High school grad tells classmates she is undocumented in valedictorian speech

Before high school valedictorian Larissa Martinez stepped up to the podium to give her graduation speech last week, she didn’t know how her fellow students would react.

The McKinney, Texas teen had spent hours writing and rewriting her nine-minute speech to say something she had hidden from most of her classmates at McKinney Boyd High School for years: She is an undocumented immigrant.

She could have talked about her accomplishments, like her good grades (a 4.95 GPA) or her 17 AP classes, according to WFAA. Instead, she told her classmates: “I’m not going to stand here and give you the traditional Hallmark version of a valedictory speech.”

In truth, she said in her speech, she and her family had left her abusive and alcoholic father in Mexico City with the hope that they might be able to make a new life across the border instead.

“I am one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the shadows in the United States,” she said. “This might be my only chance to convey the truth to all of you that undocumented immigrants are people too.”

Martinez had not always thought she would reveal her legal status so publicly. When Martinez’s family came to the United States in July 2010, they arrived on a tourist visa with little more than their luggage and dreams. And as she, her sister Andrea and her mother started making a new life, her mother cautioned her about telling people where she came from.

"We say we're not going to say nothing," her mother Deyanira Contreras said to WFAA.

So Martinez, then 12, did exactly that. While friends talked about their families, Martinez told the news station that she shared her own story with only a handful of friends.

“School became my safe haven,” Martinez said in her valedictory speech.

But as graduation and the sixth anniversary of her arrival in America approached, Martinez considered what she would say to the classmates she was graduating with in the spring. She wrote and re-wrote her comments in her family’s one bedroom apartment, reading her speech aloud to her mother.

"[Larissa] said, 'What do you think?' And then I realized, that's what we are. That's what you are... That's your story," Contreras said to WFAA.

Before she took the podium at her graduation, only ten people at McKinney Boyd High School already knew what she was about to say. When she finally stood before the sea of red graduation caps in the audience, Martinez nervously stumbled over her first words.

When she shared her secret with her graduating class, they stood and applauded.

She asked her fellow students to keep their minds open about undocumented immigrants, alluding to the campaign rhetoric of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

"America can be great again without the construction of a wall built on hatred and prejudice," she told them.

In her speech, she thanked her fellow students for embracing her.

“You taught me that it’s okay to be different and there will always be people willing to overlook those diffs and accept you for being yourself,” she said.

But her biggest praise went to her younger sister and to her mother.

“While moms metaphorically move mountains for their children, you literally moved countries for my sister and me,” she said in her speech. “That’s why everything I do, I do for you.”

Martinez plans to go to Yale University in the fall on a full scholarship, and hopes to become a neurosurgeon, she told WFAA. She told WFAA she’s relieved to have delivered her speech.

"A part of me feels like I was meant to do this," Martinez told WFAA.

This story was originally published June 9, 2016 at 8:46 AM with the headline "High school grad tells classmates she is undocumented in valedictorian speech."