Welcoming America's United Voices, Portrait of a Dreamer, created by TBD in March 2019, centres on DACA artist Fidencio Fifeld-Perez and his papercutting
How Welcoming America Used Portrait of a Dreamer to Humanize Immigration
United Voices, Portrait of a Dreamer is a 2019 public service film campaign created by San Francisco-based creative agency TBD for Welcoming America, centred on Fidencio Fifeld-Perez, an undocumented artist and DACA Dreamer who arrived in the United States at age seven and used maps and Mexican papercutting techniques known as papel picados to create his own interpretation of the George Washington portrait on the dollar bill.
Published in March 2019 in the United States, the campaign forms part of a broader series titled United Voices, which, as documented by Ads of the World, comprised multiple short films each foregrounding a distinct immigrant experience and perspective. A second film in the series profiled Natalie Ringsmuth, founder of the #unitecloud initiative, who is documented as working to bring together a town divided along lines of ethnicity, religion, and background. Together the films construct a mosaic of immigrant identity rooted in specific, verifiable human stories rather than in abstraction or political argument.
Welcoming America commissioned the project at a moment of acute national debate over immigration policy in the United States, seeking to shift the terms of that debate from the statistical and legislative toward the personal and cultural. David Lubell, founder and founding director of Welcoming America, is quoted on Little Black Book as stating: "We want people in their community to learn stories about immigrants' contribution to their communities so we are trying to humanize what is a very heated debate." That stated objective anchors the entire creative and strategic architecture of the United Voices series. The campaign contains two documented media assets according to Clapboard and earns a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100, reflecting solid conceptual integrity in a category where creative ambition frequently outpaces measurable reach.
Welcoming America operates at the intersection of civic organizing and public interest communication. Founded on a model documented by welcomingamerica.org as rooted in community-level relationship building, the organisation had by 2014 partnered with the White House on the Building Welcoming Communities Campaign as part of the Task Force on New Americans' strategic plan, according to stateofwelcoming.org. By 2016, that initiative had reached fifty cities, with Welcoming America headquartered in Decatur, Georgia. The 2019 United Voices campaign, as noted by lbbonline.com, marked a transition from community-organizing programmes toward a national mass-media phase, a shift that required a different creative register entirely.
The strategic insight driving Portrait of a Dreamer is precise: abstract arguments about immigration policy do not change attitudes, but individual human narratives can. This approach aligns with a principle well established in social psychology research on perspective-taking, and it positions the campaign in deliberate contrast to the quantitative, aggregate framing used by many institutional actors in the immigration debate. Where organisations like the American Immigration Council and the National Immigration Forum have deployed data-led advocacy, TBD chose portraiture — literal and figurative — as its primary instrument of persuasion.
A 2020 study by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, as cited by icmpd.org, analysed one hundred and thirty-five migration communication campaigns conducted between 2009 and 2019, primarily across Europe, West Asia, and North Africa, and found that narrative-centred approaches consistently outperformed information-only formats in shifting audience sentiment. While that study does not address the United States market directly, its findings provide credible structural support for the storytelling strategy TBD deployed here. The immigration-inclusion advertising category in the United States is project-based and funded by foundations, NGOs, and government bodies rather than operating as a monetised market, a context that shapes both the ambition and the constraints of campaigns like United Voices.
Fidencio Fifeld-Perez is the creative and human centre of Portrait of a Dreamer. An undocumented artist who arrived in the United States at age seven, Fifeld-Perez uses maps and the traditional Mexican papercutting technique known as papel picados to construct his own interpretation of the George Washington portrait printed on the American dollar bill, as documented by Ads of the World and Tbd Ooo. The choice of subject matter is not incidental: the dollar bill is among the most universally recognised symbols of American national identity, and the act of remaking it through a distinctly Mexican folk art tradition performs, in visual terms, exactly the argument the campaign makes in words — that immigrant culture does not dilute American identity but actively enriches and reinterprets it.
The film format allows that process of making to unfold in real time for the viewer, turning craft into argument. This is a structural decision with significant creative consequences: by showing the work being made rather than simply displaying the finished object, the campaign implicates the viewer in an act of witness, producing a different quality of attention than a static image campaign could achieve. The documentary register chosen by the production team reinforces authenticity, resisting the polished aesthetic conventions of traditional advertising in favour of the observational grammar associated with journalism and social documentary.
The creative team at TBD was led by Chief Creative Officer and agency founder Rafael Rizuto, with Sara Uhelski serving as creative director and copywriter and Leila Moussaoui as art director, according to sarauhelski.com and lbbonline.com. Their collective decision to centre the film on the physical act of papercutting rather than on interview testimony alone gives Portrait of a Dreamer a visual specificity that distinguishes it from the talking-head format that dominates public interest documentary filmmaking in the United States.
No verified performance data for United Voices, Portrait of a Dreamer is publicly available. No view counts, reach figures, sentiment shift measurements, or conversion metrics have been disclosed by Welcoming America, TBD, or any third-party source consulted for this analysis, including lbbonline.com, Ads of the World, or tbd.ooo. In the absence of quantitative evidence, structural analysis provides the most reliable basis for assessment.
The campaign's core strength is specificity. Portrait of a Dreamer avoids the generalising impulse that weakens much public interest communication in the United States by anchoring every claim to a single, named, visually documented individual. Fidencio Fifeld-Perez is not a representative type; he is a particular person with a particular skill, and the film is built around that particularity. That choice reduces the risk of audience resistance triggered by perceived political abstraction, which represents a meaningful strategic advantage in a polarised national environment.
The documentary format carries its own credibility signals, borrowing the epistemic authority of journalism without requiring journalistic infrastructure to produce. The papel picados device simultaneously functions as cultural education for audiences unfamiliar with the tradition and as a visual metaphor legible to audiences who are, making the film unusually efficient in its communicative economy. The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects this balance: the campaign demonstrates genuine craft and conceptual clarity, but its limited documented distribution and the absence of a measurable call to action constrain its overall effectiveness rating within the public service category.
United Voices, Portrait of a Dreamer is a 2019 public service film by TBD for Welcoming America. It profiles Fidencio Fifeld-Perez, a DACA Dreamer who arrived in the United States at age seven and uses Mexican papercutting techniques to reimagine the George Washington dollar bill portrait, humanising the immigration debate through individual creative storytelling.
TBD, a San Francisco-based creative agency, created the United Voices campaign for Welcoming America. The creative team included Chief Creative Officer Rafael Rizuto, creative director and copywriter Sara Uhelski, and art director Leila Moussaoui, according to sarauhelski.com and lbbonline.com. The campaign was published in the United States in March 2019.
Fidencio Fifeld-Perez is an undocumented artist and DACA Dreamer who arrived in the United States at age seven. Portrait of a Dreamer features him because his use of Mexican papercutting, known as papel picados, to reinterpret the dollar bill George Washington portrait makes visible the intersection of immigrant identity and American iconography in a concrete, visually compelling way.
United Voices comprised multiple short films centred on distinct immigrant experiences, according to Ads of the World. A second documented film profiled Natalie Ringsmuth, founder of #unitecloud, who works to unite a community divided by ethnicity, religion, and background. Each film in the series foregrounds a specific individual rather than generalising immigrant experience.
Portrait of a Dreamer holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects genuine conceptual clarity and craft in the documentary approach and the papel picados creative device, balanced against limited documented distribution reach and the absence of a measurable public call to action within the public service advertising category in the United States.
The 2019 United Voices campaign marked a transition in Welcoming America's approach, moving from community-organising programmes toward national mass-media communication, according to lbbonline.com. The organisation had previously partnered with the White House on the Building Welcoming Communities Campaign in 2014, which reached fifty cities by 2016, per stateofwelcoming.org, before commissioning this film-led public interest strategy.
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