Sunday Read: Jose Antonio Vargas - Wary undocumented citizen on a book tour

JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS

JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS is on a cross-county book tour promoting his memoir, looking over his shoulder for ICE agents.

The U.S.'s best known undocumented American has written a memoir about his journey to America and what has happened to him since he revealed his immigration status after winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Vargas has been on the move since Donald Trump took office after his landlord in L.A. advised him to leave out of fear government actions against Vargas.

“The building manager was like, 'Hey, this might not be a good idea for you to stay here because we don’t know if we’ll be able to protect you if ICE showed up,’” Vargas told NBC. “The moment he said that, it captured my predicament in a way that I have a home, but it’s not really my home.”

He went off the grid. Not only for his own safety, but also to collect his thoughts and write his memoir.

At one point, after Trump's 2016 election, he broke out of hiding. After careful consideration and discarding the suggestion of friends to move to Canada, Vargas popped up publicly as the guest of Rep. Nancy Pelosi for Donald Trump's first State of the Union in 2017.

Now he is on the move again. This time the Filipino American journalist and activist is on a tour promoting his book, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, which has received great reviews considering the timeliness of the subject.

“l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured,”  endorsed Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club.

Vargas came to the U.S. as a 12-year old boy living in the San Francisco Bay Area with relatives. He was sent here by his mother, something that he explores in his book about feelings of abandonment and the power of a mother's love.

Interviewed by NBC, he said writing a memoir is akin to "performing an emotional root canal on one’s self without novocaine." Vargas said the book essentially was a work of personal exploration and self-realization.

“Working on this book gave me the kind of clarity that I needed to face and see as a 37-year-old man who has been displaced and because of that displacement has displaced himself. Once I got closer to the end, I realized I wasn’t only hiding from the government, I was hiding from myself,” he said. “I also realized in the process that home isn’t something I shouldn’t have to earn. It’s actually a basic right to have a home — to feel like you belong in a place.

Vargas won his Pulitzer in 2008 as part of the Washington Post team that covered the shootings at Virginia Tech.

He is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and a leading voice for the human rights of immigrants. He is the founder and CEO of Define American, the nation’s leading non-profit media and culture organization that fights injustice and anti-immigrant hate through the power of storytelling.

In 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME magazine worldwide with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. 

He then produced and directed Documented, a documentary feature film on his undocumented experience. It aired on CNN, streamed on Netflix, and received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary. Also in 2015, MTV aired White People, an Emmy-nominated television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in a demographically-changing America.

Vargas is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University (’04), where he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2012, and Mountain View High School (’00).

An elementary school named after Vargas will open in his hometown of Mountain View, California in 2019.

Thus far, there have been no problems on his nationwide book tour. He plans to stick to his schedule  (See attached.) fully aware that he's letting ICE know his whereabouts.

Vargas eventually came to the conclusion to abandon the move to Canada: 

From his memoir, he writes: "I refused to let a presidency scare me away from my own country. I refused to live a life of fear defined by a government that doesn’t even know why it fears what it fears. Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship, something more akin to what I call citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience."
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