Dear America Characters

Jose Antonio Vargas’s father was the son of a Manila businessman; they had virtually no relationship, since Vargas’s father abandoned Vargas and his mother when Vargas was still a toddler. He died of lung cancer in 2011.

Alida Garcia is an immigration lawyer and a close friend of Jose Antonio Vargas.

Conrad Salinas, Lolo’s nephew and Jose Antonio Vargas’s uncle, is a former rice farmer and construction worker who became an officer in the U.S. Navy. He now lives in San Diego, and he is widely respected and beloved in Vargas’s family.

Cristina Jiménez is the founder and director of the immigrant rights organization United We Dream. In 2014, she contacted Jose Antonio Vargas to ask if he wanted to represent Define American at the U.S.-Mexico border. When he arrived, Jiménez helped him strategize to avoid immigration checkpoints.

Between 2007 and his tragic death in 2015, Jake Brewer was one of Jose Antonio Vargas’s closest friends and confidants. He was also an expert in online organizing, and he helped Vargas launch Define American. Brewer’s death forced Vargas to confront his fear of intimacy and commitment.

Mark Zuckerberg is the world-famous founder of Facebook. In 2010, Jose Antonio Vargas interviewed him for a feature in The New Yorker.

Mario is the young Mexican American Border Patrol agent who interviewed Jose Antonio Vargas in the McAllen, Texas immigration detention center in 2014.

Mary Moore, Rich Fischer’s assistant, has been one of Jose Antonio Vargas’s most loyal mentors since high school. She constantly writes him greeting cards, and he considers her part of his family.

“Mexican José” was a student at Jose Antonio Vargas’s middle school. When he asked Vargas if he had a green card, Vargas realized that he didn’t understand his own immigration status.

Bill Clinton was the president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He passed and implemented “tough on crime” laws that made immigration enforcement far more violent and greatly restricted immigrants’ rights in the U.S.

Rolan is Jose Antonio Vargas’s uncle (his mother’s younger brother, and Lola and Lolo’s son). Roland moved to California just two years before Vargas, and they even shared a bedroom for much of Vargas’s youth.

Ryan Eller was a minister and activist from Kentucky who served as the campaign director for Define American.

Teresa Moore is a journalist and editor in California. She edited Jose Antonio Vargas’s writing when he was a high school student and recommended him for the San Francisco Chronicle internship that launched his career.

Toni Morrison was the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work deeply inspired Jose Antonio Vargas in his youth. (In particular, Vargas loved her first novel, The Bluest Eye.)

One of Jose Antonio Vargas’s immigration lawyers who cautioned him against publicly admitting to breaking the law in his 2011 “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” essay.

Journalist who told Jose Antonio Vargas that even when American citizens are told the facts about immigration, they often don’t care or else disbelieve these facts, due to the influence of right-wing media outlets.