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Part 1, Chapter 5: Filipinos
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 Mexican student named José showed Vargas his green card and asked if he had one, too. Vargas had seen TV ads about a ballot measure to block “illegal immigrants” from using government services, but he thought that “illegals” were always Latinx. He surely didn’t know about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed his family members to come to the U.S. but also created the category of “illegal immigrants” for the first time. Mexican José concluded that Vargas (Filipino Jose) must not need a green card.
As a young man, Vargas knew that he was an immigrant and could tell that immigration was an important and contentious issue, but he didn’t know what any of this meant for him. He emphasizes how negative the public messaging about immigrants was—and how little he knew about the history of immigration in the U.S.—in order to show what kinds of information and stories were lacking in the media. Specifically, immigration policy’s history and immigrants’ actual stories were completely invisible. If Vargas had access to this information as a child, he suggests now, perhaps he would have thought very differently about his place in U.S. society.
Themes
