Dear America
Ratings10
Average rating4.2
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER “This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American.” —Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow “l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured.” —Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins “This book couldn’t be more timely and more necessary.” —Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of Mokha Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms. “This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.” —Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
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Listened to the audio, which was read by the author. A relatively quick read, just under 6 hours.
Oooh, the last line was chilling - after 30-some-odd years of being undocumented in the United States, with no obvious path forward - Vargas' mom was like, maybe it's time to come back to the Philippines*? (I have to assume he said no, since he'd had so many opportunities to leave over those years, knowing he might not be able to make it back to the only life he knows. And also as he mentioned, Philippines leadership wasn't exactly gung-ho about gay men.) *Vargas' mom put him on a plane when he was a tween with the intention of following him later, but per the book was never legally able to make her own way to the U.S.
I appreciated Vargas' story a lot, especially because it provided a different perspective than the ones we see most often from the southern borders. Especially as he became a journalist as an adult - I loved hearing about the newsrooms and his career at WaPo and his technology writing back when it was The Facebook. He talked about his “coming out” as undocumented and all the ways he was forced to lie to survive (getting a job, getting a license, etc.) once he found out he was not in the U.S. legally (and DACA hadn't been invented yet). The descriptions of his travel around the country and speaking to people of all walks of life about the experiences of being undocumented and what undocumented people actually want and need from their adopted homeland, and the policies that came in and out over the years that somehow never applied to him, leaving him in a perpetual state of limbo.
And ohhhhh the stuff about the Texas border and his being detained in Brownsville/McAllen. I mean, I know the Powers That Be in Texas have basically never done anything good for our neighbors to the south, but Vargas could have been in way worse trouble if he didn't have journalist and ambassador friends in high places from all his years of reporting.
I'd recommend. I didn't wholeheartedly love it, but it was very good.
