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 his Washington Post summer internship, Vargas landed a longer two-year internship at the Post after college. Pat, Rich, Mary, and Jim encouraged him to go, but Lolo thought it was too risky. Still, Vargas went. He knew that he had to be careful—he wanted to succeed, but not reveal his immigration status. During his first months, he was paranoid and paralyzed with anxiety. He decided that he needed to either leave or tell someone about his situation. He thought about immigrating to Canada. But instead, he decided to tell everything to his professional mentor, the veteran reporter Peter Perl. To Vargas’s surprise, Perl agreed to keep his secret. It turned out that strangers were generous even in Washington.
Vargas could not stand the dissonance between his job in D.C.—which largely revolved around U.S. politics—and his undocumented status, which could have made him a social and political pariah if he went public. Meanwhile, Peter Perl’s decision to keep Vargas’s secret again shows that, even if political discourse demonizes undocumented people in the United States, individual Americans are still overwhelmingly sympathetic and caring. Vargas’s experience suggests that the difference is whether people personally know undocumented people and therefore realize that they’re worthy of the same dignity and respect as anyone else.
Themes
