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Young Immigration Activist Struggles to Balance Courage with Fear is an educational, sincere, and admirable story. As an undocumented student, Macro Perez genuinely tells his story and his dreams of graduating college and living a normal life like every American. This piece fully and accurately captures the challenges and fears of Marco Perez. The narrator, Jasmin Mara Lopez, explores the struggles that Marco Perez has to go through as a high school student in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. The piece begins with Marco openly and honestly tells his listeners that he is an undocumented student and he is unafraid. Marco confronts that he was brought to the United States as a child without formal documents and grew up in Los Angeles as an undocumented student and his undocumented status caused him to feel like an outsider.

As Jasmin narrates, Marco tells his story about his fear of deportation and his activism in high school. He speaks about how he joined the Dreamer’s Club when he was a sophomore in high school and met several undocumented students who he could relate to. The story clearly illustrates Marco’s fear of deportation and his arrest when he participated in civil disobedience to protest against the LA County Sheriff. In doing so, Marco believes that the act of taking actions will allow him to free himself from his fears and give him courage. Although he is afraid that he cannot achieve his goals if he were to be “deported to a country that is unfamiliar and unknown to him,” his story is one of many stories of undocumented youth’s voices because they share these commonalities, undocumented and unafraid.

Some things to notice:
This piece is well produced because the intro is catchy and grabs my attention. The narration that goes throughout the piece leads me into the story and allows me to subtly dive deeper into it. Even though the intro is strong, the outro ends a bit too sudden. In the intro, the producer forget to introduce themselves in the beginning and they forget to end their outro adequately to allow the listeners know that the piece is approaching the end. The piece could have been a bit stronger if the producer could handle the intro and outro better. In addition, the producer demonstrates their audio and editing skills fantastically by adding background recordings to the piece that allow its listeners to easily imagine Marco’s high school friends, protest event, phone call to his lawyer, and Marco’s conversation with his mother in their car.