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Underground America:
Edited by Peter Orner and with a foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea, Underground America is the newest title from the McSweeney's Voice of Witness series. It presents the remarkable oral histories of newcomers struggling to carve out lives for themselves in the United States. Whether they've come fleeing persecution in their native countries or simply to earn a livable wage, by living and working in the United States without legal status, millions of immigrants risk deportation and imprisonment. They are living underground, with little protection from exploitation by human smugglers, employers, or law enforcement. Underground America illuminates these struggles by presenting the firsthand accounts of the men and women who experience them. Corinne Goria is an assistant editor of McSweeney’s Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, a collection of oral histories narrated by undocumented immigrants. She received her J.D. from UC Hastings in 2006 and will receive her master’s in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University in 2008. She currently works as an immigration attorney with the San Francisco law office of Marina Serebryanaya. Marcos Martinez is Professor of Theater and Chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Program at California State University, San Marcos. A graduate of the Juilliard School’s Drama Division (Group 12), he co-founded La Compañía de Teatro de Alburquerque in 1979 and later served as artistic director for three years, from 1988-1991. He has directed plays and taught the Suzuki Actor Training Method extensively, including at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Guadalupe Cultural Center in San Antonio, Taos Art Association, Faeroe Islands, Denmark, Bosnia, Croatia, Greece, Russia, Czech Republic, Israel, and the National Theater of Ghana. His solo performance Holy Dirt, which has been performed in the United States and Europe, charts the journey of a small-town Chicano actor negotiating the worlds of art and commercialism in search of a compromise between idealistic fulfillment and self-respect.
The Editors Luis Alberto Urrea earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California at San Diego. His bestselling book The Devil's Highway, a non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. The Voice of Witness series, edited by founders Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen, is a nonprofit project aimed at engaging readers of all levels — from high school and college students to policymakers. www.voiceofwitness.com
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Join San Diego Writers, Ink for a panel discussion with assistant editor and immigration attorney Corinne Goria, Cal State San Marcos professor Marcos Martinez, and award-winning local novelist Patricia Santana—and we'll hear some of the powerful stories featured in the book. Books will be available for purchase.
Patricia Santana is the eighth of nine children of Mexican immigrants and grew up in southern San Diego. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, and her master’s from UCLA. Her first novel, Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility, won the UC Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Contest and San Diego Magazine’s 2003 Book Award, and was selected as a Best Books for Young Adults 2003 by the Young Adult Library Services Association. Her new novel, Ghosts of El Grullo, was recently released by University of New Mexico Press. 
Laura Castañeda is a freelance journalist and an associate professor in the Radio /Television department at San Diego City College. She is the Producer/Host of KPBS’s Emmy Award-winning "Stories de la Frontera" and has reported for Channel 4 Cox Communication’s Emmy Award-winning "San Diego Insider" and for KGTV, Channel 10, the ABC affiliate. Castañeda also worked as a general assignment reporter and fill-in anchor at KGUN-TV, the ABC station in Tucson, and as a production assistant and writer at WLS-TV, the ABC station in her native Chicago. She is host and producer of "The Devil's Breath," a portrait of three groups of migrants who were trapped and burned in San Diego’s October 2007 wildfires.
