@ArdeeTheJourno
Karla Molinar said her father had to change his career in 2007 after moving from Mexico to the United States.
“My dad used to have his own job, his own company. Things just went wrong,” she said. “It got to a point where it was very hard for us to sustain ourselves. He was going to work for this company. He graduated with a zoology degree … It turns out that he didn’t get that job. He found another job as a carpenter.”
Molinar, 19, and her family were forced to stay in the country without Social Security numbers. And despite getting her higher education in the state, she remains an undocumented immigrant.
She almost qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, she said.
“I got here on July 20, 2007. The memorandum was issued so that you had to be here by June 15, 2007. By a month, I did not qualify,” she said.
Molinar is pursuing an international studies degree at UNM. The undocumented student ran for a senatorial seat at the Associated Students of the University of New Mexico, the undergraduate student government of the University, this semester.
Molinar said she started getting involved with ASUNM after working with the UNM Dream Team on a resolution to provide in-state tuition for out-of-state DACA students who meet New Mexico residency requirements.
“The senators were very welcoming,” she said. “They were very willing to listen to what we had to say. That was the time I decided that there should be more representation. If I could help my community in that way, I would have been happy to.”
But she was unable to snag a senate seat last week.
Still, Molinar said she aims to continue getting involved with ASUNM to represent UNM’s undocumented student population further. She said she also aims to continue her work with the Dream Team to raise awareness about issues that affect undocumented students on campus.
“You don’t have to be a senator to introduce resolutions,” she said. “So, I will keep working with senators to and build relationships with them so they know how certain measures are going to affect us.”
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Molinar said that although she is content about the recent on-campus debates surrounding undocumented students at UNM, people should discuss the issue in a more civil manner.
“There should be some sort of respect. These are people that we are talking about,” she said. “You disagree with certain policies, that’s respectable. But as far as degrading or dehumanizing undocumented students, it makes me sad to see my classmates have such a negative stereotype of immigrants.”
Expecting to receive her college diploma in 2016, Molinar aims to continue on to graduate school in the United States. One of her choice universities is UNM, she said. She also plans to be a community organizer with El Centro de la Raza, an organization that supports Latino student success on campus.
Molinar said she got her determination and academic commitment from her mother.
“Ever since I was in high school, she was always asking counselors about what the process would look like for me because we knew that we were undocumented,” she said. “I owe it to my mom, she was so involved in my academic life. She was there to guide me.”
