
I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.
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.
As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.
It still baffles my brain that I actually get to portray a character on American television that's this gay, femme-y Filipino guy.
As a gay man, I think the role of culture is central to how you change politics - culture is politics.
I got here when I was 12, I found out I was undocumented when I was 16, I became a journalist when I was 17, and all I ever did was write other stories to run away from myself.
I came across this circumstance of undocumented students. These are kids who were brought to this country as youngsters, who are raised as Americans and go to American schools, and then when they graduate high school, they have no prospects in front of them because they are undocumented and illegally in the United States.
Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can't think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture.
We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it's] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture.
It's easy to get young gay men to tickle each other, right? Let's come up with a challenge: Let's get heterosexual men. How do we do that? We make it a competition, because then it's not gay. That explains the antipathy behind the gay-journalist comment.
Within the Filipino community, everybody knows somebody who's undocumented.
In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from.
'All the President's Men' is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker.
My father was a businessman, but my mother was an intellectual. She cared about culture, politics, and philosophy, so I became interested in the protest aspect of Latin American art.
Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.
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