51 pages • 1 hour read
Helen ThorpeJust Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Political is Personal
Thorpe alternates between telling the story of the four girls she is profiling and providing the larger political context in which their stories are unfolding. For these girls, the political is personal, meaning that what is happening in the larger political arena has a direct consequence of their lives and those of their families.
For example, the murder that GómezGarcía commits at the Salon Ocampo affects the people the author is writing about. Yadira’s mother, Alma, decides to flee to Mexico rather than stand trial after being accused of stealing an identity to work because the political climate around illegal immigrants is so negative. Marisela and Yadira hope for legislation to be passed that will make their path to citizenship clear, but politics makes that an impossibility, and they are left in "limbo" (387). While white people in the book such as Luke, a fellow college student of Clara, Yadira, and Marisela, can be somewhat distanced from the news or see it as an academic exercise, the girls Thorpe profiles do not have that luxury.
The Role of Fate
In college, Marisela and her classmates make a board game that replicates the way in which Mexican immigrants try to head north looking for a better life in the United States. Each card a player draws represents a turn of fate that can affect their journey and future outcome. This game is not just academic, as it applies to the circuitous paths that the lives of many people in the book have taken. For example, Yadira and Marisela do not have documents to be citizens, while Elissa and Clara do.
Alma, Yadira’s mother, experiences twists and turns of fate. Her first husband leaves her before she can pursue citizenship, and she is caught stealing someone’s identity so that she can work. She must return to Mexico rather than face trial, and the author finds out later that Yadira’s father raped Alma so that she was forced into being married (she says that in those days, no one else would have married her after she had been raped). Her life has been a series of misfortunes when fate dealt her a difficult hand. Thorpe’s point is that illegal immigrants themselves, particularly people who came here as children, did not have a say in their own fate, but they have to deal with the consequences.
Straddling Two Worlds
The author writes about the ways in which the girls’ lives run on parallel tracks. While they are attending high school and college and trying to carry on the lives on ordinary American teenagers, they also have another existence that is far more fraught and complicated. For example, when Marisela tries to attend the prom at the beginning of the book, her traditional Mexican father wants to go with her.
Later, Yadira and Clara in particular try to live the lives of Anglo college students. They hang out with Luke, who is a privileged white student, but they can’t live his life. For example, Yadira can’t go abroad to study, as Luke does in England, because she does not have any documents. Marisela’s life is almost surreally bifurcated, as she attends college and does well when she goes clubbing in Latin discos. These two worlds make the girls more mature and complicated than the other college students around them, but they feel that they can’t share their deeper realities with other students who would not understand them.
