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Part 2, Chapter 4: Breaking the Law
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
Vargas explains that the law never protected him, so he always questioned it. He learned how the law has always enabled some people to control others. The darkest chapters in U.S. history were all legal, like lynching, Jim Crow, Chinese exclusion, and the mass deportations of Operation Wetback. For much of its history, U.S. law restricted citizenship to “free white person[s],” while protecting the enslavement of Black people. Vargas was fascinated by how this binary of Black and white shaped U.S. history.
Many Americans—especially native-born white Americans—view their nation’s laws as a neutral, fair system to uphold justice. But Vargas shows how this kind of view (or master narrative) is only possible because of an ignorance about the history of U.S. immigration policy—which has long been designed to sustain white dominance over nonwhite (especially Black and indigenous) people. Thus, instead of viewing politics as a process of making laws to benefit all Americans, he views it as a system that some groups have captured to assert power over others. As a result, while many Americans associate the law with morality—for instance, they think that undocumented immigration is wrong because it's illegal—Vargas shows that, actually, the law has long been used for immoral ends.
Themes
In eighth grade, Vargas’s afterschool book club read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. He was captivated. Morrison’s protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, yearned for blue eyes because she had been lied to about what was beautiful. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Morrison explained that Pecola “surrendered completely to the so-called master narrative”—the story about what is beautiful, worthy, and right that people in power impose on the world.
Morrison’s work influenced Vargas so deeply because it gave him another perspective on the “master narrative” of America. It showed that people who don’t have power—including people of color, women, queer people, and undocumented people—can choose to either reject or buy into the stories that those in power tell them, which are designed to keep them subservient.
Themes
Vargas didn’t want to be a “perfect victim,” like Pecola Breedlove. He saw that there was a master narrative for illegality, and that it was also created as an exception to the norm of whiteness. He resolved not to fit into it. He concludes that “Black writers gave me permission to question America,” and this led him into other writers of color. They taught him how to create his own narrative for his life.
Just as Pecola Breedlove yearned for blue eyes (which represented whiteness and beauty), Vargas yearned for legal citizenship—which, for him, represented truly becoming American and belonging in the U.S. But writers like Toni Morrison showed him that, by challenging his assumptions about what real citizenship meant, he could free himself from the psychological burden of feeling out of place as an undocumented person in the U.S.
Themes
