Alex Alpharaoh put his own DACA story onstage, and the audience keeps on growing
She had been walking for weeks across the Mexican desert, holding her 3-month-old boy to her chest. At 15 she had never left Guatemala before. When she ran out of water, she drank from puddles — if she could find them. Her breast milk dried up, and her baby grew weak with hunger. One day he began having a seizure.
Terrified, the mother screamed, “Ayudame!Ayudame!” She rocked her violently shaking infant as he stopped breathing. She watched frantically as another woman ran to her and breathed life back into her boy’s lungs. When the baby came to, the woman fed him from her own breast.
Soon after that, the mother crossed the border. Her baby was put to bed in Mickey Mouse pajamas. Someone handed her a Big Mac and said, “Welcome to America.”
That baby boy is now the 34-year-old actor and spoken-word performer Alex Alpharaoh, who tells his mother’s tale as part of the one-man show “Wet: A DACAmented Journey,” which recently wrapped a six-week run at Ensemble Studio Theatre/Los Angeles in Atwater Village.