Gerardo Iván Morales and Antero Garcia center their works on the lived realities of undocumented immigrants, using personal narrative and research to humanize an inhumane system. D. Esperanza’s Detained, cowritten by Morales, is the first-ever memoir of a child’s experience in detention on the US-Mexico border under the 2018 family separation policy. D. Esperanza kept a journal of the pain, cruelty, and resistance inside the system. In The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math, undocumented activist Alix Dick and social scientist Garcia share Dick’s story of undocumented life. Together, they pen a powerful portrait of the economic, mental, and physical toil—and expose systemic hypocrisies. This conversation will be about dignity for human beings and the importance of the immigrant community in American society.
Photo Credit: Caitlin Fisher Photography
Antero Garcia is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and a vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books about schooling in America. He coedits the Substack La Cuenta. He cowrote The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math with Alix Dick.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Gerardo Iván Morales was born in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States of America in 2000 when he was five. He is passionate about advocating for human rights and immigration. In 2018, Iván dedicated six months inside an American child detention center, providing aid and support to detained asylum-seeking children. On his first day, he met D. Esperanza and the two forged a bond, like brothers, that lasts to this day. He and D. Esperanza cowrote Detained: A Boy’s Journal of Survival and Resilience.
David Martin Davies is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of experience covering Texas, the border, and Mexico.
Davies is the host of The Source, an hour-long live call-in news program. Since 1999 he has been the host and producer of Texas Matters, a weekly radio news magazine and podcast that looks at the issues, events, and people in the Lone Star State.
Davies’s reporting has been featured on National Public Radio, American Public Media’s Marketplace, and the BBC. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including a national Edward R. Murrow Award.
