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Part 1, Chapter 3: Crittenden Middle School
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dear America, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Citizenship, Belonging, and Identity
Family, Love, and Intimacy
Immigration Politics and Policy
Journalism, Storytelling, and the Power of Truth
Summary
Analysis
In middle school, a Filipina classmate told Vargas that he didn’t look Filipino. Vargas explains that his middle school reflected California’s changing demographics in the 1990s: it was a third Latinx, a third Asian, and the rest Black and white. In the Philippines, Vargas never learned about the difference between Black and white Americans. But in America, it suddenly mattered. Still, he didn’t understand race: where did the categories Black, white, Asian, and Latinx come from? He remembers how the O.J. Simpson verdict divided the white and Black kids at his school, but the Latinx and Asian kids didn’t know which side to join. In fact, he had no idea where Filipinos fit into America, which was always polarized between Black and white people.
Vargas’s uncertainty about his race contributed to his sense that he didn’t fit into the U.S. As an immigrant, Vargas had an outsider’s view of race and racism in the U.S. Thus, while native-born Americans might take racial hierarchies for granted, Vargas clearly saw how they are arbitrary, counterproductive, and yet central to American life. His high school’s demographics reflect the way immigration has changed and challenged these hierarchies since the 1960s. Indeed, as he notes later, contemporary immigration policy is largely driven by conflicts over who and what gets to count as American. At base, this is about race—or, more specifically, about white Americans’ desire to hold onto political, cultural, and economic dominance.
Themes
