Our very own team member, Josue Mendez, has been working on a Broadway production for the past year that he truly believes will encompass the journey of not only the descendants of Puerto Ricans, but the descendants of immigrants as a whole. “I wanted to tell the story of myself during a time when I had to work with other people to overcome the problems we all faced that immigrants of this country have now come to face,” says Josue when speaking of his project.

The title of the project is Yearbook and details the time of Joshua, a third-year student in college who is the president of a yearbook organization. If you’d like to read a small abstract of the production, you can check it out below:

“The goal of Yearbook is to tell the story of struggles – not of immigrants themselves, but the children of immigrants who must grow up in a world filled with social injustice and racism, as well as the issues that come with lack of privilege and those typically associated with immigrated families. Based mainly on my personal life and the experience I’ve had as president of a yearbook organization filled with minorities, each and every single one of the people described in this mock story are all based on real people in the organization who have truly faced these issues at one point or another. This story aims to show these true stories of the children of immigrants who must do what they can to survive – not just for their sake, but for their families. All this while attempting to get their story across in the form of a yearbook that’ll be read by many who will never experience these kind of struggles themselves.“

Josue has been kind enough to show you a small snippet of Act One down below. Of course, there is spoilers – read at your own risk!

“Act One:

Due to an internal conflict within the yearbook organization the previous year, the college administration of  X University was forced to pick a new leader for the yearbook organization – a Puerto Rican junior who they felt was the only person capable to run the club. From then, Joshua, the newly-elected president, chooses his own ragtag team to fill up his executive board – all minorities and children of immigrants. Upon review of previous yearbooks, the team notices each book feature little to no immigrants or minorities, nor speak of what truly goes on undercover in the school – plenty of cases of racial hatred and division.

In a year filled with injustice in the world, the yearbook team decide they can use this one opportunity they have to break the mold and create a yearbook that captures the story the school needed to hear – a story they feel only minorities can tell best. The team gets to work, as we see the conflicts several of our team undertake in their regular lives on top of trying to create this yearbook. We learn of Joshua’s outside conflicts: keeping up his relationship with his Guyanese girlfriend who is constantly threatened by an alcoholic father as well as working at a low-income job where majority of the proceeds are then forwarded to his low-income single mother. We learn of the problems of two other team members of the yearbook organization: the Colombian David, who is threatened with the deportation of several family members if a certain presidential nominee takes office, the Chilean Sandra, who must deal with a mentally-ill sister and a family that cannot afford to hospitalize this child, and the Haitian Donald, who is risked with getting kicked out of the college for not being able to afford next semester’s tuition.”

Make sure to catch the rest beginning of next year as Yearbook opens up in the Public Theater!