Sara Mora - Storyteller & Migrant Rights Activist (Featured on OPRAH'S 8 Young Visionaries)
This was such an amazing and IMPORTANT conversation!
One of the many wonderful things that I love about my podcast is that I get to learn about other people's origin stories and how they got to where they are at now, but it also serves as a platform to educate not only myself but others as well.
Sara is SO honest and open about her journey, and I really appreciated learning more about being undocumented in the United States.
Sara Mora is 24 years old and has been an immigrant rights activist since her early teens years growing up in Hillside, New Jersey. In 2014, her work supporting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy (DACA) led her to interview the president of her home country, Costa Rica. It was then that Sara divulged her status as undocumented, an admission that caused her to go viral. Revealing her status was uncommon in her community and the country at the time and she quickly began to receive responses from peers. Many were extremely appreciative of her honesty and ability to open up the important conversation of immigrant status and rights. This surge of support prompted Sara to start Population MIC, an organization centered around providing communities with the tools necessary to tell their stories and be heard by lawmakers. Since then, Sara has taken on many roles, using her platform and her follower base (136K and counting) to push for immigration reform and support others who are undocumented in any way possible.
Sara has also been featured in OPRAH'S 8 Young Visionaries as well as Seventeen Mag's 2020 Voices of the Year.
In this episode, we talk about what it means to be undocumented to her and why she decided to speak about it publicly, the societal expectations that you will only succeed if you have a post-secondary education, the importance of rest and not feeling guilty about it, her activism work and how social media has played a large part in her career.