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Part 2, Chapter 17: Outlaw
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
After Vargas published his essay in The New York Times Magazine, the Slate media critic Jack Shafer wrote a column criticizing him for lying about his immigration status. Vargas understood Shafer’s reaction, but he also wondered how much privacy journalists are supposed to have. He wondered how Shafer would have acted in his situation, and he nearly called Shafer, but then he remembered his journalist mentors’ advice: “toughen up.”
Shafer’s reaction suggests that he didn’t appreciate the full significance of Vargas’s decision to lie on his application forms. This was quite literally Vargas’s only route to building a career in journalism. Vargas suggests that any aspiring journalist in his position, including Shafer, would have done the same. But even if they likely would have made the same decision, journalists often struggle to empathize with it. Shafer’s reaction shows how most U.S. journalists who write about immigration write from citizens’ perspectives (not immigrants’) rather than empathizing with that of immigrants themselves.
Themes
Vargas explains that career journalists generally view it as unprofessional to combine their work with advocacy. But women, queer people, and people of color are often labeled “advocacy journalists” if they write about anything related to their identities. For instance, one of Vargas’s straight, white male editors warned him that, as a gay reporter, he wouldn’t succeed if he kept writing about AIDS.
By labeling non-white male journalists’ work as “advocacy,” Vargas suggests, media organizations protect the racist tradition of defining straight, white, male, citizen voices as the neutral standard or measure of objective truth. Paradoxically, according to this ideology, a straight white citizen male’s perspective on other groups of people is always more objective and trustworthy than those other people’s perspectives on themselves—and yet these other groups’ perspectives on straight white citizen males are not seen as more objective.
Themes
Still, Vargas didn’t know how to adapt to his new role: he wasn’t just a journalist anymore, but also a political figure. He argues that many Americans don’t know how to talk about the realities of immigration—who moves where and why—and forget that it’s the foundation of their country. In particular, Americans fail to see how the U.S. government and U.S. multinational corporations have created the conditions that push so many people to migrate. History books celebrate white people’s migration, but treat it as a crime when people of color migrate—even when they go to the countries that colonized them. Vargas argues that migration is a human right, and to fulfill this right, the world needs to build “a new language around migration and the meaning of citizenship.”
The media and U.S. public often regard sources who acknowledge how their identities have shaped their lives as biased. Therefore, it’s no surprise that many Americans no longer saw Vargas as credible once he came out as undocumented. Similarly, many Americans immediately dismiss the perspectives of migrants, noncitizens, and nonwhite people as too subjective. This even happens when their perspectives are based on actual history, while more powerful white citizens’ views are sometimes based on lies and omissions about the past. As a result, the American public and media are only capable of understanding “migration and the meaning of citizenship” from one perspective: that of non-migrant citizens watching non-citizen migrants move to the U.S. Most Americans, he argues, have learned not to empathize with immigrants or view them as moral equals with true human rights (which Vargas’s “new language” about migration and citizenship would seek to do).
Themes
After publishing his essay, Vargas started wondering why the government hadn’t deported him. He wrote a story for Time magazine to answer this question and explore many of the other contradictions in U.S. immigration politics. He also interviewed Gaby Pacheco, who explained why coming out as undocumented allowed her to help others. While Time wanted a photo of Vargas on the cover, he and Gaby convinced them to use a photo of thirty-five undocumented young people instead. In collaboration with the organization America’s Voice, Vargas and Gaby helped fly these young people to New York and organized a photo shoot. He remembered how seeing Ellen DeGeneres on Time inspired him as a child.
Vargas’s Time story and cover photo were extremely significant. They meant that Vargas attained the same platform as the people who inspired him in his childhood, like Ellen DeGeneres. Of course, even more importantly, it meant that his message would spread just as widely as Ellen’s and, ideally, get taken seriously by much of the U.S. population. Finally, Vargas’s article signaled a profound shift in the way news organizations covered undocumented people—they were suddenly allowed to tell their own stories instead of being spoken for by others.
Themes
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The day after Vargas’s cover story, President Obama announced the DACA program, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gave 850,000 young undocumented people some rights, including work permits and protection from deportation. While DACA was a positive step, its recipients had to reapply and pay $500 every two years for temporary protection. Six of the thirty-five young people on the Time cover couldn’t apply for DACA—including Vargas, who was a few months above the thirty-year age cutoff. This devastated Lola. A few weeks later, Vargas was going through airport security when a T.S.A. agent recognized him. He started to worry—but then she told him her brother-in-law was undocumented. Then, she pulled a copy of Time out of her bag and asked for a signature.
Vargas’s article certainly didn’t cause the passage of DACA, and the DACA program really just included watered-down provisions from the DREAM Act (which could not pass through Congress). Still, DACA proves that immigration policy change is possible, and it shows how profoundly this kind of policy change can improve people’s lives. Therefore, DACA validated Vargas’s belief that coming out as undocumented and fighting for policy reform were worthwhile forms of public service. So did his encounter with the T.S.A. agent, which affirmed his belief in storytelling’s power to humanize marginalized and invisible people.
Themes
