Dear America Themes

Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen is the journalist and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas’s memoir about his life, work, and activism as an undocumented American. In 1993, at age 12, Vargas left his native Philippines to live with his grandparents (Lolo and Lola) in California. But four years later, he learned that he was undocumented. Nevertheless, he managed to attend college and become a wildly successful journalist: he covered the 2008…

Jose Antonio Vargas starts and ends Dear America by emphasizing how immigration fractures families. If they leave the U.S., undocumented migrants can’t easily return; meanwhile, their relatives generally can’t get visas to visit the U.S. As a result, undocumented people often go decades without seeing their relatives abroad. Vargas hasn’t seen his mother or siblings in over 25 years—and he doesn’t know if or when they will ever reunite. This separation has been devastating. In…

As soon as Jose Antonio Vargas’s high school English teacher introduced him to journalism, he knew that he wanted to be a reporter. When America rejected him, journalism became his “way of writing [him]self into America.” By reporting for the school newspaper—and later the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Daily News, and Washington Post—Vargas channeled his sense of fear and confusion into storytelling. At first, while he felt like he couldn’t tell…