Dear America

Author:: Jose Antonio Vargas Full Title:: Dear America Tags:#media/book

• themes::
  • theme 1
• Summary::
  • summary 1

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* To Lolo, America was something you wear, something you buy, something you eat, ([Location 384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=384))
* America was like a class subject I’d never taken, and there was too much to learn, too much to study, too much to make sense of. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=422))
* Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it. ([Location 456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=456))
* This dynamic—Latinos and Asians seemingly left out of the black-and-white binary—would become a dominant question in my life. Where do I go? Do I go black? Do I go white? Can I do both? ([Location 490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=490))
* race was as much about behavior—perceived behavior, expected behavior—as it was about physicality. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=498))
* Even though Lolo and Lola arrived in the U.S. nearly a decade before I did, I was their introduction to America—which is typical in intergenerational immigrant families trying to find their footing in their adopted home. ([Location 577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=577))
* But my family is from the other Mountain View, which is part of the other Silicon Valley. This is the Mountain View of immigrant families who live in cramped houses and apartments, who depend on Univision, Saigon TV News, and the Filipino Channel for news of home, not the homes they’re living in but the homes they left behind. This is the Silicon Valley of ethnic grocery stores in nondescript and dilapidated buildings, where sacks of rice and pounds of pork are cheaper, where you hear some Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese before you hear a word of English. This is the other Mountain View, in the other Silicon Valley, where the American Dream rests on the outdated and byzantine immigration system that requires families to wait for years, if not decades, to be reunited with their loved ones. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=587))
* While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act benefited Asian immigrants, it put Latinos at a disadvantage. Before 1965, immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries was largely unrestricted, and there was a government guest worker system called the bracero program that permitted millions of Mexican nationals to work in the U.S. The dissolution of the bracero program and the enactment of the 1965 immigration law created an “illegal immigrant” problem where there had been none. ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=615))
    * **Note**: The danger of complex bills having lots of effects and side effects
* Above all, it was the hardening—the emotional hardening—that I remembered most from that afternoon and the subsequent days and weeks. Something within me hardened, and it became a place no one else could go. That I would not allow anyone else to breach. I felt betrayed in ways I couldn’t yet articulate to myself or fully face. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=664))
* Second, and more importantly, writing was a form of existing, existing through the people I interviewed and the words I wrote as I struggled with where my physical being was supposed to be. Writing was also a way of belonging, a way of contributing to society while doing a public-service-oriented job that’s the antithesis of the stereotype that “illegals” are here to take, take, take. ([Location 892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=892))
* News writing, especially breaking news writing, I learned early on, depended on verbs. It was all about action. ([Location 911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=911))
* “There is always one moment in childhood,” Graham Greene once wrote, “when the door opens and lets the future in.” As the years passed, Pat, Rich, Sheri, Alexis, Mary, Daisy, C.J., Susan, and Judy, among others, are the people who would find windows and try to open them when doors were shut. They did it because they could afford to; more importantly, they did it because they wanted to. ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=950))
* To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power. ([Location 1054](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1054))
* The “how” of the story is Pecola being told that she is ugly, unattractive, unwanted. She takes it all in, so much that she wishes for blue eyes. The “why” of the story haunted me. Why was Pecola wishing for blue eyes when she had black ones? Who told her to want blue eyes? Why did she believe them? ([Location 1081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1081))
* Being “illegal” translated to limitations of what my life was and what it could be. ([Location 1091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1091))
* Moyers: The master narrative. What is—that’s life? Morrison: No, it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction. History. It has a certain point of view. ([Location 1103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1103))
* White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness—how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal—hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what they’ve constructed. ([Location 1117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1117))
* “You have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.” ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1129))
* There is no passing alone. At every challenging, complicated, and complicating juncture of my life—getting to college, getting a job, getting a driver’s license so I could have a valid proof of identification so I could get a job, keeping the job—a stranger who did not remain a stranger saved ([Location 1275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1275))
* Driving down Highway 175 that night in Texas, as Stevie was reminding me not to worry about a thing, I couldn’t help but worry about everything. Even when it seemed like everything was going well, really well, I worried about everything. ([Location 1380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1380))
    * **Note**: Always in a scarcity mindset
* Passing was purgatory. It was exhausting, always looking over your shoulder, waiting to get found out, always wondering if you’re not passing enough. Paranoia was like some viral disease that infected my whole body. Stress was oxygen. I couldn’t be present for my own life. Even—no, especially—on a day like this. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1399))
* It was the easy answer to Zuckerberg’s easy question, the kind of question I had never fully answered since I found out that I was not supposed to be here. I never answered it fully on government forms, be it while applying for jobs or a driver’s license. I rarely answered it fully when friends, coworkers, and even potential lovers inquired about why I had not visited my mother or why I rarely talked about her, or why my grandparents raised me, or why I couldn’t take advantage of an all-expense-paid trip to Switzerland, or why I didn’t want to work in Baghdad and cover the war in Iraq. ([Location 1431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1431))
* For more than a decade, I carried the weight of trying to succeed in my profession—I need that byline, I need that story, I need to be seen—while wanting to be invisible so I didn’t draw too much attention to myself. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1455))
* There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1467))
* To free myself—in fact, to face myself—I had to write my story. ([Location 1472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1472))
* I had spoken with at least ten immigration lawyers, all of whom told me that telling my full story publicly was not a good idea. One lawyer went as far as calling it “legal suicide.” Talking to lawyers made me feel like I was carrying an incurable disease, with everyone offering their diagnoses. Few offered treatments. ([Location 1475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1475))
    * **Note**: Always on the safe side for things that are uncommon. Have to go against conventional advice in these cases where the wisdom isn’t clear and the advice isn’t from people who have gone through it.
* About “coming out,” which I’ve done twice in my life: it’s less about “coming out” and more about letting people in. I learned that you come out to let people in. The reality is, the closet doesn’t only hide you from strangers. The closet also hides you from the people you love. ([Location 1494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1494))
* Taking a page from the playbook of the LGBTQ rights movement, we believe that you cannot change the politics of immigration until you change the culture in which immigrants are seen. Storytelling is central to our strategy: collecting stories of immigrants from all walks of life, creating original content (documentaries, databases, graphics, etc.), and leveraging stories we’ve collected and stories we’ve told to influence how news and entertainment media portray immigrants, both documented and undocumented. ([Location 1540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1540))
* Publishing the essay, I realized, was breaking a cardinal rule in journalism: write the story, don’t be the story. ([Location 1558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1558))
* The government has no problem taking our money; it just won’t recognize that we have the right to earn it. ([Location 1574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1574))
* Nationwide, the amount of taxes that the Internal Revenue Service collects from undocumented workers ranges from almost $2.2 million in Montana, which has an estimated undocumented population of four thousand, to more than $3.1 billion in California, which is home to more than three million undocumented immigrants. According to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants nationwide pay an estimated 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes on average. To put that in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent. ([Location 1578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1578))
    * **Tags**: [[blue]]
* Annually, undocumented workers pay $12 billion to the Social Security Trust Fund. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1591))
    * **Tags**: [[blue]]
* Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified. I don’t how many times I’ve explained to a fellow journalist that even though it is an illegal act to enter the country without documents, it is not illegal for a person to be in the country without documents. That is a clear and crucial distinction. I am not a criminal. This is not a crime. ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1600))
* My truth—the facts of how I got here, the context in which I had to lie in order to survive—was an agenda. I was no longer just writing the stories, I was now being written about, subject to how other people perceive the story based on their knowledge of the issue. ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1605))
* To achieve journalistic “objectivity,” we sacrifice people’s humanity. ([Location 1610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1610))
    * **Note**: How do we maintain balance of perspective without losing humanity and doing balance for the sake of balance
* Context is the invisible ghost that haunts many TV segments, radio hits, and news articles. Most journalists and media influencers I’ve spoken to or have been interviewed by do not know basic information about immigration and how the system works—or doesn’t. ([Location 1645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1645))
* You cannot separate the documented from the undocumented population, because many undocumented people, myself included, have family members who are U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents. At least nine million people, in fact, are part of what are called “mixed-status” families—households in which one member or more is here legally and the others are not. We’re all mixed up. ([Location 1672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1672))
* Between 1965 and 2015, new immigrants and their offspring accounted for 55 percent of U.S. population growth, according to the Pew Research Center. In the next fifty years, immigrants and their offspring are expected to comprise 88 percent of our country’s total population growth. In other words, a country that’s been long characterized by its black-and-white binary now faces a far more complex and unparalleled demographic reality. ([Location 1679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1679))
    * **Tags**: [[blue]]
* All the while, our country’s framer-in-chief is President Donald Trump, who considers members of the news media who call out his half-truths and bald-faced lies as “the enemy of the people.” ([Location 1699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1699))
* Here in the U.S., the language we use to discuss immigration does not recognize the realities of our lives based on conditions that we did not create and cannot control. For the most part, why are white people called “expats” while people of color are called “immigrants”? Why are some people called “expats” while others are called “immigrants”? What’s the difference between a “settler” and a “refugee”? Language itself is a barrier to information, a fortress against understanding the inalienable instinct of human beings to move. ([Location 1751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1751))
* Migration is the most natural thing people do, the root of how civilizations, nation-states, and countries were established. The difference, however, is that when white people move, then and now, it’s seen as courageous and necessary, celebrated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality. Is it a crime? Will they assimilate? When will they stop? ([Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=1766))
* I’m neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I don’t identify as a liberal or a conservative. In my mind, progress—being progressive—should not be limited by politics, and certainly not dictated by one party. But since I’m an undocumented and gay person of color, I’m considered a progressive. And the thing about being an “activist” in progressive circles is, you’re never enough. ([Location 2025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2025))
* I exchanged a life of passing as an American and a U.S. citizen so I could work for a life of constantly claiming my privilege so I could exist in the progressive activist world. ([Location 2083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2083))
* The task of dismantling the mass detention and deportation of immigrants is so towering that people who are supposedly on the same side try to stand taller than the next person. Internecine fighting has plagued all kinds of movements since time immemorial. The difference now, however, is the publicness of social media. It’s not enough we attack systems, we also battle each other, out in the open. Bullying is commonplace. In the past few years of navigating the progressive activist circle, I’ve learned that there are all kinds of borders, none higher, steeper, more consequential than the borders between human beings—even among people who are fighting for the same thing but may not even agree on how to define what that thing is. ([Location 2085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2085))
    * **Note**: In the end we destroy each other
* Why do they think what they think? And in my experience, many people of color, including immigrants, can be as isolated from white people as white people are to them. White people are seen less as individuals but as oppressive, overwhelming systems, systems they are ignorant of or indifferent to, if not blindly complicit in. So, where do we all meet? ([Location 2109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2109))
* Others feel that America is not home to them, and they’re not made to feel like America is home. America is simply where they live, where they work, where they make money. And for some, home is the culture of their home country, not the culture of an adopted land that asks them to assimilate, whatever that may mean. ([Location 2137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2137))
* I wish I could say that being a global citizen is enough, but I haven’t been able to see the world, and I’m still trying to figure out what citizenship, from any country, means to me. I wish I could say that being a human being is enough, but there are times I don’t feel like a human being. I feel like a thing. A thing to be explained and understood, tolerated and accepted. A thing that spends too much time educating people so it doesn’t have to educate itself on what it has become. I feel like a thing that can’t just be. ([Location 2139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2139))
* I cannot vote. Which ID will I use to vote? My American Express card? Though I’ve lived in this country for twenty-five years, though I pay all kinds of taxes, which I am happy and willing to pay, since I am a product of public schools and public libraries, I have no voice in the democratic process. Think of it as taxation without legalization. ([Location 2235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2235))
* Nothing is better. I thought coming out as undocumented, liberating myself from the lies and the need to pass, would make all of this better. I was wrong. Trading a private life that was in limbo for a public life that is still in limbo made it worse. In recent years, I’ve increasingly become a recluse, as if some part of me has already left, since I may have to leave anyway. I’ve started separating myself from people, even from my closest friends. ([Location 2261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2261))
* citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience. ([Location 2381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2381))
* And that insidious message—the narrative of immigrants as potential terrorists, a threat to our national security—blanketed news coverage. ([Location 2457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2457))
    * **Note**: That’s what terrorists wanted. An America of fear and suspicion and paranoia. Not an America that is welcoming and secure in herself. Worst thing we could do to extremist ideology is welcome everyone with open arms
* What transpired in the summer of 2014 epitomizes the moral bankruptcy that characterizes how we talk about immigration in America during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Headlines from even reputable news organizations like CBS News read: “Is the Surge of Illegal Child Immigrants a National Security Threat?” ([Location 2519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2519))
    * **Tags**: [[pink]]
* Home is not something I should have to earn. Humanity is not some box I should have to check. It occurred to me that I’d been in an intimate, long-term relationship all along. I was in a toxic, abusive, codependent relationship with America, and there was no getting out. ([Location 2617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2617))
    * **Tags**: [[pink]]
* Sitting alone in that cell, I concluded that none of this was an accident. None of it. You know how politicians and the news media that cover them like to say that we have a “broken immigration system”? Inside that cell I came to the conclusion that we do not have a broken immigration system. We don’t. What we’re doing—waving a “Keep Out!” flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in—is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don’t want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits—all of that serves a purpose. People are forced to lie, people spend years if not decades passing in some kind of purgatory. And step by step, this immigration system is set up to do exactly what it does. ([Location 2621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2621))
* As the decades have passed, their relationship, like my relationship with Mama, is mostly transactional, measured by the American products that we ship over to the Philippines and the U.S. dollars that we provide that Mama can’t live without. We think we can bury what we’ve lost under all the things we can buy. When the truth is, the loss that my mother can’t express to her mother is what I struggle to express to her now. ([Location 2679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0776TSKBJ&location=2679))