Rafael Agustin

Youthful obliviousness has clearly served Rafael Agustin well, said Dave Davies in NPR.org. Born in Ecuador, he arrived in the U.S. at 7 but didn’t realize until he applied for a driver’s permit that he had entered the country illegally. Finally, his parents sat him down for “the Talk,” as he calls it. “It wasn’t about the birds and the bees,” the 41-year-old TV writer says.

“It was about Uncle Sam.” Agustin’s parents had been doctors in Ecuador. Here, they worked initially at a car wash and a Kmart, and were forced to move abruptly several times. Agustin, happily soaking up sitcoms most nights, knew nothing. “I was able to grow up an oblivious, stupid American kid,” he says.

Agustin’s new memoir, Illegally Yours, turns briefly urgent after his teenage moment of truth, said Stuart Miller in the Los Angeles Times. Forced to turn down college acceptances, he simultaneously amped up his all-America act. “I decided

I’d be the most popular kid in school,” he says. “I became class president and prom king so no one would ever suspect the truth about me.” Eventually, he did obtain permanent residency papers, started UCLA a few years late, and, after realizing how few acting roles were available for Latinos, turned to writing. He wrote a TV pilot about his experiences that led to a run writing for the hit series Jane the Virgin. Now he’s hoping that his comic memoir will help spotlight what pursuing the American dream is like for most immigrants. “We love this country so much, and it just won’t love us back,” he says. “But we’re going to stay and take the abuse and hope that one day America will see the error of its ways.”