Author Archive
From Undocumented Immigrant to Immigration Reform Advocate
When she speaks at college campuses across the country, Julissa Arce is often asked why undocumented immigrants in the U.S. don’t do things the “right” way, why they can’t simply “get in the back of the line.”
Her answer is always the same: If there was a right way to come here, if there was indeed a “line” to stand in, then that is where undocumented immigrants would be. That’s where Arce—a former Wall Street executive who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her parents when she was 11 years old, and lived and worked here undocumented for more than a decade—would have happily stood. Unfortunately, “the line is a mythical place,” she says, because contrary to what many believe, there are very few ways for people to legally emigrate to the U.S.
Arce—who spoke earlier today as part of the Penn State Forum series at the Nittany Lion Inn—considers herself “lucky” as far as undocumented immigrants go. Her parents brought her into the U.S. by plane and on a valid tourist visa, and that made things easier for her years later when she married her American boyfriend and applied for a green card, before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2014. But for Arce, the relative ease of the final administrative processes can never erase the torment of being undocumented, of waiting in stomach-churning fear for the authorities to get wind of her status, realize that her social security number and green card were fake. When would they come for her, Arce wondered almost every day, as she successfully completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin (she began studying there the year Texas passed a law allowing noncitizens, including some undocumented immigrants, to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges), completed internships at Goldman Sachs in New York City, and accepted a full-time job with the firm, rising through the ranks quickly to become vice president?
Inevitably, the ax fell when Arce had every piece of the American dream she’d always wanted, with a phone call informing her that her dad (her parents returned to Mexico when she started college) was seriously ill.
“My mother begged me not to go,” she said, because her undocumented status meant Arce would not be allowed to re-enter the U.S., “but I knew if I did not go, I would never be able to live with myself. Anyway, while I agonized about whether to go or not, my dad died. That was the cost.”
Everyday across the U.S., undocumented immigrants are facing similar dilemmas, Arce—who quit her job at Goldman Sachs after she got her green card—says, and having to take difficult decisions with painful consequences.
Since revealing her incredible story in 2015, she’s been a tireless advocate for proper immigration policy—particularly as it pertains to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. She is chairman of the board of the Ascend Educational Fund, a New York-based organization that provides educational scholarships and mentoring to young, undocumented immigrants who want to go to college.
“Education was my way up and I’d like for others to have the same opportunity,” she said. “That’s what we come here for—opportunity.”
Arce’s 2016 memoir, “My (Underground) American Dream” has been adapted into a television miniseries starring actor America Ferrera.
Savita Iyer, senior editor
In the May/June issue of the Penn Stater, we’ll feature interviews with experts from across the university on the topic of immigration.
Award-Winning Writer Susan Miller’s New Play Debuts Off-Broadway
Susan Figlin Miller does not keep a journal. She doesn’t jot down or record interesting tidbits of conversations she might hear on the subway in New York, or at Webster’s Bookstore Café in downtown State College, where she wrote portions of her new play, 20th Century Blues.
“Once I put words down on a page,” says Miller ’65 Lib, “a story hopefully takes on its own original life.”
Sound easy? Well, perhaps so for a prolific and award-winning author, who has written not just for the stage, but for television (Miller was a writer for the ABC series Thirtysomething), the movies (she wrote the screenplay for a short film called The Grand Design, starring Six Feet Under’s Frances Conroy) and the web (her indie web series Anyone but Me—which airs on Youtube and Hulu—has been viewed over 50 million times).
20th Century Blues, directed by two-time Obie award winner and Tony award-nominee Emily Mann, is Miller’s most recent play, and it begins performances at the Signature Theatre in New York on Nov. 12, running until Jan. 28. The play recounts the story of four women, friends for many years, who meet once a year to have their pictures taken in a ritual that chronicles their changing selves as they navigate life—its rewards and challenges. But when it transpires that those private pictures could go public, their decades-long, tight-knit relationships are suddenly tested, forcing the four women to confront their past and prepare for their future.
“This play is called 20th Century Blues because I don’t think any of us are really living in the 21st century yet,” Miller says. “These women lived most of their lives in the previous century. And the things that happened then, seemed to happen in a way that gave us space and time to absorb the huge impact of what had occurred—World War II, the Army-McCarthy Hearings, the fight for Civil Rights, AIDs. Now, because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, and the awareness of global tragedy, there is no time to take it all in or heal from it.”
In her body of work, Miller has taken on the big themes—race, gender relations, sexuality, communication— and she’s also focused on what she calls “otherness:” She creates characters that, for one reason or another, fall out of the mainstream (one of the four women in 20th Century Blues is African-American and gay), and she places those characters in situations that are unexpected, situations that force them to think about who they are, how they came to be who they are, how they relate to the people around them. And how the world sees or should see them.
“I feel like our country is still very much in denial of otherness—whether that’s race or culture or just people who are uniquely different,” Miller says. “One of the only ways I think that the fear of otherness can be overcome is to define it and then transform it into something human, because we all participate in this world. It’s something important to me that somehow runs through 20th Century Blues and in my other work.”
Miller wrote her first play, No One is Exactly 23, when she was 23 years old and teaching high school in Carlisle, Pa. She won an Obie award in playwriting, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, for her autobiographical, one-woman play My Left Breast.

Susan Miller and the cast of 20th Century Blues
Award-Winning Poet Hopkins Gifts Libraries His Private Collection
Award-winning children’s poet and author Lee Bennett Hopkins recently informed the Penn State University Libraries that he would be giving them his entire personal collection of children’s poetry books, manuscripts, and correspondence.
A small portion of the valuable collection—boxes and boxes stored in Hopkins’ Cape Coral, Fla., home—has already been sent to the Special Collections Library at University Park, and soon, Karla Schmit, interim head, Education Library and Director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and Ellysa Cahoy, education and behavioral sciences librarian and assistant director for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, will determine where to house the rest.
Hopkins’ private collection is valued at more than $2 million and comprises, among others, 18,000 children’s poetry books, as well as letters from Dr. Seuss. It’s a significant gift to the Penn State libraries, Schmit says, and will be a huge draw for scholars of children’s literature.
But the gift also cements (more…)
Conversations Around the Hijab
When Maha Marouan, associate professor of African-American Studies and Women’s Studies, was teaching at the University of Alabama, some of the Muslim female students on campus would come by her office to chat about what was going on in their lives. A number of them wore the Hijab, or head scarf, and they confided in Marouan that more often than not, the scarf invited a certain kind of negative scrutiny that made them feel unwelcome on campus.
Marouan documented the experiences of five of these students in a movie entitled “Voices of Muslim Women in the US South.” Produced by New York-based company Women Make Films, the half-hour documentary examines how Muslim women carve a space for self-expression and identity in a part of the country that often has unflattering views about Islam and Muslims. The United Nations Association of Centre County showed “Voices of Muslim Women in the US South” at Schlow Library on Tuesday, and invited Marouan to facilitate a discussion about her film.
Although the documentary was made in 2013, Marouan believes it is even more relevant today, when many Muslims across the U.S. and on campuses feel unwelcome, if not unsafe. It echoes some of what we heard from Muslim students at Penn State in our March/April 2016 cover story. The film is a good conversation starter, she said, to help counter the prevailing narrative around Muslims, Muslim women and the Hijab.
For STEM Companies, Career Fair Offers an Abundance of Potential New Recruits
It was impossible to miss Raychel Frisenda and her friend Brianna Bennett in the melee of formally dressed students thronging the Bryce Jordan Center on Thursday, the third day of Penn State’s annual Fall Career Fair.
Not only had the engineering juniors eschewed the de rigeur suit, their pink (Rachyel) and blue (Brianna) hair set them apart from the crowd.
“Sure, it’s a little intimidating to show up dressed like this and see 4,000 people in suits,” Raychel said with a laugh, “but suits are so not me.”
“I don’t do ties and suits,” Brianna added, “and that’s not going to change, probably not even when I go to work.”
By all accounts, though, attire and hair color are irrelevant to the many companies gathered at the BJC on Thursday, technical recruiting day: Recruiters for these firms said they have positions to fill and they know they can count on Penn State to offer up smart, highly qualified STEM candidates like Reagen Alexich ’16, a chemical engineering major who found her current job at CoverGirl cosmetics at the Career Fair.