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 fact, Vargas argues that it hasn’t just cut him off from his family, but also undermined his very ability to form loving relationships at all. However, it hasn’t changed his fundamental human need for love. Fortunately, he has managed to surround himself with loving, generous mentors and peers who treat him like family. This, more than any other factor, has allowed him to thrive in the U.S. While Vargas still struggles to love others, then, his mentors have taught him that love is still powerful—and he’s still worthy of it. In addition, they have shown him that he can always rebuild his capacity for love in the future. Thus, while Vargas shows how immigrants’ experiences often tragically cut off their capacity for intimacy, he argues that they can never fully lose it because the need to love and be loved is universal.
Vargas shows how immigration wounds people by separating them from their loved ones. Most significantly, Vargas’s journey to the United States separated him from his mother—who was supposed to follow him to the U.S., but never could. Because of his undocumented status, Vargas can’t leave the U.S. and expect to get back in. As a result, Vargas and his mother haven’t seen each other since the day Vargas left Manila in 1993. Vargas struggles to capture how deeply this separation has affected him. He often avoids having serious, emotional conversations with his mother because it’s just too painful—they have been cut out of one another’s lives for too long. But Vargas notes that this is part of a broader cycle: Vargas’s mother was also separated from her mother (Lola), who also migrated to the U.S. These severed relationships embody the human cost of U.S. immigration policy, which doesn’t give undocumented people any realistic hope of seeing their beloved family members again. Vargas sees that others share the same trauma. When the Border Patrol detained him in a Texas immigration jail, he was surrounded by young boys from Central America who migrated alone to seek asylum in the United States. He immediately started wondering what thoughts, feelings, and experiences led their parents to send them on such a treacherous journey. This reminded Vargas of his own mother sending him to the U.S. In this moment, he recognized that undocumented people endure similar trauma, no matter their particular stories or countries of origin.
Next, Vargas shows how the trauma of undocumented life has cut him off from his own emotions. He argues that, for the time being, he is only capable of “distant intimacy.” He struggles to get close to people and has never had a long-term relationship because he so strongly associates love with pain and separation. This shows how the trauma of immigration can harm people’s ability to make attachments later on in life. Yet, after his close friend Jake Brewer died in a tragic accident, Vargas finally acknowledged and started to address his tendency to run away from intimacy. Thus, while he understands how separation from his family has deeply scarred him, he also believes that he still retains the capacity to love—somewhere, somehow.
But by finding unconditional love from others—like the mentors, colleagues, and activists he meets on his journey—Vargas learns that he will never fully lose his ability to love, even if it is damaged. Most importantly, Vargas recognizes the power of love through the network of mentors he affectionately calls his “white family.” They include Pat Hyland, Rich Fischer, Mary Moore, and Jim Strand, among others. When Vargas was in high school, these adults taught him to drive, set him up with immigration lawyers, and sent him to college. And they continued to support him throughout his journalism career. Vargas fully credits them with his success, and with showing him the value of unconditionally loving relationships. Vargas feels the same way about the friends, immigration lawyers, and activists who have fought alongside him and helped him run Define American over the last decade. For instance, when he realizes that he might get captured by the Border Patrol at the southern border, his friends Alida Garcia and Ryan Eller immediately fly down to help him. Vargas deeply appreciates his friends’ love, even if he doesn’t feel fully able to repay it. Vargas’s thirtieth birthday party clearly captures the bittersweet mix of pain and hope that he associates with love. He had long compartmentalized his life, separating his friends, “white family,” and real family. He worried that mixing them would lead to conflict and embarrassment. But when he saw them all mix at his party, he realized that this separation was a mistake. The party clearly showed him that, even if he constantly feels isolated and alone, he truly does belong somewhere, and people really do love him. In other words, his party helped him identify and accept the power of love, but also acknowledge how he spent so many years running away from it.
Thus, Vargas shows how immigration can be emotionally traumatic, but he also shows how immigrants like him can learn to overcome this trauma in the long term. At the end of Dear America, he has a long, emotional conversation with his mother for the first time in many years. While he knows that his relationship with her will always be scarred by their separation, and he will always face a tragic choice between being with her and staying in his country, he also ends the book with a sincere faith that he will be able to love again.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Love, and Intimacy ThemeTracker
Family, Love, and Intimacy Quotes in Dear America
This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book—at its core—is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.
As the Continental Airlines flight left the tarmac, I peeked outside the window. I had heard that my native Philippines, a country of over seven thousand islands, was an archipelago. I didn’t really understand what that meant until I saw the clusters of islands down below, surrounded by water. So much water, embracing so many islands, swallowing me up as the airplane soared through the sky.
What happened to all that love and longing I felt for the family and friends I’d left? Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it. I don’t think I would ever love Mama again in the childlike, carefree, innocent way I loved her while writing that letter. I don’t know where that young boy went.
I ended up watching Lola watch the movie, wondering how much she had given up to come here, how rarely she got to see her own daughter. At that moment, I realized it wasn’t just me who missed my mother—Lola longed for my mama, too. But I was too selfish to want to see it, too absorbed with my own pain.
Without realizing it, I replaced Mama, to whom I barely spoke at the time, with Pat, Sheri, Mary, and Gail. I couldn’t talk to my own mother while I was collecting mother figures.
As we walked down Montgomery Street, looking for his parked car, Rich broke the silence.
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re already here,” Rich said. “Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”
I’m not sure where my life would have gone without those words. I pocketed and referenced them whenever any kind of doubt surfaced. Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.
Recently, after meeting some members of my “white family,” which is what I call the folks from Mountain View High School, a Mexican American friend asked me why I think all those white people helped me. Was it “white guilt”? The “white savior” thing? I laughed out loud. It’s neither of those. I told him that even though I know that they’re all white—physically, that is—I didn’t think of them as white people when I was growing up. I associated white people with people who make you feel inferior, people who condescend to you, people who question why you are the way you are without acknowledging that you, too, are a human being with the same needs and wants.
Journalism was a way of separating what I do from who I am, a way of justifying my compromised, unlawful existence to myself: My name may be at the top of this story, I may have done all the reporting and the writing, but I’m not even supposed to be here, so I’m not really here.
Since I began writing, the three most dangerous words in the English language for me have been “I,” “me,” and “my.”
As people mingled with each other through the buffet dinner of chicken curry, samosas, biryani, and naan, I realized that I had made a mistake by keeping everyone apart all these years. I was afraid that they wouldn’t have anything to talk about. It was not until my family life, my school life, and my work life all converged in that Indian restaurant that I discovered that they indeed had something in common: their generosity to me.
And to be seen by so many people, so many good people, meant that I was here, and maybe even that I was supposed to be here.
Sitting on the floor, staring at the boys in the cell, I kept thinking of their parents, the fear they must have felt knowing that they needed to do what they needed to do. I also kept thinking of my mother, wondering as I had so many times over all these years what she told herself as she said good-bye to me at that airport twenty-five years ago.
“Maybe,” Mama said, her voice growing fainter for a moment, “maybe it’s time to come home.”
