Terry Gross

Her new one, Upper Classy, is now streaming on Netflix.

You can tell from the titles that class and money have been defining issues in her life because she grew up in extreme poverty.

For the first seven years of her life, Christella, her mother, and three siblings were squatters in an abandoned diner in Texas with a toilet on the outside.

Christella managed to get into a theater program in high school, win theater awards, study theater in college, but had to put her own dreams and ambitions on hold and quit college twice to care for her mother and help her sister raise her children.

Eventually, Cristela broke through by performing across the country on college campuses.

In 2014, she became the first Latina to create, write, and star in a network TV show.

Her semi-autobiographical sitcom, Cristela, ran for one season on ABC.

Cristela Alonso, welcome to Fresh Air.

It is a pleasure to have you on the show.

It is so good to be here.

Oh, good.

Can we talk about what the clip was about was that half of your family was undocumented?

Can we talk about that without worrying about your family being deported now?

How old were you when your mother became a citizen?

And what was it like for you when the National Guard troops and Marines were just showing up in L.A.?

It was kind of unbelievable.

You grew up in a border town on the American side of the Texas border, and the town was just about all Mexican and Mexican-American.

And you used to cross over the border a lot to visit family on the other side in Mexico.

What was crossing the border like then?

This was in the 1980s during the Reagan administration.