45 pages • 1 hour read
Jose Antonio VargasDear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Jose Antonio Vargas
Jose Antonio Vargas is the undocumented citizen who provides the book with its title. An autobiographical collection of essays, the book interweaves his life story with the general experiences of those without documentation in America. The book is not addressed to his fellow undocumented citizens. Instead, the book is an attempt to explain the humanity of an undocumented person’s situation to a wider (and presumably legal) population. He tells the story of the good people he meets and the many who help him. As well as these people, there are those who offer criticism. It is the latter that the author hopes to address and the former he wants to thank.
The narrative is presented as a quest: a search for identity as defined in a country which placed a large emphasis on documentation and legality. The author’s first difficult experience with identity is his sexuality; he comes to terms with his homosexuality through magazines and culture, discovering that America can be a warm and accepting place. He has another secret identity and knows that he must keep his undocumented status hidden. This anxiety eats away at the author until he chooses to reveal to the world that he is undocumented. That the two instances of “coming out” parallel each other is important: this is the discourse that the author has learned and one that he knows to employ. If America can learn to accept gay people, he reasons, can it learn to accept undocumented people?
Perhaps the only lasting identity that never falters for the author is his identity as a journalist. He nurtures this ambition from a young age and constantly strives toward it. Though he works hard and excels, he is forced to rely on others for help. Being a journalist provides him with what he needs most: his name appearing on a piece of paper. To the author, it is a demonstration of the worth he contributes to society. Though he admits that it does not function in the same way as actual documents, the eventual fame he wins as a journalist does help him to escape the Texas jail. Becoming a journalist is the closest approximation the author can make of being a documented person, providing one of the few fixed identities he has in a complicated and occasionally difficult life.
Lolo and Lola
Throughout the book, the author’s grandparents provide him with many opportunities but also operate as a source of great frustration. In a narrative sense, they represent his hesitancy. When he is about to make a big decision—such as coming out as undocumented—the author thinks about how his grandmother will react. In difficult moments, he telephones her to speak about what he plans to do. While his grandfather always errs on the side of caution, she is more understanding and more emotional. If the author’s grandparents provide physical sanctuary when the author first arrives in the country, Lola provides emotional sanctuary later in life. The author has trouble with emotional intimacy, but he knows that Lola is always there for him.
However, the author’s relationship with his grandparents is not always easy. When he first reveals his homosexuality, their strict Catholic beliefs seem to clash with their grandson’s revelation. It takes them a long time to accept him as he is, and this drives a wedge between grandson and grandparents. Additionally, Lola and her husband bear some responsibility for their inability to navigate their grandson’s immigration status. There are a number of bureaucratic procedures (such as adoption) that could have secured legal status for the author, but Lola and her husband were too scared to act. They worried that they might make a mistake and have their grandson deported. Though they are at fault, the author is understanding of their predicament. He knows that Lola always acts in his best interests, at least as far as she understands those interests, and she remains one of his closest allies.
One of the most important revelations for the author is when he begins to comprehend the universality of loss. He realizes that he is not the only member of his family (or society) who has been separated for a long time. Lola has been separated from her daughter for a long time, their family driven apart by the government’s refusal to allow the author’s mother to immigrate. This understanding reveals the difficulty that many immigrants face. Lola becomes a stand in for the wider issue: the manner in which families are split apart and the way they try to do their best and do not always succeed.
The United States Government
While the book features many characters who appear and disappear on a regular basis, there is always one constant: the United States government. In a narrative sense, the government fills the role of the antagonist. It is a unified force, ever-present wherever the author travels and always on the cusp of having him arrested and deported. The manner in which the government is portrayed ensures that its reach is never far away and seemingly inescapable. It is a constant threat and the obstacle that the author and many others must overcome.
One of the most repeated points made throughout the book is that the United States government and its immigration policies are not limited to a single administration. Instead, Presidents from Reagan to Bush to Obama to Trump are criticized. While the minutiae of their approaches to immigration differ, there is a general sense that the government’s anti-immigration rhetoric is steadily becoming more and more poisoned. Responses to undocumented (and legal) immigrants become more extreme not because of a single figure but because of wider government policy. Indeed, it is America’s foreign policy, free market ideology, and general government apparatus that bears the brunt of the blame. The author is careful not to single out a single figure or policy, but to suggest that it is the broader, uniform approach that leads the US government to become the villain in the text.
This villainous character is not only evident in arrests and deportations. Instead, the author discovers that one of the government’s most powerful weapons is silence. When the author takes the drastic measure of revealing his undocumented status in a very public manner, he expects a response from his ideological enemy, the government. He hopes that its response will help cure the rising anxiety beginning to plague his consciousness. Instead, silence from the government terrifies him. He begins to goad the government, trying to compel it to break its silence. In this moment, he realizes that the true danger of the antagonist is not that it threatens him as an individual. To the government, he is an inconvenience. Instead, the government issues increasingly dangerous threat to hundreds of thousands of people. The US government's role is to make the author realize that this story is not about him alone.
