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ASU Lodestar Center Leadership Council member is turning trauma into hope
Published February 7, 2019 - ASU Now | Alisa Reznick
Turning trauma into hope for Arizona’s DACA recipients
When Reyna Montoya first moved to Mesa, Arizona, in 2003, it was hard to feel at home.
Violence had forced her family from Tijuana, Mexico, when she was 10 years old, and they’d been making 4 a.m. car trips from the Arizona border to her Phoenix-area school ever since. Now living in Mesa full time, talking about that part of her life felt like a taboo.
“It was very much a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of thing — growing up undocumented,” she said. “I didn’t really understand how policies impacted my life until I went to apply to college or get a driver’s license and seeing that I wasn’t able.”
Montoya is one of tens of thousands of undocumented young people across the country to receive protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program since its inception in 2010. But the program wasn’t available when Montoya was growing up.
Instead, she navigated the labyrinth of barriers on her own and enrolled at Arizona State University out of high school. In her sophomore year, an immigration and economic policy class through the School of Transborder Studies made her realize she wasn’t alone.
“A lot of my own stories were connected to those policies,” she said. “It was like, ‘OK, there are others like me; I’m not the only one who is being affected.”
Montoya completed a Bachelor of Arts in political science and another in transborder studies, both from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, along with a minor in dance in 2012. Today she also holds a master’s degree in secondary education from Grand Canyon University.
Learning about the policies affecting her own life empowered Montoya to help spur change. Now, less than a decade since she graduated, her advocacy network Aliento is giving new DACA generations the support to do the same.
Read full article here.
Reyna Montoya is a member of the ASU Lodestar Center's Leadership Council. Meet the Council here.