From an ‘Undocumented...

Contd .from Page 6 At age 8, after finishing “Peter Pan,” he tried to retell the plot, lecturing his 3-year-old brother.

A volunteer art teacher at a homeless shelter in Bushwick, Brooklyn, had noticed young Dan- el reading a book about Napoleon. Impressed and charmed, the teacher, Jeff Cowen, befriended him and steered him to his alma mater, Collegiate.

“He strove for the very best for us, and he did it without any expectation of return,” Ms. Peralta said of Mr. Cowen. “He wanted Dan-el to flourish.”

When Dan-el started Latin as an eighth grader at Collegiate, his teacher, Stephanie Russell, was taken aback at how he had not only read Plato, but also had thoroughly absorbed it. She did not know his background, nor did she care.nytimes.com

“His intellectual gifts were what jumped out at me,” Dr. Russell said, adding that he was well-liked for his easy generosity.

“He spread an influence around that we were all the better for,” she said. “And all of this while obviously leading a split, double life.”

It is a dichotomy that Dr. Padilla describes in his memoir by mixing slang and earnest prose. He is as fluent in the Fugees as he is in the Fates and recently wrote a weighty article about antiquity’s influence on hip- hop artists (“From Damocles to Socrates”) for the online classics journal Eidelon.

Dr. Padilla can go from opining on Plato to opining on Pedro — as in Pedro Martinez, the Dominican Hall of Fame pitcher. He entertained working for a Major League Baseball team or writing for the analytical-heavy Baseball Prospectus.

Instead, he chose an academic career in one of the more esoteric disciplines. He has spent this summer at Columbia teaching previously incarcerated adults the relevance of the ancient texts. He has not talked about his own story.

“He loves the texts, I mean, I don’t see any time for anything else,” one student, Isaac Scott, 35, said. “He loves this stuff, reading, literature, the ideas, the questioning, the doubts, the ambiguity. He loves when we catch on to something.”

Dr. Padilla did not “come out” as undocumented until his senior year at Princeton, when he told his friends and posted on a Princeton message board, in advance of an article that was later published in The Wall Street Journal. In 2006, he joined an immigrant advocacy movement even as his lawyer, Stephen Yale-Loehr, was trying to find a way for him to be able to return from studying at Oxford. Mr. Yale- Loehr has petitioned for his client’s status at every academic stage.

For Dr. Padilla, the strangest stage may be an actual one. A new musical inspired by his life, “Manuel Versus the Statue of Liberty,” written and produced by a Princeton alumna, Noemi de la Puente, will be performed this week in Manhattan.

The other day, Dr. Padilla met his mother to give her a signed copy of the book, which he dedicated to her. In her confident and petite elegance, it was clear where he got his determination. Ms. Peralta said she began writing her own memoir soon after he was born.

“I said at the time, If I don’t ever finish this, Dan- el will write the story,” Ms. Peralta said. “I would have liked for the narrative to have been one with less suffering, for there to have been less in the way of pain.”