Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  Then, in a clear voice drenched in defiance, I added: “I am.”

  9.

  Alone

  The agents inside the sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot McAllen Border Patrol Station on West Military Highway did not know what to do with me.

  They kept moving me from one cell to another. An agent took me out of the cell with the boys and put me in a much smaller one by myself. Then back again with the boys, then back again to the cell by myself. I realized that I was separated from the other men, who were locked up in different cells. I walked past one cell that had only grown women—pregnant women, women cradling babies, women talking to one another.

  Two hours passed before an agent opened the door and peeked his head in. “Are you famous or something?” He closed the door and seconds later opened it again. He held up his phone and showed me an article on CNN. “Dude, you’re all over the news.”

  After I was handcuffed at the airport, I’d been driven alone in a white van. The ride to the station took less than fifteen minutes, if that. Upon my arrival, two agents took everything I had: my phone, my wallet, my backpack, my luggage. I was asked to take off my leather belt and the laces in my shoes. When I asked why, one of the agents said, “We don’t want you hurting yourself.”

  I wanted to laugh out loud after the agent said that. I’ve always used laughter to conceal the pain; here, to distance and detach myself from the absurdity of this whole ordeal. Is this really about who has the right papers and what the laws are? Or is this about someone to control? Is this really about who is a citizen or not? Are we talking about the same citizenship that many Americans callously take for granted? Are these agents so blithely unaware that they and their government have hurt me more than I could ever hurt myself?

  But I say nothing.

  There was no bathroom in the cell. You had to call an agent to use one. Incredibly, I did not use the bathroom in the hours I was locked up. I managed to hold it in. I should have used the bathroom as an excuse to check out the rest of the station. That was what a curious and enterprising reporter would have done. But for the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t a reporter, which was the only thing I knew how to be, so long as I was reporting on other people and what was happening to them. I was something else altogether, someone I didn’t entirely recognize.

  The quietness is forbidding, all alone in that cell. Nothing but you and your thoughts, which become somewhat tangible, bouncing around the white walls and the cold floors before building into some emotional squall. There was no place to run. No role to play. Though I was fully clothed, I’d never felt more naked in my whole life.

  There was nowhere to run away from and no need to hurry. My life of deadlines came to a halt, the facts clearly in front of me. The father I never had, or who left me, the mother I left, or who left me. The country I left, which was my home, which I don’t know much about, and the country I am in, which is my home, except it isn’t. It’s dangerous out there, and home should be the place where we feel safe and at peace.

  Home is not something I should have to earn.

  Humanity is not some box I should have to check.

  It occurred to me that I’d been in an intimate, long-term relationship all along. I was in a toxic, abusive, codependent relationship with America, and there was no getting out.

  The very reason that I’m locked up in this cell is because of who I am and who I’ve become. Who am I without America? What would I be without America?

  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. What we’re doing—waving a “Keep Out!” flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in—is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don’t want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits—all of that serves a purpose. People are forced to lie, people spend years if not decades passing in some kind of purgatory. And step by step, 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.

  10.

  Interview

  “So when did you arrive in the United States?”

  After the sixth hour, I was taken out of the cell and escorted inside an office, where an agent asked me questions while he filled out a form. His name was Mario, and he was clean shaven and young looking, as if he’d graduated from high school just few years before. He was of Mexican descent, like all the other agents in the station.

  “August 3, 1993.”

  “Did you cross the border?”

  “No. My border was the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m from the Philippines.”

  He laughed. “Hey, I know someone from the Philippines. You guys have Mexican names.” As he started talking about “Pac Man”—as in Manny Pacquiao, the famous Filipino boxer—I saw him place an accent on the “é” in “José.” I stopped him and said that Filipinos, for reasons I don’t fully understand, don’t put accents on our Spanish names. “I guess it’s our way of rebelling against Spanish colonialism. Or something like that.” I might not be able to control what was happening, but I was going to control the punctuation of my name. It was a defense mechanism, also a way of distracting myself from the fact that I was losing control. Usually I ask questions. I don’t answer them.

  Later, I would find out why my name doesn’t carry an accent mark. After the Americans forced the Spanish out of the Philippines, their typewriters couldn’t type accented vowels. My name is Jose because of Spanish colonialism. But Jose isn’t José because of American imperialism. Even my name isn’t really mine.

  He broke the silence and asked: “Who did you come with? Your mom?”

  “No. My mom put me on a plane.”

  “By yourself?”

  “No. I was with this guy who my mom told me was an uncle.”

  “So you came with your uncle.”

  “Actually, I found out later on that he wasn’t my uncle. He was a stranger that my grandfather—my Mama’s dad—paid to get me here. My mother sent me to live with her parents—”

  He cut me off. “You came with a coyote,” he said. “A lot of the kids here had coyotes.”

  I nodded.

  More silence.

  Again, he broke it and asked: “What do you do?”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “Yeah. I know. I looked you up,” he said. “Why journalist?”

  “I don’t know.” By this point, I was annoyed and confused. He already knew I was a journalist, yet he asked the question just to stall the conversation, like he needed to buy some time. He kept looking at the window waiting for someone important to show up.

  “You always wanted to be a journalist?”

  “No. I wanted to make films.” If he had looked even remotely interested, I would have said that I wanted to make films because it was a way of showing the world what you see, like the Paris of François Truffaut and the Rome of Federico Fellini. Films are a way of seeing beyond yourself, into other people and other places. Films are possibilities, both real and imagined.

  Instead, I continued: “When I found out I was undocumented, that I didn’t have the right kind of papers to be here, I wanted my name to be in the newspaper.” If he really wanted to know, I would have said that having my name in the newspaper—“by Jose Antonio Vargas”—was the only way I could think of existing and contributing something concrete in the process. That was my article. I reported it. I wrote it. It’s real. I’m real.

  This time I broke the silence. “Why did you become a Border Patrol age
nt?”

  “The benefits are solid, man.”

  Seconds later, another guard came into the room, the same guard who took my shoelaces and asked if I was famous. All afternoon, the guards I’d encountered had given me knowing looks, like I was a lab experiment they had figured out. If they had, they didn’t tell me. Who was I? Who had I become? Where was I going? What they did say was that within an hour or so, I would be released, but they were trying to figure out how. I kept asking why I was being released. They wouldn’t say. “There are a lot of reporters out there,” the other guard said. “They’re waiting for you.” I asked if either of them spoke Spanish. They both did.

  “What’s ‘miedo’?”

  “Fear,” one of the agents said. “It means fear.”

  11.

  Cycle of Loss

  Sitting on the floor, staring at the boys in the cell, I kept thinking of their parents, the fear they must have felt knowing that they needed to do what they needed to do. I also kept thinking of my mother, wondering as I had so many times over all these years what she told herself as she said good-bye to me at that airport twenty-five years ago.

  Mama and I rarely talked about what happened at the airport. Sometimes I would ask about a fact here or there. What was I wearing? What was she wearing? What were her last words to me? But we never talked about how we felt, what we lost, what it means. That’s the truth, as hard as it may seem to believe. Maybe it’s because it’s too hard for me to ask and too painful for her to remember. Maybe it’s because we both know it wouldn’t change anything. Maybe it’s because the truth is too heavy to carry around.

  The truth is, I’m not the only one who lost a mother. Mama lost a mother, too. Lola, my mother’s mother, left the Philippines and moved to America in 1984, three years after I was born. Lola had seen her only daughter, my mama, no more than six times in thirty-four years, quick visits of two to three weeks every few years. Mama is waiting in line to legally come to America. As the decades have passed, their relationship, like my relationship with Mama, is mostly transactional, measured by the American products that we ship over to the Philippines and the U.S. dollars that we provide that Mama can’t live without. We think we can bury what we’ve lost under all the things we can buy. When the truth is, the loss that my mother can’t express to her mother is what I struggle to express to her now.

  The truth is, if Mama had known then what she knows now—that calling her on the phone is difficult, because I can’t really pretend that I know the voice on the other end of the line—that seeing her on Skype or FaceTime feels like some sort of twisted joke, exposing the reality that the technology that easily connects us has rendered the very borders that divide us even more visible—I’m not sure if she would have said good-bye at the airport. On one of our rare phone calls she said, “I look at you, now, the person you’ve become, and how can I have any regrets.” I’m sure she meant it as a statement, but it sounded like a question.

  The truth is, there’s a part of me, I’m uncertain how much, who is still in that airplane, wondering why Mama put me there.

  12.

  Truth

  Speaking of the truth, for years now, I haven’t wanted to find out exactly how I got out of detention on July 15, 2014. For a person who’s made a life out of asking questions, I didn’t want to face the facts.

  I didn’t want to know that while most undocumented immigrants are arrested, detained, and deported, without due process, I was able to get out after eight hours of being locked up.

  I didn’t want to know that friends who had connections to the Philippine Embassy in the U.S. called the consul general and got him to call DHS to point out that I was Filipino. At the time, the detention centers in Texas were so packed that agents were doing what were called “drag and drops”—dropping you across the border right into Mexico.

  I didn’t want to know that the reason why the agents kept moving me from cell to cell was because journalists and photographers were scheduled to tour the station that day—the same day I happened to be locked up. Agents didn’t want journalists to see me locked up in a cell with the boys.

  I didn’t want to know that the moment I was arrested at the airport, friends called their contacts at DHS and the White House. People in positions of power responded and offered help. Even though I didn’t want to know, I knew I needed to know, however belatedly.

  In the process of finishing this book, of cracking open my life so I could put it back together, I called Mama. We spoke longer than we’d ever spoken, telling each other things we’ve avoided in the twenty-five years we’ve grown apart. Mama will turn sixty-one this year. At thirty-seven, I am a year older than she was when she dropped me off at the airport on that hurried morning. I told her that since that morning, I’ve always been hurried, that working on this book is the first time I’ve ever allowed myself the space and time to feel, and that I’d been feeling lost and alone. When she asked me where I was, I said I was staying at a hotel. I told her I had no home at the moment: no physical space of my own, no permanent address.

  “Maybe,” Mama said, her voice growing fainter for a moment, “maybe it’s time to come home.”

  Acknowledgments

  There is nothing greater than gratitude, and my profound thanks to the people who made this book possible, especially the people who bring life to book publishing.

  Thank you, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Jay Mandel, my agents at WME, who propelled me to start the writing process, which meant asking myself hard questions. Thank you to my editor Julia Cheiffetz, who for years believed that I had a book in me, even when I didn’t think I did. Thank you to the incredible and indefatigable team at Dey Street Books, including: Lynn Grady, Benjamin Steinberg, Heidi Richter, Kelly Rudolph, Kendra Newton, and Sean Newcott, all of whom guided me through this process.

  Editing comes in all forms, but for this book, the most helpful editors were trusted friends and confidants who insisted that I listen to the sound of my own voice. Thank you, Nathalie Wade, Christina Bellantoni, Paola Mendoza, Maria Gabriela Pacheco, Diana Espitia, Arvind Murthy, Mony Ruiz-Velasco, David Buchalter, Lara Drasin, Alejandra Campoverdi, Luisa Heredia, and Marcia Davis. A very special shout-out to Barbara Feinman Todd, whom I met nearly a decade ago when I helped teach a multimedia journalism class at Georgetown University. After I read her book, Pretend I’m Not Here, I knew she would be the ideal sounding board (and therapist) as I dug deeper into my psyche. This book was written in Airbnbs, in hotel rooms, and in the spare bedrooms of Elise Haas and Cristela Alonzo. I finished it while sleeping and working in Nicole Ponseca’s living room. Thank you, Bob Haas, for telling me that it was okay to take time off to think and write this book.

  I am a product of three families: the family I was born into, the family of friends and mentors I found here in America, and the family that makes up Define American. Many members of my families are recognized throughout this book, and you can meet my entire Define American family, including our board of trustees and advisory board, at defineamerican.com/team. My eternal thanks to the earliest supporters and champions of Define American, particularly Barbara Picower of the JPB Foundation, Taryn Higashi of Unbound Philanthropy, Cathy Cha of the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and Liz Simons of the Heising-Simons Foundation. Thank you to Ryan Eller for your leadership and the grace in which you exhibit it. Thank you, Jonathan Yu, for putting up with me at all times.

  Thank you to Lola, my beloved grandmother, for your love.

  About the Author

  JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS, a journalist and filmmaker, is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Define American. His work has appeared internationally in Time, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a reporting team. In 2014, he received the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA. He directed the documentary feature Documented and MTV special White People, which was nominated for an Emmy Award. An elementary school named after him will open in h
is hometown of Mountain View, California, in 2019.

  More info on joseantoniovargas.com

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Copyright

  The author will donate a portion of his proceeds from Dear America to Define American, his nonprofit organization. For more information, visit DefineAmerican.com.

  DEAR AMERICA. Copyright © 2018 by Undocumented LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Excerpts from the Broadway musical Ragtime, as performed on the 1997 Tony Award broadcast:

  Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. Book by Terrence McNally. Music by Stephen Flaherty. Music and Lyrics © 1997 Pen and Perseverance and Hillsdale Music, Inc. Book © 1997 Terrence McNally. All Rights Administered by WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  Cover lettering by Jose Antonio Vargas

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vargas, Jose Antonio, author.

  Title: Dear America : notes of an undocumented citizen / Jose Antonio Vargas.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Dey Street, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018031550 (print) | LCCN 2018041703 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062851369 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780062851352 | ISBN 9780062851352 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062860972 (large print)