GLR Review March-April 2019

In high school, Vargas began to write for newspapers. Find- ing stories in the people and places around him became his way of “writing myself into America ... to make myself visible.” As the time came to apply to college, he told friends he wasn’t in- terested, that he had a good-paying job with a local paper. The truth was that college wasn’t an option; he had no paperwork to prove that he was in the U.S. legally. The teachers and friends in whom he confided tried to help, but his options for legalization were basically nonexistent. Happily, Vargas received a special scholarship from a ven- ture capitalist, who didn’t care whether he had the right papers or not. The scholarship allowed him to attend San Francisco State, a university that didn’t require the usual documentation. His policy of avoiding talking about paperwork seemed to have paid off. But just before he graduated from high school, he ap- plied for an entry-level job at a youth magazine and had to lie on the employment forms about his citizenship status, “a difficult and necessary choice to survive.” Vargas began to understand that illegality “must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom.” He notes that legality has always been a construct of power: “Lynchings, violent seizures of indigenous land, barring women from voting—all of that was [at one time] legal. ... ‘Separate but equal’ was legal. Jim Crow was the law of the land.” After college, he was awarded an internship at The Wash- ington Post. “What if you get caught?” his grandfather asked him. He started feeling like “a walking time bomb.” Depression and anxiety began to take a toll. To move forward in his life, Vargas decided he had to tell the truth about himself: “To free myself—in fact, to face myself—I had to write my story.” The lawyers he consulted made him feel like he was carrying an in- curable disease. In 2011, he publicly declared his undocumented status. Be- lieving that “journalistic service to the public good was worth more than my personal need for legal protection,” he published “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” in The New York Times. At the same time, he cofounded Define America, an im- migrant rights organization that seeks to change the way immi- grants are perceived. Inspired by the LGBT rights movements, Define America focuses on storytelling as a vehicle to influence how the news and entertainment industries portray immigrants. Vargas criticizes the mainstream media’s coverage of immi- gration as “lackluster at best and irresponsible at worst, promot- ing and sustaining stereotypes while spreading misinformation.” Claiming he is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, he points to Fox News as dominating the way the anti-immigration narrative is framed, a story that paints undocumented immigrants as ter- rorists, criminals, and a threat to national security. It’s a narra- tive—Vargas calls it “morally bankrupt”—that dehumanizes people whose only crime is to practice “improper migration.” “Migration is the most natural thing people do,” he writes, “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, cele- brated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality.” Vargas confesses that coming out as an undocumented im- migrant has taken its toll. The notoriety has interfered with his ability to be intimate with others. Using the language of border control, he acknowledges that he has put up walls and delineated borders “in all my relationships. ... Trading a private life that was in limbo for a public life that is still in limbo made it worse.” And after more than two decades in the US, he still has no clear path to citizenship. The book ends—around the time of Donald Trump’s inau- guration—with Vargas confessing to feeling “lost and alone.” He wonders if it’s time to return to the Philippines. Despite this gloomy conclusion, Dear America is a story that highlights one man’s courage, honesty, and humanity in the face of an ap- pallingly callous immigration system. It’s a story that should help anyone, of whatever political stripe, to understand the har- rowing drama that every immigrant lives as he or she keeps “try- ing to be a human being.”    Man is Not a Peninsula Either When you’re talking about South Asia after lunch to a portable classroom (read: trailer) full of ninth graders populating the spectrum from comatose to nuclear and you’re thinking about geography’s incestuous relationship with demography and you write in blood-red teacher script across the spartan white board: p-e-n-i-s-i-n-u-l-a and continue your train of thought while the comatose awake like Lazaruses and the frenetic get an injection of speed and then the trailer shakes with ninth grade laughter—afternoon laughter— hormonal, almost belly-shaking hahas and lols, and then you look to where they point and, like Belshazzar, you realize the writing is, yes, on the wall, and you have played to your students’ strengths, writing penis in u on the board for all to see, and you think back to fourth grade, when penises were hot lunchroom topics and you just wanted to think about the spelling bee until, in front of god and country, you missed the word “peony,” and your face flushed red then like now. D OUGLAS R AY