Philly comedian Che Guerrero finds humor and absurdity in his undocumented life

Philadelphia comedian Che Guerrero recreated the most consequential day of his life on social media, modeling the awkward, posing-for-a-picture smile and squint of his 5-year-old self.

The boy’s photo appeared on an immigration visa that would be overstayed, marking him as undocumented for nearly the next three decades.

“Sorry America,” Guerrero says in the caption, “I wasn’t the one who made the choice.”

Today, Guerrero, 36, works to inject laughs or at least a moment’s levity into the fractious national debate over immigration, writing and performing as a stand-up comedian, host, speaker, TikToker, and podcaster, a range of programming collectively offered as “My Undocumented Ass.”

He’s not funny ha-ha. He doesn’t do jokes about annoying spouses, or riff about the provincialism of Philadelphia — the transplanted New Yorker actually loves the city.

Instead, he points out the absurdity in situations where immigrants seeking better lives for themselves and their families are stuck in government systems that aim to dictate where they can and cannot live.

At one point, as he discusses in a routine, he was held in jail in New York and nearly deported over $50 in traffic fees.

He views his job as “helping people see this is not normal, give them the tools to laugh, but also to push forward for change,” Guerrero said.

He now has permanent U.S. residency, what’s known as a green card, which came to him in 2018 through a prior marriage to an American citizen.

But his prior life experience being undocumented — among about 13 million people, who could be deported at any time — remains his focus. He’s performing his stand-up set Jan. 18 at 9:15 p.m. at Punchline Philly comedy club.

Guerrero expects his work to take on new urgency as President-elect Donald Trump undertakes what he promises will be the largest mass-deportation program in American history. Polls show support for Trump’s plan.

In a Scripps News/Ipsos survey conducted after the election, 52% said they somewhat or strongly supported the mass deportation of people who are in the country illegally. That included 85% of Republicans and 54% of independents. A subsequent survey showed overall support for deportations dropped to 38% if it meant separating families.

Bill Rhoads first saw Guerrero perform about four years ago, at First Person Arts, the storytelling collective where the comedian now works as social-media manager.

“I thought, ‘This guy has something,’” said Rhoads, senior vice president of the Esperanza Arts Center, a hub for Latino arts and culture in North Philadelphia. “I approached him because I loved his material, but also saw he had something that would be relevant to the community.”

Guerrero became artist-in-residence at Esperanza, spending a year working on his routines but also helping neighborhood youths hone their own material, then acting as host of their bilingual comedy show. He was not just an artist but also a mentor and advocate, Rhoads said.

“He’s using comedy to address really important issues, affecting especially the Latino community, around immigration, around systemic racism,” he said. “The thing I’ve seen about Che over the last few years [is] his artist vision and his reach has really extended.”

Daniel Guarin, who studies sociolinguistics and Spanish at Temple University, where he teaches language classes and recently earned his doctorate, has never seen Guerrero’s routines — but knows humor can bring insight and humanity to sensitive topics like migration and culture.

“Humor serves as a tool, a powerful one, to show people the other side of the coin,” said Guarin, who was born and raised in Colombia.

It can foster empathy, challenge stereotypes, and bring “awareness of this reality — migration, being undocumented, not being able to get a job legally, being threatened by the idea that you are doing something wrong just by being alive — and the absurdities it entails.”

What’s funny about being undocumented, which from the outside can seem scary and uncertain? You might be surprised, says Guerrero, who came here with his grandmother and sister from the Dominican Republic.

Like the time he and a former girlfriend realized each had been eyeing the other as a potential route to legal status, not knowing that neither was a U.S. citizen.

“My grandmother grew up during [Gen. Rafael] Trujillo’s dictatorship,” Guerrero said. “She helped me realize how much humor could help people. Humor is a form of resistance, resilience, and healing.”

Guerrero, who lives in South Philadelphia, didn’t plan to become a comedian. Growing up in Queens, N.Y., he wanted to be a doctor. His immigration status interceded, he said, after he received a partial scholarship to St. John’s University, the Catholic college in Queens.

“That’s when the hammer fell on me,” he said. “An aunt was like, ‘How are you going to accept? You’re not a U.S. citizen.’ … I didn’t know the gravity of it.”

Until then, he thought that family warnings about lurking immigration officers were like ghost stories, tales parents tell to children to make them behave.

Guerrero learned that people not legally in the U.S. generally are ineligible for state and federal college financial aid. And for driver’s licenses, and work authorization, and programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

High school friends told him he was funny. So after graduation he started showing up at open-mic nights at comedy clubs. He got some laughs, and he thought, “This pays cash and they don’t ask you for papers — it’s perfect!”

Guerrero threw himself into writing and performing. By 2018 he was a Philly’s Phunniest finalist at Helium Comedy Club.

“Whenever somebody finds out I was undocumented, right away their first question would be, ‘Oh, my God, how’d you get here?’” he told the crowd. “They want to hear an awesome escape story. … How did I get here? American Airlines. I watched Erin Brockovich my whole way to freedom.”

His audience tends to be a mixture of people who have been affected by the immigration system, along with their families and allies who support migrants’ efforts to make lives in the United States.

Trump has pledged to deport millions of undocumented people beginning on his first day in office. Experts say that the plan would demand billions in tax dollars and a radical expansion of the nation’s deportation apparatus, but that even partial success could cause huge disruption, not only to those who would be arrested but also to the economy and American civic life.

At immediate risk would be 47,000 undocumented people in Philadelphia, part of 153,000 statewide.

Guerrero said that he expects Trump to do what he says. And that he intends to speak out about it.

“My style of humor is going to be even more important under this administration,” Guerrero said. “When people start seeing the horrors, when they see families being ripped apart, they’re going to need stories to be told, and they’re going to need a moment of levity.”