In the Latino community, the Trump campaign, even when it seemed it was a long shot he would be elected president, his campaign itself just caused lots of consternation and nervousness and anger. Famously, piñata makers started making piñatas of Donald Trump, even before he won the Republican nomination. There was this sense that, here's a person who's rising in the polls because he's insulting us, because he's created this scapegoated image of us as the people responsible for the decline of the United States.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

I'm, by nature, a really optimistic person. It goes back to my parents having been each divorced three times and my finding some way to survive all that. I always managed to survive by being upbeat.

In real life, there are right-wingers, there are anti-immigrant activists who want to overturn this constitutional right that we have to become Americans when we're born in this country. There's lots of people who believe that this has led to the phenomenon of the anchor babies. I am an anchor baby. My parents were able to receive their residency and citizenship because, I, a U.S. citizen child of theirs, was born in Los Angeles.

I just feel that art is more important than ever, that art is something that can unify us, that can make America stronger.

I want to bring Americans into some experiences they ordinarily would not consider. Experiences in Latin America, people in Latin America, I want to bring them closer to those people, and I know I have to work extra hard at my craft to reach across these increasing chasms, these gaps that exist between different kinds of Americans, and that's the work of the artist, is to create these works that sort of help us understand our time.

Undocumented people have been targeted for years now. Even under the Obama administration, there was a really large number of deportations of undocumented people. Trump has just taken that policy and ratcheted it up several notches. He's made it much more intense. We've had situations where people who would have been covered by the Obama administration, people who had been promised a path toward legal residency, had that taken away. I did not imagine that. I could never have imagined that happening.