Jose Antonio Vargas

“I have no control whatsoever on how people perceive me from the Right or the Left. All I have control over is who I say I am.”

“When people saw that the film was called 'White People,' many got very defensive. I've been getting some very interesting emails - and I'm used to hate mail, believe me. I think this idea that we grouped white people together is offensive to people.”

“As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.”

“A broken immigration system means broken families and broken lives.”

“To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.”

“The film 'Documented,' a project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Define American campaign, is about my families: the family I was blessed to be born into, and the family of friends, mentors and allies that I found when I moved to the United States at 12, a Filipino kid trying to make sense of my new home in America.”

“My mother made a choice. And when I was younger, I judged her for making that choice. Then I got older and got to be an adult, and I realized that was the ultimate sacrifice that any parent and any mother could possibly make.”

“I'm a journalist, and I'm a filmmaker. I have an organization that's all about telling stories.”

“After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.”

“When you're undocumented, you're supposed to keep your head down and be quiet and pay taxes, social security - even though people don't know that we do those things - and not say anything.”

“We cannot change the politics issue until we change the culture around it; until we talk about what parents do for their kids as an act of love. That's a cultural conversation.”

“There were many factors as to why I decided to come out as being undocumented. One of them is because I look the way that I look; I don't look like the 'stereotypical undocumented' person.”

“I'm not a minority: I'm a majority of one. We all are. To call someone a minority, you give them baggage, of not being full, or not being seen as full. All of us need to be seen as full human beings.”

“Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.”

“The more successful I got, the more scared I got. My name was all over Google. I had a Wikipedia page I was terrified to look at. And so I just snapped. I thought, 'If I'm going to come out with this, I'm going to do it in a big way. And not just for myself. This can't just be my story.'”

“Demographically speaking, young white people are not in the majority in this country; they're in the minority. My question is, if they're not the majority anymore, then what happens? How do things change? Or do they change at all?”

“I want to be as creatively disruptive as possible. I want to be radically transparent in a way that isn't showboating.”

“Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president.”

“I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.”

“People don't really assume that I'm Filipino. Of course, they're gonna think, 'Oh, are you some sort of Hispanic?' and you say, 'No, I'm actually not.' I get Korean or Chinese a lot.”