Dear America

DEAR AMERICA by Jose Antonio Vargas is a fantastic memoir about Vargas’ experiences living as an undocumented citizen. I flew through this book. His experiences were really eye opening and gave me a lot to think about. I think he does a great job of trying to balance the telling of his own personal experience, while examining how his experience is VERY different from so many others. I loved how he gets his reader to think about how being undocumented really affects different people differently, depending on hundreds of different factors. But the tie that binds them is still the same, being undocumented presents hundreds of challenges that have damaging effects on your mental health and safety.

I know this may be me being captain obvious, but the more I think about borders the more I just sort of realize how fake it all seems. Haven’t humans been migrating to different areas to escape hardships since literally the beginning of time? Animals still do this…Further, as the climate crisis worsens we will only see more and more movement of people traveling to so-called “better and safer” areas. Reading Vargas’s story was just perplexing. Like why can’t they just give him his damn papers. I know the reason (racism) but the absurdity of it all just seems so…..well, stupid.

Also shoutout to Maria @mpjustreading for putting this on my radar.

[ID: The book DEAR AMERICA: NOTES OF AN UNDOCUMENTED CITIZEN, by Jose Antonia Vargas, rest on some green bushes. The cover is bright yellow with a black fingerprint on the cover.]

#DearAmerica #FilipinoWriters #FilipinoAuthors #AAPIAuthor #Memoirs #GreatBooks #AlwaysReading #PlantsAndBooks #FlilipinoBookstagrammer #BookReflection #BookReview #CaliforniaReader #ReadMoreBooks #alwayslearning