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 learning that he was undocumented, Vargas started doing everything he could to act American. It often felt like a theater production. He learned about American culture by borrowing CDs, VCR tapes, and magazines from the library. After watching figure skating on TV, he started borrowing classical music from the library. Then, he moved on to hip hop and country music. Through movies, he learned about New York City—and Meryl Streep’s versatility as an actress. He learned English slang from shows like Full House; The Oprah Winfrey Show taught him about writers like Toni Morrison, while The Rosie O’Donnell Show taught him about Broadway.
Learning about American culture was still a way for Vargas to assimilate, but after learning he was undocumented, assimilation took on a different meaning: it was no longer about becoming a genuine American, but rather about hiding the fact that he wasn’t one. This reflects how closely citizenship is tied up with identity: Vargas assumed that being truly American meant having citizenship. But eventually, he came to realize that cultural identity and political participation can be just as important as citizenship. His youthful interest in television, movies, music, and theatre also shows how entertainment media—and the stories it tells—play an important role in shaping young people’s sense of themselves and their place in the world.
Themes
Rosie O’Donnell hosted the 1998 Tony Awards, so Vargas decided to watch it. The awards featured a scene from the musical Ragtime, which depicted three groups—white suburbanites, Black Harlemites, and immigrants from Europe—coming together to dance to ragtime. Vargas rewatched the song over and over: it showed him that there were white immigrants, too. In fact, he realized that everyone in the U.S., besides Native Americans, has an immigrant background. But he also wondered where the immigrants that he knew fit into the picture.
Ragtime challenged Vargas’s preconceived idea of what the United States could be. It showed him that mainstream white culture was not the only truly American culture. Rather, when the different groups come together to dance ragtime, it symbolizes how the U.S. always has been a diverse melting pot. But Vargas also noted that this melting pot narrative about American identity hadn’t yet begun to include undocumented people or people who couldn’t easily immigrate to the U.S. until the 1960s (including Filipinos).
Themes
Lola and Lolo only watched Filipino TV at home. After coming out, Vargas spent a month away, then moved back in with them. One day, he picked up a copy of The Joy Luck Club from the video store, because it was the only movie that he’d ever come across about Asian Americans. He watched it with Lola, who broke down in tears during the movie. He realized how much she sacrificed to come to the U.S., and how much she also missed his mother. He concludes that “passing as American” was his way to take some control in his life, when his immigration status made him feel like he had none.
The Joy Luck Club is about Chinese immigrant women living in San Francisco and their relationships with their Chinese American daughters. Clearly, Vargas and Lola saw an element of their own experiences in the movie: immigration also strained their family by creating geographical and cultural distance between them. This vignette also reflects storytelling’s power to humanize immigrants by authentically representing their stories. By seeing people like them represented onscreen, Vargas and Lola began to see immigration as a collective experience and source of identity in the U.S., not just as an individual burden of silent suffering.
Themes
