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" As you watch 'Documented' on CNN, I ask you, my fellow Americans: What do you want to do with me? What do you want to do with us? How do you define American? "

Jose Antonio Vargas

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" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I can't marry my way into citizenship like straight people can. I can get married in the state of New York where I live, but because of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government, which hands out visas, won't recognize my marriage. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" The story of undocumented immigrants in this country is not just about undocumented immigrants. It's about the country as a whole, and it's about us being able to tell the truth about where we are with this issue because we haven't been telling the truth about where we are with this issue. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I remember the first article I ever wrote, and I saw my name in the paper, and I already knew I was undocumented, and I was thinking: 'How can they now say I don't exist?' "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" In Tagalog, we call undocumented people 'TNT,' which means tago ng tago, which means 'hiding and hiding.' So that's literally what undocumented means in Tagalog. And that kind of tells you how Filipinos think of this issue, and really any culture, right? "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I am not a lobbyist. I am not a political activist. I am not a leader, as far as I'm concerned. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I've been uncomfortable dealing with my identity since I was 16 years old. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" At the end of the day, stories connect us, not politics. And there's so many stories out there waiting to be told. It's just a matter of who's out there listening. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I am more than an immigration activist. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby DMV office to get my driver's permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. 'This is fake,' she whispered. 'Don't come back here again.' "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I've always really wanted to make a film on what it means to be white in a country that's getting less and less white. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" Film in many ways is very literal. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" As I graduated from public schools and started working in newsrooms, I told myself that I am only the 'illegal' that my own country has not bothered to get to know. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" For decades, I have cringed whenever someone called me 'illegal,' as if I'm an insect on someone's back. I found out I didn't have the right papers - that I was here illegally - when I tried to get a driver's permit at age 16. But I am not 'illegal.' No person is. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" Left-leaning bloggers have had a tremendous impact on the Democratic Party. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" All I've ever done since I was 17 is tell stories. You know, I'm a storyteller. And that's what I'm going to keep on doing, especially now, kind of embracing and making sure that we tell immigration. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print - writing in English, interviewing Americans - validated my presence here. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I worked for 'The Chronicle' in San Francisco, and immigration is a big issue in that region. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I guess, as a reporter, I always thought that my biggest strength was that I could get anybody to talk to me. I wasn't the best writer, but I could get people to talk to me. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" I wasn't supposed to be walking with Mark Zuckerberg. I wasn't supposed to be interviewing Romney's sons. Why was I doing it? Because I wanted to survive. I wanted to live. I wanted to earn what it means to be an American. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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. "

Jose Antonio Vargas

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

Jose Antonio Vargas

" 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.' "

Jose Antonio Vargas