Dreamer concludes her academic journey with a Dreamer documentary
Yosmara Lorenzo, a Mass Communication/Digital Media Production major who has concluded her undergraduate journey, has completed a final assignment by doing a film documentary on “her people.”
Ms. Lorenzo is an undocumented student and a beneficiary of the TheDream.U.S. Opportunity Scholarship. She and “her people” are undocumented students who are known as Dreamers.
Dr. Renee Marine, the Short Form Documentary course instructor, persuaded Ms. Lorenzo to take on the subject which had been started by a previous group of students but not completed. Ms. Lorenzo found the plight of Dreamers to be an important story. She entitled the documentary “A Light of Hope.”
To see and hear the documentary, click on the below link:
“I was really excited to do this because this was something that is part of me,” Ms. Lorenzo said. “I really want to represent that part of the community well and why DACA is super important. I wanted to tell that story for others to understand the way we feel.”
DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), established under the President Barack Obama Administration in 2012, defers deportation action on individuals who came to the U.S. as children. DSU has been an Opportunity Scholarship school since 2016, which has made it possible for 200 Dreamers to enroll at the University. To date, four cohorts of Dreamers have completed their undergraduate degrees at DSU.
Her interviews with other DSU Dreamers and their stories of how they came to the U.S. brought her back to her incomplete recollection of how she entered the country with her parents at age five.
“In their stories of how they crossed the border, they remembered more than me,” said Ms. Lorenzo, who was born in Guerrero, Mexico. “I only remember bits and pieces about crossing.”
Her “bits and pieces”: “I remember running in this field. We didn’t come in a car. There was a time I had to be separated from my parents. I was with all these people I didn’t know, and we were all in a van, and they were taking us somewhere. They put me to sleep. I guess they gave me sleeping pills. I guess that was so I wouldn’t make any noise in case we got pulled over.”
Ms. Lorenzo hopes to take her documentary beyond the Mass Communications classroom. “I plan to submit it to some film festivals, and I also want to send it to people who advocate for DACA,” she said.
Making the most of her undergraduate journey, Ms. Lorenzo is completing her four years at DSU with a 3.8 GPA.
“I am proud of my many accomplishments here at DSU,” Ms. Lorenzo said. “My advice for any DSU students is to talk to their professors, who can lead them to new opportunities.”
Her parents, Leoba Cuevas and Silvestre Lorenzo, and other family members are traveling from Atlanta, Ga., to attend the May 10 Commencement Ceremony. “Everyone is excited because I am the first in my family (to earn a college degree),” she said.
“Something my dad always said to me was “؟Que tú vas a hacer con tu vida? (What are you going to do with your life?),” Ms. Lorenzo said. “With the scholarship, I could tell him that I was going to go to the DSU. If it wasn’t for my dad and those words, I don’t know where I would be today.”
Dr. Marine – who is the Program Coordinator for the Mass Communication curriculum – and Zak Kimball, the Mass Communication Production Coordinator and Instructor – created the Independent Study – Short Form Documentary course in 2022 to provide students with instruction on how to do an intense documentary production. One student team’s documentary that first year, entitled “Once a Hornet, Always a Hornet – The Past, Present, and Future of DSU Football,” won the $40,000 Coca-Cola HBCU Sports Production Award.
In 2023, a team of students produced a documentary on DSU Associate Professor Mabel Morrison, and won Hearst Broadcasting’s “Bronze Telly Award.”