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 the truth about his own life, he knew that he could at least make a living telling other people’s truths. Eventually, though, he decided that he needed to tell his own story, too. This is why he came out as undocumented. In part, Vargas chose to do so because he wanted to define the meaning of his own life for himself, rather than letting others define it for him. But he also came to see publishing his story as the right thing to do for others, because it could help humanize undocumented people and educate the public about immigration issues. Vargas uses his own experience to illustrate the power of journalism and storytelling. Writing, he argues, can change the world by empowering the people who do it, humanizing the people it’s about, and educating the people who read it.
Vargas first became attracted to writing because he saw how storytelling can empower people who otherwise get ignored or forgotten. Vargas first understood this when he started reading African American writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin in middle school. He realized that their insights about power, identity, and exclusion in the United States fit his own experiences better than anything he learned at school. Moreover, he saw that African American writers insisted on defining their own story instead of letting the white establishment do it for them. This is why Vargas says that “Black writers gave me permission to question America.” He hoped that, by becoming a writer, he could do the same for others. Vargas applied this lesson to journalism. In everyday life, Vargas felt like he couldn’t express his true self—people saw his race, immigration status, and sexuality, but not his real character or talents. But writing allowed him to exist in America on equal footing with other people and tell his own story in his own voice, when everyone around him seemed determined to deny him that right.
Over time, Vargas also learned that writing can contribute to movements for social justice by humanizing the people behind them. In the context of immigrant rights, he believes that storytelling is crucial to help the U.S. public understand the true cost of American immigration policies. He points out that many Americans view undocumented immigrants as faceless laborers—as political symbols, rather than human beings. But he thinks that this is because the public doesn’t hear their stories. In turn, this is why he decided to publicly come out as undocumented, start the organization Define American, and write articles like his 2012 Time magazine cover story about the lives of young undocumented Americans. He wanted to show that there are diverse kinds of undocumented immigrants and that they all have different experiences, but are united by the harm U.S. immigration policy has done to them. And, while Vargas has faced plenty of ignorance and hatred because of this journalism, he has also connected with many people because of it. In one particularly touching moment, a TSA agent recognized him and, instead of detaining him for being undocumented, asked him to autograph a copy of his Time cover story instead. She then explained that her brother-in-law is undocumented. Vargas’s article connected with her because it showed her that her brother-in-law’s experience wasn’t isolated. This shows how storytelling can persuade people by connecting with them on a personal, human level.
Finally, Vargas deeply believes that good writing can change the world (and improve U.S. immigration policy) by informing the public. Vargas points out that one of the main barriers to change in the U.S. is that most Americans—including even journalists—simply know nothing about the U.S. immigration system. Therefore, they do not understand how uniquely cruel and ineffective it is compared to other countries’. For instance, they assume that the U.S. has always used military force at the southern border, rather than recognizing that this has been a deliberate policy choice since the 1990s. In other words, because they don’t know how the system was created, they assume that it’s natural—that it has always been that way and will always stay that way. This is why Vargas argues that, if journalists, activists, and educators actually want to change the U.S. immigration system, they have to teach Americans about the reality of it. While most of the media focuses on the polarizing political controversies surrounding immigration, Vargas believes that the key to moving the nation forward is accurately recounting the facts about immigration and empathetically telling people’s immigration stories. He concludes that journalists are uniquely poised to do this.
For much of his life, Vargas loved journalism because it allowed him to ask questions and tell stories for a living—but also because it didn’t require him to discuss or confront his own identity. Nevertheless, Vargas eventually realized that he needed to tell his own story if he wanted to harness the true power of writing. This is why he publicly came out as undocumented in 2011, founded Define American, and wrote this book. He hopes that, if Americans can understand how the U.S. immigration system actually works, learn about its history, and empathize with his and other immigrants’ personal experiences, then they can eventually change the conditions immigrants face.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Journalism, Storytelling, and the Power of Truth ThemeTracker
Journalism, Storytelling, and the Power of Truth 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.
Still, if the Philippines was America’s “first real temptation,” as Mark Twain wrote, then America, given its imperialist history, also became a temptation for Filipinos eager to escape poverty and provide for their families. After all, if Americans could come and claim the Philippines, why can’t Filipinos move to America?
Ragtime connected dots I didn’t know existed, allowing me to better understand American history in ways my textbooks didn’t fully explain. I would learn that except for Native Americans, whose tribes were already here before the colonists and the Pilgrims landed, and African Americans, who were uprooted from their homes and imported to this country as slaves, everyone was an immigrant. I didn’t know what legal papers they had, or if they needed them, or if they were considered “illegals,” too, but white people were immigrants, like my family are immigrants.
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.
I didn’t realize it then, but the more stories I reported on, the more people I interviewed, the more I realized that writing was the freest thing I could do, unencumbered by borders and legal documents and largely dependent on my skills and talent. Reporting, interviewing, and writing felt like the safest, surest place in my everyday reality. If I was not considered an American because I didn’t have the right papers, then practicing journalism—writing in English, interviewing Americans, making sense of the people and places around me—was my way of writing myself into America. In the beginning, writing was only a way of passing as an American. I never expected it to be an identity. Above all else, I write to exist, to make myself visible.
The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction. History. It has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking. “This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it.”… She [Pecola Breedlove] is so needful, so completely needful, has so little, needs so much, she becomes the perfect victim.
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.
Since the beginning of my journalism career, there was no escaping the fact that I was lying about myself so I could survive in a profession dependent on truth-telling.
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.”
There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on.
“Jose, are you going to print that you’ve done things that are ‘unlawful’? In the New York Times?”
“Yes. It’s in the essay.”
“Jose, the moment you publish that, we cannot help you.”
“Jose, are you there?”
She took a big breath.
Telling the truth—admitting that I had lied on government forms to get jobs—meant that “getting legal” would be nearly impossible.
I took a big breath.
“If I can’t admit that, then why am I doing this?”
A longtime journalist who edited immigration for a regional news outlet told me: “Even when we report facts about undocumented immigrants, the readers either don’t care or don’t want to believe it. That’s how successful the right-wing sites have been.”
The overall result?
Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified. I don’t how many times I’ve explained to a fellow journalist that even though it is an illegal act to enter the country without documents, it is not illegal for a person to be in the country without documents. That is a clear and crucial distinction. I am not a criminal. This is not a crime.
When will we connect the dots?
When will we fully face what’s in front of us?
Who gets to exercise their rights as U.S. citizens, and why?
Migration is the most natural thing people do, the root of how civilizations, nation-states, and countries were established. The difference, however, is that when white people move, then and now, it’s seen as courageous and necessary, celebrated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality. Is it a crime? Will they assimilate? When will they stop? […] Yes, we are here because we believe in the promise of the American Dream—the search for a better life, the challenge of dreaming big. But we are also here because you were there—the cost of American imperialism and globalization, the impact of economic policies and political decisions. During this volatile time in the U.S. and around the world, we need a new language around migration and the meaning of citizenship. Our survival depends on the creation and understanding of this new language.
I wanted to keep repeating: there is no line.
I wanted to scream, over and over again: THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE!
Sitting alone in that cell, I concluded that none of this was an accident. None of it. You know how politicians and the news media that cover them like to say that we have a “broken immigration system”? Inside that cell I came to the conclusion that we do not have a broken immigration system. We don’t. […] This immigration system is set up to do exactly what it does.
Dear America, is this what you really want? Do you even know what is happening in your name?
I don’t know what else you want from us.
I don’t know what else you need us to do.
“Maybe,” Mama said, her voice growing fainter for a moment, “maybe it’s time to come home.”
