School’s namesake ‘rendered speechless’
New Mountain View school to be named after undocumented immigrant
A new Mountain View elementary school will be named after Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, documentary filmmaker and immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas, who made waves in 2011 after outing himself as an undocumented immigrant.
The Mountain View Whisman School District voted this week to name the school — currently under construction on North Whisman Road — after Vargas, a graduate of Crittenden Middle School and Mountain View High School.
Vargas, born in the Philippines, moved to the U.S. at the age of 12, settling in Mountain View with his grandparents. He revealed his status as an undocumented immigrant in an essay for the New York Times magazine back when it wasn’t common to
do so, building an activist movement that would grow in the years to come. In the essay, he recalls unknowingly entering the U.S. with false documents as a kid. He found out about his legal status during a trip to the DMV as a teen, after an employee told him his green card was fake and warned him never to return.
“We’re not always who you think we are,” Vargas wrote of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. “Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.”
Vargas, who was part of a team of Washington Post journalists awarded a Pulitzer in 2008 for their coverage
of the Virginia Tech shooting, went on to create Define American, a national nonprofit media and culture organization aimed to counter anti-immigrant hate through storytelling.
Vargas said he first heard about the proposal to put his name on the school last fall when Superintendent Ayindé Rudolph reached out to him on Twitter.
“I thought, ‘This is not gonna happen,’ ” he said in an interview Friday. “Especially now, in this era.”
Fast forward several months and Vargas said he’s “rendered speechless” by the entire thing. As the news sets in, the 37-year-old said he’s coming to terms with the gravity of this recognition.
He said he hopes the school is a haven for immigrant students and their families.
“I just hope this is a symbol of that,” said Vargas. “Of what it means to be welcome, what it means to be part of a community, what it means to see yourself in other people.”
Jose Antonio Vargas Elementary School is on track to open for the 2019-20 school year, according to the district. Vargas — who will publish his debut memoir, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” this fall — said he plans to be there for the opening.
“I am completely cognizant,” he said, “that this is way bigger than me.”