Entertainment

Diane Guerrero’s Immigration Essay & 6 More Celebs Who Used Personal Experience to Raise Awareness

This week, the LA Times featured an op-ed by Diane Guerrero (whom you may know as fast-talking, scrappy, Maritza Ramos on Orange Is the New Black) about her parents getting suddenly deported when she was just 14 years old. "Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me," she writes, "No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own." Guerrero's piece calls attention to the importance of immigration reform, as well as the need to fix our country's juvenile justice system. It's well-written, poignant, and deeply moving.

Guerrero isn't the first celeb to use their fame and personal experience to raise awareness. Here are six other celebrities who shared their own stories to raise public consciousness for a cause.

by Arielle Dachille

Diane Guerrero

But first, more on Guerrero. When she was barely of high school age, the actress dealt with he horror of her parents being abruptly deported back to Colombia. She tried to keep up as normal of a relationship with them as possible, but she said in her LA Times Op-Ed that “too-short phone calls and the annual summer visits I made to Colombia didn’t suffice.” By discussing her own experience, Guerrero highlights the imperative for Congress to “provide a permanent, fair legislative solution” so that no more families are torn apart by the current immigration laws.

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Seth Rogen

Alongside his wife Lauren Miller, Rogen established the foundation Hilarity For Charity in 2013 as part of the National Alzheimer’s Association. Their mission is to educate the public about the disease and raise funds for research, as well as to support families who are caring for people with Alzheimer’s. In February, Rogen made a poignant address to Congress where he detailed the heartbreak of watching his mother-in-law devolve mentally under the weight of early-onset Alzheimer’s. The video of Rogen’s speech went viral, and raised wide-spread awareness for his cause.

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Ryan Lewis

Macklemore’s musical partner Ryan Lewis has been a mouthpiece for his mother’s charity the 30/30 project, which supports HIV research and care for patients. Lewis’ mother contracted HIV from a blood transfusion 30 years ago, and has been living with the disease ever since. Earlier this year, the foundation launched an IndieGoGo campaign with a target goal of $100,000, and raised $152,178 by the time it closed.

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Carey Mulligan

Since 2012, Mulligan has been an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society and has participated in many projects to help raise awareness of this debilitating disease. As a teenager, she watched her own grandmother succumb to its effects, but hopes that “by speaking about my grandmother’s dementia I hope to shine a light on the condition.”

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Emma Watson

Watson launched the He For She campaign earlier this year to raise awareness of gender inequality. She addressed the UN back in September, and has garnered widespread support from her celebrity friends for the cause.

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Lady Gaga

Gaga has been vocal about her own experience being bullied in high school, and the lasting effect that it has on one’s self-esteem. In 2011, she founded the Born This Way Foundation with mother Cynthia Germanotta, stating that her aim with this project was “to establish a standard of bravery and kindness, as well as a community worldwide that protects and nurtures others in the face of bullying and abandonment.”

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Angelina Jolie

In May 2013, Jolie penned an Op-Ed in the New York Times about her decision to get a double mastectomy when she was diagnosed with a gene that put her at a high risk for breast cancer. “I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer,” she said. “It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.”

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