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
Six hours after he entered the detention center, Vargas went to an interview with a young Border Patrol agent named Mario. (All of the agents were of Mexican descent.) Mario asked when Vargas crossed the border and was surprised to hear that he was from the Philippines. Mario also put an accent on “José,” but Vargas explained that Filipinos write “Jose” without the accent. Mario asked who Vargas arrived to the U.S. with and why he became a journalist. Vargas vaguely said that he wanted to see his name in the paper. Soon, the agents told him that he was getting released—but not why. They also said that there was a crowd of reporters outside. On his way out, Vargas asked them what “miedo” means—it’s “fear.”
This interview was Vargas’s only real human contact with the law. And it was relatively cold and impersonal. Mario and the other border patrol agents weren’t anti-immigration radicals, but the children and family members of immigrants. They didn’t hate Vargas; they were just doing their jobs. And they clearly weren’t the ones deciding whether he would be deported or released. In other words, the people behind the Border Patrol were as nameless and faceless to Vargas as immigrants are to the majority of Americans. Indeed, because of the language barrier, the young boys in Vargas’s cell were anonymous strangers to him, too. The one word he captured, “miedo,” offers a glimpse of the profound suffering that U.S. immigration policy was inflicting on them.
Themes
