TEDx Talk - Illustrating My Immigrant Experience
May 23rd, 2018
If you had told Alberto Ledesma as a child if he would become a college student or teach a university, he would have called you insane. Now, he is an illustrator and an esteemed professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In his talk, Dr. Ledesma illustrates his Chicano story and shares his journey through life as an undocumented immigrant. Alberto Ledesma was born in Jalisco, Mexico in 1965. He was brought to Oakland, California at eight years old as an undocumented immigrant. Since then, Alberto has graduated UC Berkeley three times over and has held faculty positions at Cal State University, Monterey Bay and UC Berkeley. His dissertation, “The Dialectics of Silence and Subterfuge,” is one of the earliest critical works written in the United States on the representation of undocumented immigrants in fiction. Over the years, Alberto has published poems, essays, and short stories in a variety of venues. He is a past winner of UC Irvine’s Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and was a featured writer in Gary Soto’s Chicano Chapbook series. His essays have appeared in various edited collections, including David R. Maciel’s Culture Across Borders and Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi Quiñonez’s Decolonial Voices. His current work in progress is Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Vignettes from an Undocumented Life. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at
