Late last week The Daily Tar Heel, UNC-Chapel Hill's student newspaper, wrote an article titled "5 Students Enter Race For SBP." (SBP is student body president.)
"As of Tuesday night, five students are in the running for UNC Student Body President. Though they submitted their paperwork in the early evening, juniors Winston Howes, Manoj Mirchandani, Andrew Powell, Nikita Shamdasani and Emilio Vicente were prohibited from campaigning before midnight."
I think it's safe to say that since that day, only one candidate for the UNC-Chapel Hill student body presidency has been profiled by The New York Times. In a story titled Emilio's Great Race, writer Frank Bruni describes campaign at Carolina, and then says that one of the leading candidates for office is an undocumented immigrant:
His name is Emilio Vicente. He’s a junior, 22, and a minority three times over: Latino, undocumented and gay. He came to the United States from Guatemala at 6, his mother leading him under barbed wire and into Arizona, as he recalls it. (He remembers the screech of a woman with them whose hair got caught.)
Vicente told Bruni that winning the popular vote on campus is important to him, and to others in his same legal predicament:
His victory would be a milestone, not just locally but perhaps nationally, and it would be a chance, he told me, “to change the narrative of what it means to be undocumented.”
- Read the full article here.
- Look at Emilio Vicente's campaign page.
- Here's a collection of Emilio's writing for the Huffington Post.