Zaid Renato Consuegra Sauza never dreamed of becoming a chef. Under other circumstances, he might be living in Boston instead of Kansas City. He might have finished school. He might be making movies for a living, as he’d originally planned.

“If I was documented,” he says, “I’m 90 percent sure I would’ve taken my life a different way.”

With a tattoo wrapped around the back of his right hand and a colorful calavera and crossbones taking up most of the inside of his right forearm, Sauza certainly looks like a millennial chef. His scraggly beard and the colorful beanies he wears atop his closely cropped head seem right at home behind the counter of Pirate’s Bone Burgers, the vegan restaurant he opened in Kansas City, Missouri, earlier this year. Here, in the high-traffic Crossroads neighborhood, Sauza slings juicy beet burgers and fries topped with melty cashew cheese. His deftly executed plant-based menu and determination to build a welcoming space set him apart. “It has definitely opened a lot of eyes as to whether or not people want more vegan food here,” Kansas City food writer April Fleming says. “I think it’s clear by the response that people do.”

Named one of the city’s “rising stars” last year, fitting in is new for Sauza. He wasn’t quite 11 years old when he and his family immigrated from Mexico City to Shawnee, a porcelain-white suburb to Kansas City’s southwest. “When I got to Kansas, I realized how different it was than I had envisioned,” he says. “I thought everyone in America lived like The Nanny. That balloon popped real quick.”

At school, his classmates often bullied him for being Mexican, and being short didn’t help. And although he came to the U.S. legally on a tourist visa, he became undocumented just six months later, after overstaying the cutoff.

“I remember quite clearly when a classmate of mine called me an illegal alien,” he says. “At the time I didn’t know what that was. I knew it was bad. I knew that I was being picked on. But my only conclusion was that I looked weird—that I looked like an alien.”

In high school his family opened a movie rental shop, later expanding into a robust corner store with an array of products and its own kitchen. Working there consumed Sauza’s social life. “I remember birthdays and Christmas not being a thing,” he says. “It’s the same immigrant story you’ll hear from other people—always striving for more, but not necessarily being in the now.”

Eager to escape Kansas, Sauza moved to Boston after high school and enrolled in a continuing education film and television program at Emerson College. It was all he could afford, and it didn’t require him to provide a Social Security number. He thrived there, but when he tried to level up to a bachelor’s degree, the school refused to admit him without proof of legal status. He threw himself at the mercy of a college administrator, literally begging her, down on his knees in her office, to help him. It didn’t work.

So instead, Sauza enrolled in a community college where the rules were more lax and graduated with an associate’s degree. But then his status intervened again. He’d gotten a driver’s license—his best form of legal ID—back in Kansas, but state law had changed, and it was set to expire. There was nothing to be done but move back, where he took a job as a server at a Mexican restaurant, one of the few places that would hire him as an undocumented person.