Lolo continued to be against my going. He’d never heard of the Post; he’d never seen All the President’s Men. On top of his litany of discouragement and disapproval—“Hindi ka dapat nandito” (“You are not supposed to be here”) and “Paano kung nahuli ka?” (“What if you get caught?”)—he added a new one: “Masyado mong sinusugal ang buhay mo.” (“You are gambling with your life too much.”) At that moment I realized that he feared for me, that it worried him that neither he nor I had any idea what could happen. Without ever saying it, he knew that I knew that I was here because of him, because of his lies, which were now my lies.
I had two graduation parties before moving to D.C. One was organized by Pat, Rich, Sheri, Mary, and Jim, and the other was planned by Lolo and Lola.
When I arrived at the Post on June 2, 2004, I knew I had to do everything I could to be “successful.” In addition to the constant deadlines of newspaper reporting, there was a bigger personal deadline: February 3, 2011, the date my license would expire. It was a delicate dance: standing out in a highly competitive newsroom but not standing out so much as to draw attention and attract unwanted scrutiny. There was no room for error; I could not make any mistakes. There was also no room for enemies. I had to make friends and allies, but I had to make sure I didn’t get too close to anyone or share more information than needed. I had to be careful.
I started freaking out about four months into the job, getting paranoid to the point of paralysis. It was one thing to risk being undocumented at the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a whole other thing to be undocumented at the Washington Post, hiding in plain sight in the nation’s capital, where immigration was a constant topic of conversation. I was nervous, and it showed.
Over a lunch meeting with Deborah Heard, the editor in charge of the department I was working for, I was so obviously dripping with anxiety—about how I was performing, about whether my internship would lead to a permanent job—that she couldn’t help but ask, “What could we do to not have you worry?”
During my first few months at the Post, I felt like a walking time bomb. Worse, only I could hear the ticking, which was nonstop, especially in a post-9/11 nation’s capital that was swarming with security, where almost every professional you meet tries to figure out who you are, how you got there, and what they can use you for. I was wrapped in so much paranoia that I thought the phallic Washington Monument, which overlooks the whole city, was following me around, poking at me, daring me to slip and get found out. I never visited any of the free museums, telling myself that they didn’t belong to me, that they were not for me to enjoy, that I was unwelcome in this city.
As the days and weeks passed, I walked around the newsroom like I had the word “ILLEGAL” tattooed on my forehead. It was getting harder and harder to focus on the work, and it became clear that I had to either leave the Post or find someone reliable who would keep my secret. As the years passed, as I kept on passing as an American, sharing my story was a compulsion, a way of relieving myself of the burden of the lies I had to tell so I could exist.
When I got back to my desk after lunch on October 27, 2004, I started looking at the website of the Globe and Mail, a newspaper in Canada. I had read that Canada had a friendlier immigration policy. Perhaps it was time to leave. After all, I can be a journalist anywhere in the world, I reassured myself. Maybe I was risking too much, as Lolo had warned. I couldn’t just compartmentalize what I was feeling, as Rich had suggested two years before. Now was the time to tell somebody I could trust, in the same way I trusted Mrs. Denny, and Pat and Rich.
In my years of reporting, I’d developed a good sense of people, needing to size up potential sources quickly, whom to trust and whom to stay away from. Using the Post’s internal messaging system, I pinged Peter Perl, a longtime reporter who had recently been promoted to director of newsroom training and professional department.
VARGASJ 10/27/2004 1:58:48 PM: are you here today, peter?
PERLP 10/27/2004 2:37:49 PM: hi . . . i just got back & am here, till about 6. feel free to stop over. . . .
VARGASJ 10/27/2004 2:38:40 PM: are you glued to your desk, or can i buy you starbucks? (i can afford it.) i have something important to tell you
PERLP 10/27/2004 2:39:17 PM: please come visit . . . we can take a walk if we need to . . .
I first met Peter when I was a summer intern. Every intern was randomly assigned a “professional partner”—a mentor—and he was mine. Peter started working at the Post in 1981, the year I was born. Bob Woodward hired him from the Providence Journal. When I was selected for the two-year internship, Peter was among the first Posties, as Post employees were known, to send a note of congratulations.
Sitting on a bench in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, I told Peter about everything. All of it. The license I wasn’t supposed to get. The fake green card. The help I got from Pat, Rich, Mary, and Jim. I told Peter that years ago, after I found out I was here illegally, Lolo took me to the local Social Security Administration office to apply for a Social Security number, which I needed if I was to get any kind of job. To apply, we used a fake passport with my name on it that Lolo had bought. When the Social Security card arrived, it clearly stated: “Valid for work only with I.N.S. authorization.” Lolo took me to a nearby Kinko’s. He covered the “I.N.S. authorization” text with a sliver of white tape, and we made twenty or so photocopies of the doctored card. That photocopied, doctored card, I told Peter, is what I had submitted to the Post’s human resources department.
After my disclosure, I expected Peter to say that we had to go to the human resources department. I braced myself.
“I understand you a hundred times better now,” Peter said. “This is now our shared problem.”
Peter said that I had done the right thing by telling him, and that he didn’t want to do anything about it just yet. I had just been hired, he said, and I needed to prove myself. “When you’ve done enough,” he said, “we’ll tell Don and Len together.” (Don Graham was the chairman of the Washington Post Company; Len Downie was the paper’s executive editor.)
A month later, I spent my first Thanksgiving in Washington with Peter, his wife, Nina Shapiro, and their sons, Matt and Daniel. To my surprise, the generosity of strangers that I’d been fortunate to find at Mountain View High School extended nearly three thousand miles to the Shapiro-Perl household in Silver Spring, Maryland.
9.
Strangers
There is no passing alone.
At every challenging, complicated, and complicating juncture of my life—getting to college, getting a job, getting a driver’s license so I could have a valid proof of identification so I could get a job, keeping the job—a stranger who did not remain a stranger saved me.
I use that word deliberately, because that was what each of them did, even if they didn’t know what they were doing.
Saved.
They saved me.
After telling me that my green card was fake, the curly-haired, bespectacled woman at the DMV could have called immigration officials.
After finding out that I was ineligible for financial aid because I don’t have any legal papers, the administrators, teachers, and parents at Mountain View High School didn’t need to help me. I didn’t even ask them for help, because I didn’t know how to. But they offered help, even when I didn’t know what kind of help I needed, even when they didn’t know what they were doing.
After discovering that I was ineligible for a summer internship, the recruiter could have reported me to someone.
After I confessed about the fake papers, the doctored Social Security card, the driver’s license I wasn’t supposed to have, the senior newsroom personnel could have dragged me to the office of human resources and gotten me fired.
I don’t know why they did what they did.
But I know for sure that all these Americans—all these strangers, all across the country—have allowed people like me to pass.
If just five people—a friend, a co-wo
rker, a classmate, a neighbor, a faith leader—helped one of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in our country, then illegal immigration as we know it would touch at least 66 million people.
10.
Bylines
Being a reporter wasn’t just a job. It was my entire identity.
Journalism provided the framework for my life. I marked time by what story I was with struggling with (either the reporting or the writing or both), and which deadline for which article was looming. I was always on some kind of deadline for work, which made me sometimes forget about my other deadline: the expiration of my only piece of identification in a town that runs on business cards, résumés, and IDs.
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. After decades of internalizing the dominant, nagging narrative that “illegals are taking our jobs,” I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that I was taking another person’s livelihood. One way I reconciled the lies I told about myself was by taking my work very seriously: getting every fact right, insisting on context, telling the truth as much as the truth could be ascertained. I may lie about my status as an undocumented worker, but my work is true. I dealt with the notion that I took a job that could have gone to another journalist by writing stories that no other reporter could write.
When I was promoted to a full-time reporting job at the Chronicle, I was assigned to cover “diversity issues”—a code phrase for people of color in the Chronicle’s mostly white newsroom. But instead of writing about blacks, Latinos, and Asians, I decided to write about white people, particularly because the Bay Area was among the first minority-majority regions in the country. “In a world of racial diversity, what is ‘white’? Caucasian students seek to define their culture, heritage,” read the headline of a front page story I wrote that made top editors, all of whom were white, nervous. My direct editor, Pati Navalta, a Filipina American who was one of the few women-of-color editors in the newsroom, fought for the story. The article told the story of Justine Steele, a blond-haired, blue-eyed student who attended a high school of 4,054 people of whom 8 percent were white. I began the story with this lede: “The other students call her ‘white girl.’ ”
“You could get away with that story because of your byline,” one of the senior editors, a white woman who was friendly with me, said after the story was published. “Your byline doesn’t sound white or black.” She sounded like Mrs. Wakefield after the O.J. Simpson trial.
I convinced myself that I could also come up with original story ideas when I got to the Post. No one else, I told myself, can do what I do. Though it sounds self-important, delusional, and unrealistic, it was my way of arriving at some sort of peace so I could do my work.
I lived alone, in a small studio that was less than three blocks from the newsroom. I didn’t have too many friends outside work, and even then, I did not spend too much time outside work. I was so overwhelmed with all the reporting, writing, and revising that I had to do that I kept a pillow under my desk in case I needed to take naps. Though I was a solid reporter, I was a relatively weak writer. In my early years of news reporting, I was so insecure about my English that I sometimes wrote my first drafts in Tagalog before translating them in English. I had to work extra hard to make sure my copy was clean enough, especially in an institution that prided itself on being a “writer’s newspaper.”
Assigned to the Style section, the Post’s storied feature section, I wrote about the culture of video games and began reporting deeply on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in D.C. My reporting on AIDS led to a yearlong series of stories chronicling the epidemic in the District, while my front-page articles on video games caught the eye of some top editors. David Hoffman, the genial editor of the foreign desk, asked me out to lunch one afternoon, days after I wrote a story about video games being the rock and roll of the war in Iraq. Over burgers at Bobby Van’s, a steakhouse near the office, he asked me if I was interested in going to Baghdad to write what he called “Jose stories,” which, in my mind, meant stories about technology culture, and youth culture. He said he could see me as a foreign correspondent.
I excused myself and headed to the bathroom. How do I turn this opportunity down without sounding suspicious? I didn’t have a cell phone and couldn’t call Peter or Rich or Pat to ask for advice.
When I got back to the table, the only thing I could say that was not a barefaced lie was: “I grew up overseas.”
“I’m not really looking to travel internationally,” I added. “I want to get to know America more.”
David looked perplexed. In the friendliest way he could, he said that if I wanted to rise through the ranks at the Post, I should consider being a foreign correspondent or a political reporter.
The moment he said that, I jumped. “I want to be a political reporter.”
I had little experience covering politics. Yes, I covered city hall meetings when I was at the Voice and helped cover the California gubernatorial recall election when I was at the Chronicle. But this was national politics, and this was the Post, the home of the Watergate investigation, a news organization whose bread and butter is politics. There were older, much better, and more experienced reporters at the Post waiting their turn to be national political reporters. I figured the only way I would ever cover politics was if I came up with a beat that no one else had.
Like all newspapers, the Post struggled to adapt to the digital era, a deficit that I used to my advantage. I wanted to use online videos to accompany my feature stories, going as far as learning how to shoot and edit videos myself on my own time. At the time, the print newsroom, which was in Washington, was separate from the digital newsroom, which was across the river in Virginia. I had to go to Virginia to figure out how to “package” my feature stories with videos. Some of my colleagues scoffed at my efforts at what was being called multimedia journalism. Others were supportive. Nevertheless, using technology was a way to stand out in a newsroom that was struggling to figure out how to leverage it.
Technology was also my ticket to being a political reporter. Most political reporters had enough trouble adjusting to their BlackBerrys, much less understanding what social media was. After watching Hillary Clinton announce that she was running for president in an online video—“I’m beginning a conversation, with you, with America,” she said—I wrote a two-page memo pitching a new area of coverage: the marriage of politics and technology. The 2008 campaign, I argued in the memo, will be the first digital-powered, social-networking-oriented presidential race. Since I had a Facebook account and knew what YouTube was (Twitter had yet to break at the time), I said that I was uniquely suited for this beat and outlined several areas of coverage. Instead of sending the memo to my editor, who would then have to send it to her editor, and then her editor to his or her editor, I sent the memo directly to the Post’s top two editors: Len Downie and Philip Bennett. Bennett called me into his office, and less than two weeks later, I was put on the campaign team.
The editors I bypassed were irked, to say the least. I apologized, because I had to and because I meant it. I told one that, if I had sent the memo to her, I didn’t think I would have gotten the chance to cover politics. Not enough experience. Too young. Wait your turn. What I did not tell that editor, or any other editors, was that I had a personal deadline. Looking back now, I must have been a frustrating reporter to manage. My ambition far outweighed my skills. I was trying to sprint in a marathon.
Lynne Duke, a reporter-turned-editor, was one of the senior Posties who took me under her wing. Lynne was among several black women at the Post—in addition to Marcia Davis, my editor, and her boss, Deborah, there was Vanessa Williams, Teresa Wiltz, Robin Givhan, et al.—who formed a kind of sisterhood: they championed one another, and, for some reason, they all ended up guiding me in some way.
The first time I heard from Lynne was when she read an extensive profile I wrote on a longtime comm
unity activist. “That piece was good. Until the end. Your kicker”—the ending sentence or paragraph of a story—“ruined it,” she told me. I disagreed, but I cherished her brand of tough-love. Over lunch near the office one afternoon soon after I was promoted as a political reporter, after I told her all my ideas for coverage, she said: “Jose, you need to understand what kind of journalist you’re going to be before the political machine eats you up. Because it will eat you up.”
Then and there I wanted to tell Lynne what was eating me up.
But I stopped myself.
I wasn’t prepared for whatever her reaction would be.
11.
Campaign 2008
“Young man,” the sheriff said as he leaned against my rental car. “Did you know you were driving about thirty miles over the speed limit?” He took off his sunglasses. “License and registration, please.”
It was March 2008. This was the first time I was pulled over by any kind of law enforcement. Usually, I was more than cautious, driving at or below the speed limit. But I was on deadline on an election night, and I did not realize I was driving that fast. And of all the places to get caught, I was pulled over in Texas, where I’d been driving for the past two weeks covering the historic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. As I slowly reached for my license, questions ricocheted in my head. What if the sheriff finds out that I’m not supposed to have this license? What if he puts me through some test and I forget the address that’s listed on the license? If he calls immigration on me, if I get arrested on the spot, do I get a phone call? What do I tell Lynne Duke, my editor, who is waiting on me to file a story, which was already late?
The sheriff’s cell phone rang.
As he walked away from my car to answer the call, I felt something wet trickling down in my pants.
I peed myself.
Dear America Page 7