“I have these little red cards,” says Ignacio, a young immigrant rights activist, near the end of Yosimar Reyes’s new play No llegamos aquí solos, at Teatro Visión in San Jose, California, Feb. 12-22. “They’re ‘Know Your Rights’ cards, but honestly? I think we should make ‘Know Your Neighbors’ cards.”

That is Reyes’s play in a nutshell. Fired up by the need to prepare his neighbors in East San Jose’s historic Latine enclave of Mayfair for ICE raids he’s sure are coming any minute, Ignacio learns that there are better ways to resist than to scold and lecture, and that previous generations—including Mama Doña, the grandmother who brought him from Mexico as a child—have much to teach him about solidarity in the face of adversity.

“Sometimes you can become so focused on trying to activate people that you become dogmatic in your practice,” said Reyes, a DACA recipient who was named the 2024-25 poet laureate of Santa Clara County. “You forget that listening is very important. Ignacio is caught up in being responsive to all the news on his phone. So he feels the urgency of now, but he forgets that these people lived already through this, right? This is not new for them.”

The play’s director, Rodrigo García, who also serves as Teatro Visión’s artistic director, highlighted the challenge of gentrification, a trend many San Joseans are facing, which has cultural as well as economic impacts. “Where are the people’s stories going,” García wondered, “once the big buildings come in and the landscape changes?”

The play’s title, which translates to “we did not arrive here alone,” suggests an answer.

“I’m exploring this idea of how all these people who come to this country are all strangers, and somehow have to become families, because they’re up against the same thing,” said Reyes, who fondly remembers his grandmother cooking for day laborers who came to the U.S. on their own. “That’s what I witnessed growing up—the way our community shows up for each other.”