Jose Antonio Vargas To Speak At DeAnza Commencement

Jose Antonio Vargas, an immigration reform advocate who won a Pulitzer Prize while a reporter at the Washington Post, will be the keynote speaker at De Anza College's 46th annual commencement ceremony. 

The U.S. Senate began debate this week on a comprehensive immigration bill whose fate is closely watched by millions, including "Dreamers," young people whose families brought them to the U.S. when they were minors, just as Vargas was brought to Mountain View by his grandfather, and hope to go to college.

Vargas is the founder of Define American, a campaign to elevate the national conversation around immigration. In June 2011, he publicly announced his own status as an undocumented immigrant in The New York Times Magazine, with a follow-up cover feature published the next year in Time magazine. 

He recently testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on immigration reform. "Documented," a film he wrote about his experiences and that marks his debut as a film director, will premiere June 21 in Washington, DC, at AFI Docs, the American Film Institute's documentary festival. He previously wrote and co-produced "The Other City," a film based on his 2006 series for the Washington Post on HIV/AIDS in the nation's capital, and has been shown locally.

He also reported on tech and video game culture and the 2008 presidential campaign for the Washington Post, where he was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the shootings at Virginia Tech. 

Afterwards, he served as a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post, launching both the Technology and College sections of the publication. Vargas' work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Daily News, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, for which he profiled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He has been a guest on Nightline and The Colbert Report, among other TV shows. He is a graduate of Mountain View High School and San Francisco State University.