Dulce’s Story
Dulce Valencia
is an immigrant artist and storyteller from Guerrero, Mexico.
Dulce arrived to the state of Nevada as an undocumented immigrant on Christmas Day in 2007 when she was 12 years old.
From the beginning, she knew she was undocumented but didn’t know what that meant until in 8th grade she was awarded “Student of the Year” from her Middle School. As part of the award, she was to receive a small scholarship, “all you need is your social security number” said her principal. When she told her she didn’t have one, her principal said,”That’s impossible, everyone has one.” After that, Dulce understood she was different.
In High School, she started to realize that she couldn’t do many things that normal people could: like get a driver’s license, get a job, or go to college.
In 2012, President Obama announced DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) a program that gave young DREAMers who met different requirements like good moral character and were under a certain age a temporary work permit. Unfortunately, there was a cut off date of June of 2007 and Dulce missed the deadline by a few months and was unable to apply.
After this, Dulce began getting involved in the immigrant rights community in Nevada. She began sharing her story as an undocumented immigrant and pushing for immigration reform. After graduating from High School, she and her mother were able to obtain work permits through a U-Visa. Thanks to this, Dulce was able to work legally and was able to pay her college tuition.
While going to college, she also worked full time as an Organizing Director of Civic Engagement for a local organization in Nevada. She led their non-partisan GOTV and voter registration efforts registering and engaging thousands of voters in the state of Nevada who were primarily immigrant and young voters. Her work and story were profiled by Lifetime’s Her America Project.
Dulce obtained her Associate of Arts degree from College of Southern Nevada in 2018 and transferred to University of Nevada, Las Vegas where she decided to pursue her passion for storytelling and major in Theatre Studies and began appearing on stage and behind the scenes in Las Vegas productions.
Over the last couple of years, Dulce has continued to pursue her education while taking a break to work in Nevada’s 80th Legislative Session and live in New York City where she was an immigration fellow for FWD.us and made her stage debut appearing in Hart Island Requiem (written by Ty Defoe and Tidtaya Sinutoke) at a reading for the Drama League, directed by Madeline Sayet.
Once she returned to Las Vegas, she joined Dream Big Nevada, a non-profit immigrant service organization as the Deputy Director and continued her studies at UNLV where she graduated with a Bachelor’s of Arts- Theatre Studies and was chosen by her college as one of the student speakers for graduation. You can watch her speech here.
In 2020, she appeared on the Apple TV + series “Dear…” where she shared with her idol, Lin-Manuel Miranda her story as well as how he’s inspired her work on immigration and as a theatre maker.
She was named one of Desert Companion’s One’s to Watch in 2020.
Dulce’s story was one of the featured stories for We Are Here, a short film documentary produced by 271 Films, directed by Constanza and Doménica Castro which had its premiere as part of Sundance’s official selection for 2022.
She moved to Los Angeles in 2021 to pursue a career as an actor and writer and currently serves as the Senior Manager of Entertainment Engagement at Define American where she leads their consulting work in Film and TV.