No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.

No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.

My parents' deportation gave me so much strength to keep on moving forward, because any type of failure - whether in school or with jobs or rejection from a casting office - nothing could be as bad as what I had already gone through. Nothing could be worse than coming home expecting to see your loving parents and them not being there.

Since I went public with my story, I've never experienced such hate. I sometimes want to crawl under my blanket and hide forever and say, "No, that's some other girl who had an opinion." My blood has boiled a few times, but I just have to come back to earth and say people are entitled to their own opinions and I'm entitled to share my story the way I want. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

I had dreams, but always told myself, 'Nah, that would never happen.' For a poor Latina, (acting) wasn't a reality.

I feel like there's this misconception that immigrants come here and just don't care about the system and paying taxes, and that's not true. My father was desperately trying to be a legal contributor to this society.

We have a broken system, and we need politicians who are going to fix it. We need someone who's going to govern on behalf of everyone in this country, including immigrants. The fact of the matter is, the candidates need the Latino vote to win. If we feel we're not being represented and if we feel like the candidate is insulting us, ignoring us, and is not leading with fairness and empathy, I think that's going to be reflected in turnout.