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The American-born actress, now known for her roles in Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was 14-years-old when her parents and older brother were deported to Colombia. She remembers coming home from school to find her dad's car in the driveway, dinner on the stove, but the house empty. "At first, I did break down and cry," she says. She went to visit her parents in jail, and they gave her the option to travel to Colombia with them. Guerrero felt that she had to stay here in the U.S. "I have to finish my studies, and I have to work really hard, and try to get my family back together," she thought.

Guerrero admits that she lived "in the shadows" for years. "I could have disappeared and nobody would've known anything," she as. But as her career picked up, she felt she had to speak out. In November, she wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. "I was so scared," she remembers. "I want to be viewed like a serious actress, and I'm afraid that people are just going to see me as the poor little girl whose parents were deported when she was 14." The piece sparked some criticism, but also earned strong support from families who had been through the same thing. "That made it all worth it," she says.

Interview Highlights

On why Guerrero decided to share her story

Once I started advancing in my career, I stopped wanting to hide from my reality. And it was really difficult when people would ask me where I've come from, what my roots were, and what my childhood was like without avoiding the question, or being vague, or even lying. That's how embarrassed I felt, or afraid to share my story. I didn't think that people would understand. But as I'm coming into my own, I'm feeling I don't want to hide anymore.

On why she didn't go to Colombia with her parents

That was a lot of the response from the letter — angry people — "why didn't she just go back with her parents?" Well, it wasn't that easy. Our financial situation wasn't stable. Anybody who lives in Colombia knows that if you don't have any money — I tell you what — you don't have many options.

Her response to people who say 'But your parents broke the law'

The fact of the matter is that my parents were here and stayed, and tried to amend their situation. And because there wasn't really a way to do things — I suppose — clearly, this is what happened.

Has Guerrero's family situation informed her work as an artist?

Absolutely. I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist, and empathize with the human experience unless you know your truth, and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

And Diane and I will head to Miami later this month to hear more about how immigration is shaping the American story. I'll be hosting an event there, in partnership with member station WLRN.

Share your immigrant story with us by sending an email to nprcrowdsource@npr.org.

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"Kids are inundated with so many advertisements of things that they 'should' have," de la Pea says. "And they develop this idea of like I want, I want, I want. ... I felt like the grandmother was such a great vehicle for: But you have, you have, you have."

Robinson identified with that sentiment, but says his grandmother was a little less "polite and gentle" in her efforts to help him recognize the blessings in front of him. "It was like a sandwich," he says. "The bread was sort of like the discipline, and the meat and the vegetables were kind of like the love, so it was balanced."

De le Pea grew up in a working class neighborhood, just outside of San Diego near the U.S.-Mexico border. "My big takeaway from my childhood was: I saw my dad get up every day 5:00 o'clock in the morning. ... I saw my mom hustle, do every different job she could to provide for us. We never had quite enough, but we made it work. And I think my goal with everything I write ... is to kind of show the grace and dignity on the 'wrong side of the tracks.' "

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Nana gave everyone a great big smile and a "good afternoon." She made sure CJ did the same. Christian Robinson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House Publishing hide caption

itoggle caption Christian Robinson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House Publishing

Nana gave everyone a great big smile and a "good afternoon." She made sure CJ did the same.

Christian Robinson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House Publishing

De le Pea says this book features characters from diverse backgrounds but it isn't a book about diversity. "That's very important to me," he says. "I don't think every book has to be about the Underground Railroad for it to be an African-American title."

Robinson says that, coming from the perspective of an illustrator, the essential element is fun. He's found that in books that focus explicitly on diversity, "there tends to be an element of heaviness — maybe because the history is heavy and serious."

Robinson hopes that playful, fun stories featuring a diverse cast of characters will reach wider audiences. He and de la Pea designed Last Stop on Market Street to be a book that would speak to all kids. "This is a book that features an African-American boy and his African-American grandmother," de la Pea says. "I think sometimes in the past those books were set aside for kids of color. I really, really hope that everybody reads this. I hope suburban white children are read this book as well."

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Hard times have hit the oil fields. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude has dropped from a high of over $100 to less than $50. But Tracy Perryman, a small oilman in Luling, Texas, has learned how to survive the lean times.

Oil companies that take on a lot of debt sometimes don't survive the downturns. But veterans of oil busts have learned how to plan for the inevitable price plunges.

Perryman's family has been in the oil business in Luling since the 1920s, when a wildcatter drilled down a half-mile through ancient limestone and struck a small but productive field measuring 2-by-12 miles. Nearly a century later, the Luling field, located about an hour south of Austin, is still active — there are about 9,000 producing wells in Caldwell County.

"When oil is up, we know it's going to go down. ... We try to spend the money on our equipment and our production to get it in good shape, so when it does ... we can ride through the hard times..."

- Tracy Perryman, production manager, B.J.P. Inc.

They have made a good living for Perryman, production manager of B.J.P. Inc. Unlike the stereotype of the flamboyant, boorish Texas oilman, Perryman wears work clothes and speaks softly.

Digging into a slice of smoky brisket in the dining room of Luling City Market, he looks out the window and considers what the price drop has meant for traffic rumbling through his hometown.

"Gravel trucks, oil field trucks, oil haulers, rigs ... going right through Luling — it's maybe half as much or less in activity than it was when oil was $100 a barrel," he says.

As it happens, the Luling field lies just north of the monster-sized Eagle Ford Shale formation, which has become one of the world's most prolific fields thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling.

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The old Luling wells are what are called stripper wells — they produce less than 15 barrels a day.

After lunch, Perryman sits on the tailgate of his pickup next to one of his bobbing pumpjacks. The dirt is stained black and the air smells of rotten eggs.

"This well that we're currently sitting by produces about a barrel-and-a-half of oil a day and about 20 barrels of saltwater," he says. "It was drilled in the early '60s. We anticipate that it will continue to produce for many, many years."

Staying Afloat When Prices Are Falling

So how does a small oilman stay above water when prices drop in half?

"When oil is up, we know it's going to go down," Perryman says. "We try to spend the money on our equipment and our production to get it in good shape, so when it does go down, we have no debt, we have good equipment and we can ride through the hard times and get ready for the next boom."

In better times, his company bought new pumpjacks, pipes, tanks, vehicles, forklifts and machine tools. They fixed roads and fences. And they paid cash.

Today, everything has changed. They'll defer downhole maintenance on wells, they'll ignore potholes in their roads rather than call the gravel truck, and they'll try to repair broken equipment instead of replace it.

"I don't believe that hard times are here yet," Perryman says. "In April of '98, we'd seen oil go down to $9 a barrel. And that was tough, because it was costing us $18, $19 a barrel ... just to get it out of the ground."

Most small independents like Perryman cannot afford to explore for oil. They buy up properties from the majors, who decide to sell off marginal wells when they become less profitable. The Perryman family purchased its wells years ago from Humble Oil, which became Exxon.

"Smaller, independent oil and gas producers like Tracy Perryman are of critical importance, obviously, to our state and our national economy," says Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.

He says in Texas — the nation's biggest crude oil producer — 41 percent of all wells are stripper wells like the ones in Luling. "The reason smaller independents can survive is because they are not drilling $5-, $10-, $15-million horizontal wells in the sweet spots ... of some of these shale formations."

Perryman's company owns 116 wells — all of them shallow and vertical. Together, they produce about 100 barrels a day. Last summer when prices were high, they paid $10,000 a day. Today, it's half that.

But year after year, the moaning pumpjacks keep Perryman's company afloat. The one he's sitting next to brings up 1 to 2 quarts of oil and saltwater with every stroke.

"You get enough of these wells," Perryman says, grinning, "you can make a living, even at $45 a barrel, in Luling."

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My mother, as far as I can remember, has been a feminist and that was another thing that I didn't realize was slightly unusual in a household like mine. But also, I think a lot of working-class black women and educated black women — my mother is educated, both my parents went to college — are feminists, but wouldn't articulate as such whereas my mother would. ...

She would always say things like, when people talk about "When we get married," she'd say, "If you get married," and talk about a lot of things as a choice. Or she would always tell this story of a friend of hers who was raising a child on her own and somebody would say, "Oh, you need a husband," and the friend would say, "No, I need a wife." So she was very conscious of the hierarchy of gender and these kinds of things.

On a real-life incident that inspired her to write one scene in the book

One time my mom ... sat me down, we were sitting there, and she said, "You know your father and I aren't married." And I was like, "Really?" And she was like, "Yeah." And I'm struggling because I'm thinking like, my mom is the one who told me not to say "illegitimate." It doesn't matter, but at the same time it kind of does matter.

She was lying. This was some kind of weird prank just to see what [I] would say.

And so I think what I'm doing in the book is thinking about [how] in that moment I felt so like something dropped away, even though I had been taught not to feel that way. I had been taught not to be invested in this foolishness. But that's part of why it's there, because it was a part of this learning process that Kenya undergoes about her parents and about the mythologies of her childhood that fall away. And I could draw on that one bizarre moment of my mom's sense of humor.

On Solomon's experience attending an affluent private school

It was alienating in a lot of ways, but I certainly got an excellent education. I guess it took me a long time to understand the mix of feelings I have about that. It's something I've written about a lot and thought about a lot because [Bryn Mawr's Baldwin School] was a great school, aesthetically it was beautiful, I got to do so many things, but I always felt just kind of cold and out of it there.

I and a lot of the other black students were just marginal because we were black. We would never be at the core of the social experience of that school, I felt, because we were black.

- Asali Solomon

There were things that could clearly explain this, like people really would ask me questions about the city, like, "Were there pools of blood on the ground?" and people would say things that were subtly or not-so-subtly racist. And class was a big issue. A lot of the kids were wealthy.

We weren't poor, but we weren't wealthy. We didn't have a lot of money — and that was something that was always there. I was very nervous about people coming to my house, which, in a lot of cases, they were not even allowed to do, because they weren't allowed to come to West Philadelphia.

But I think that recently I was thinking about how to articulate it. And I would say that in that situation I and a lot of the other black students were just marginal because we were black. We would never be at the core of the social experience of that school, I felt, because we were black. ... I didn't go to high school there, but I imagine that would've only increased as people got into dating, because [we] weren't going to be dating out there.

On the trade-off of attending a school where you feel marginalized

The thing that's difficult about "good schools" where you feel alienated or socially marginal, is that depending on who you are as a person, you can make it out of that and write fiction about it — about the pain that you experience. But a different kind of person won't necessarily get the benefit of the education because they're so broken as a person by that experience. So that's a kind of risk there. For me, I was definitely affected in ways that were negative and positive. But I think partially my ability to communicate about it in this way really means that it was a positive.

Read an excerpt of Disgruntled