Dear America

Listened to the audio, which was read by the author. A relatively quick read, just under 6 hours.

Oooh, the last line was chilling - after 30-some-odd years of being undocumented in the United States, with no obvious path forward - Vargas' mom was like, maybe it's time to come back to the Philippines*? (I have to assume he said no, since he'd had so many opportunities to leave over those years, knowing he might not be able to make it back to the only life he knows. And also as he mentioned, Philippines leadership wasn't exactly gung-ho about gay men.) *Vargas' mom put him on a plane when he was a tween with the intention of following him later, but per the book was never legally able to make her own way to the U.S.

I appreciated Vargas' story a lot, especially because it provided a different perspective than the ones we see most often from the southern borders. Especially as he became a journalist as an adult - I loved hearing about the newsrooms and his career at WaPo and his technology writing back when it was The Facebook. He talked about his “coming out” as undocumented and all the ways he was forced to lie to survive (getting a job, getting a license, etc.) once he found out he was not in the U.S. legally (and DACA hadn't been invented yet). The descriptions of his travel around the country and speaking to people of all walks of life about the experiences of being undocumented and what undocumented people actually want and need from their adopted homeland, and the policies that came in and out over the years that somehow never applied to him, leaving him in a perpetual state of limbo.

And ohhhhh the stuff about the Texas border and his being detained in Brownsville/McAllen. I mean, I know the Powers That Be in Texas have basically never done anything good for our neighbors to the south, but Vargas could have been in way worse trouble if he didn't have journalist and ambassador friends in high places from all his years of reporting.

I'd recommend. I didn't wholeheartedly love it, but it was very good.