Dear America
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Note to Readers
Part I: Lying 1: Gamblers
2: The Wrong Country
3: Crittenden Middle School
4: Not Black, Not White
5: Filipinos
6: Mexican José and Filipino Jose
7: Fake
8: Coming Out
Part II: Passing 1: Playing a Role
2: Mountain View High School
3: An Adopted Family
4: Breaking the Law
5: The Master Narrative
6: Ambition
7: White People
8: The Washington Post
9: Strangers
10: Bylines
11: Campaign 2008
12: Purgatory
13: Thirty
14: Facing Myself
15: Lawyers
16: Second Coming Out
17: Outlaw
18: Who Am I?
19: Inside Fox News
20: Public Person, Private Self
21: Progress
Part III: Hiding 1: My Government, Myself
2: Home
3: Distant Intimacy
4: Leaving
5: Staying
6: Detained
7: The Machine
8: National Security Threat
9: Alone
10: Interview
11: Cycle of Loss
12: Truth
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Dedication
To Mama in the Philippines,
and to every American who has made me
feel at home in the United States
To the world’s migrant population,
258 million and counting
Epigraph
America is not a land of
one race or one class of men . . .
America is not bound by
geographical latitudes . . .
America is in the heart . . .
—CARLOS BULOSAN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Note to Readers
Part I: Lying
1: Gamblers
2: The Wrong Country
3: Crittenden Middle School
4: Not Black, Not White
5: Filipinos
6: Mexican José and Filipino Jose
7: Fake
8: Coming Out
Part II: Passing
1: Playing a Role
2: Mountain View High School
3: An Adopted Family
4: Breaking the Law
5: The Master Narrative
6: Ambition
7: White People
8: The Washington Post
9: Strangers
10: Bylines
11: Campaign 2008
12: Purgatory
13: Thirty
14: Facing Myself
15: Lawyers
16: Second Coming Out
17: Outlaw
18: Who Am I?
19: Inside Fox News
20: Public Person, Private Self
21: Progress
Part III: Hiding
1: My Government, Myself
2: Home
3: Distant Intimacy
4: Leaving
5: Staying
6: Detained
7: The Machine
8: National Security Threat
9: Alone
10: Interview
11: Cycle of Loss
12: Truth
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
I do not know where I will be when you read this book.
As I write this, a set of creased and folded papers sits on my desk, ten pages in all, issued to me by the Department of Homeland Security. “Warrant for Arrest of Alien,” reads the top right corner of the first page.
These are my first legal American papers, the first time immigration officers acknowledged my presence after arresting, detaining, then releasing me in the summer of 2014. I’ve been instructed to carry these documents with me wherever I go.
These papers are what immigration lawyers call an NTA, short for “Notice to Appear.” It’s a charging document that the government can file with an immigration court to start a “removal proceeding.” I don’t know when the government will file my NTA and deport me from the country I consider home.
We are living through the most anti-immigrant era in modern American history. Immigration of any kind, legal or illegal, is under unprecedented attack. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which issues green cards and grants citizenship, has stopped characterizing America as “a nation of immigrants.” To a degree unmatched by previous administrations, President Trump is closing America’s doors to the world’s refugees, slashing the number of refugees who can come to the U.S. by more than half. The everyday lives of “Dreamers,” young undocumented immigrants who like me arrived in the country as children, are subject to the president’s tweets. Trump conflates undocumented immigrants with violent MS-13 gang members, referring to us as “animals” and “snakes,” often in front of boisterous crowds roaring with approval.
In a blunt warning to the country’s estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants, Thomas Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Congress: “If you are in this country illegally, and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.”
Homan added: “No population is off the table.”
A woman diagnosed with a brain tumor was picked up at a hospital in Fort Worth. A father in Los Angeles was arrested in front of his U.S. citizen daughter, whom he was driving to school. A young woman was apprehended after speaking at a news conference against immigration raids. A “zero tolerance” policy at the border rips families apart, denying asylum seekers their rights under international law. Toddlers are placed alone at “tender age” shelters, while parents struggle to locate their children. Every day, tens of thousands of people are jailed.
Since publicly declaring my undocumented status in 2011—greeted by the likes of Bill O’Reilly as “the most famous illegal in America”—I’ve visited countless cities and towns, in forty-eight states, engaging all kinds of people. Most Americans, I discovered, have no idea how the immigration system works, what the citizenship process requires, and how difficult, if not downright impossible, it is for undocumented people to “get legal.” All the while, undocumented workers like me pay billions into a government that detains and deports us.
But this is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book—at its core—is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.
Note to Readers
Mine is only one stor
y, one of an estimated eleven million here in the United States. In the past seven years, I’ve met several hundred undocumented immigrants from all parts of the country, who greet me at coffee shops and grocery stores, approach me while I visited college campuses and spoke at events, and contact me through social media and e-mail.
Although the details of our stories differ, the contours of our experience are much the same: Lying, Passing, and Hiding.
Part I
Lying
1.
Gamblers
I come from a family of gamblers.
And my future, it turned out, was their biggest gamble.
Everything about the morning I left the Philippines was rushed, bordering on panic. I was barely awake when Mama snatched me from bed and hurried me into a cab. There was no time to brush my teeth, no time to shower.
A few months prior to that morning, Mama had told me the plan: We were going to America. I would be going first, then she would follow in a few months, maybe a year at most. Until that drive to the airport, Mama and I were inseparable. She didn’t work, because I was her work. She made sure I was doing well at school. She cooked every meal: usually a fried egg with Spam for breakfast and, if I was good, her special spaghetti dish with chicken liver. On weekends, she dragged me to her card games and mah-jongg games. Our apartment was so tiny that we shared a bed. I was Mama’s boy.
It was still dark outside when I arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport. For reasons she wouldn’t explain, Mama couldn’t come inside the terminal. Outside, Mama introduced me to a man she said was my uncle. In my ragtag family of blood relatives and lifelong acquaintances, everyone is either an uncle or an aunt.
After handing me a brown jacket with a MADE IN U.S.A. label in its collar—a Christmas gift from her parents in California, the grandparents I would soon be living with—Mama said matter-of-factly, “Baka malamig doon.” (“It might be cold there.”) It was the last thing I remember her saying. I don’t remember giving her a hug. I don’t remember giving her a kiss. There was no time for any of that. What I do remember was the excitement of riding in an airplane for the first time.
As the Continental Airlines flight left the tarmac, I peeked outside the window. I had heard that my native Philippines, a country of over seven thousand islands, was an archipelago. I didn’t really understand what that meant until I saw the clusters of islands down below, surrounded by water. So much water, embracing so many islands, swallowing me up as the airplane soared through the sky.
Whenever I think of the country I left, I think of water. As the years and decades passed, as the gulf between Mama and me grew deeper and wider, I’ve avoided stepping into any body of water in the country that I now call my home: the Rio Grande in Texas, not too far from where I was arrested; Lake Michigan, which touches Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, states with big cities and small towns that I’ve visited in the past few years; and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—I’m the person who goes to Miami and Hawaii without ever going to the beach.
When people think of borders and walls, they usually think of land. I think of water. It’s painful to think that the same water that connects us all also divides us, dividing Mama and me.
I left the Philippines on August 1, 1993.
I was twelve years old.
2.
The Wrong Country
I thought I landed in the wrong country.
Filipino culture is fascinated with and shaped by Hollywood movies and beauty pageants. There were two television events that Mama and I watched live every year: the Academy Awards and the Miss Universe pageant. From an early age they shaped my vision of the world and of America. The America of my imagination was the America in Pretty Woman, Sister Act, and Home Alone, the America of Julia Roberts, Whoopi Goldberg, and Macaulay Culkin. The moment I landed at Los Angeles International Airport, I expected to see people who looked like Julia, Whoopi, and Macaulay—people who looked like the people I watched during the Oscars. Instead, I was greeted by something like the parade of nations that kicked off the annual Miss Universe pageant, with each contestant speaking in their own tongue. The America I first encountered at the airport was a polyphonic culture that looked like and sounded like what a bigger world was supposed to look and sound like.
In the Philippines, there were two types of weather: hot and really hot. Even when it was raining, even when typhoons knocked down trees and flooded homes, including ours, I don’t ever remember feeling cold. The varied weather in California—warm and sunny in the day, cool and nippy at night—required instant adjustment. I learned how to layer my clothes, and I was introduced to a thing called a sweater. I owned jackets but had no sweaters.
The bigger adjustment was living with new people: my grandparents, whom I called Lolo (Grandpa) and Lola (Grandma), and my mother’s younger brother, Rolan. Until Uncle Rolan moved to the U.S. in 1991, he lived with Mama and me. Lola had visited the Philippines twice, bringing bags of Snickers and M&M’s and giving relatives and friends money (one-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, sometimes ten-dollar bills) like she was an ATM machine. If the word “generous” were manifested in one person, it would be Lola. I only knew Lolo from photographs, where he was always posing: back straight, stomach out, chin up, the posture of someone used to being watched. He posed in front of the house, in front of his red Toyota Camry, in front of some hotel in some town called Las Vegas. I was barely three years old when Lolo moved to America. By the time I arrived in Mountain View, California, Lolo had become a naturalized U.S. citizen. He legally changed his first name from Teofilo to Ted, after Ted Danson from Cheers.
To celebrate my arrival, Lolo organized a party that introduced me to all the relatives I’d only heard about but never met. There were so many of them it was like we had our own little village. Among the attendees were Florie, Rosie, and David—Lolo’s siblings, whom I was instructed to call “Lolo” and “Lola” as a sign of respect. Filipinos like honorifics. Everyone older than you is either a kuya (if he’s male) or an ate (if she’s female). Unless they are a Lolo or a Lola, you call them Uncle or Auntie, even when you’re not actually related. Lola Florie, in particular, commanded respect. Lola Florie, who worked in electronics, and Lolo Bernie, her husband, who served as a U.S. Marine, owned the house that we were living in. Their two American-born sons, Kuya Bernie and Kuya Gilbert, spoke very little Tagalog, yet still managed to instantly welcome me into the family. Lola Florie was the matriarch of the matriarchs in the family; she was the reason her older brother Ted and her younger sister Rosie had been able to come to America. Lola Rosie, the loudest and friendliest of my extended family, announced that Uncle Conrad had driven seven hours just to see me in person. Uncle Conrad was a legend in our family, having escaped a life of harvesting rice and doing construction work in the Philippines to becoming an officer in the United States Navy, a point of pride for all of us. Standing no taller than five foot three inches and speaking English with a gravelly, guttural Tagalog accent, Uncle Conrad was in charge of 92 enlisted personnel. He was Lolo’s favorite.
“Masayang masaya na kami na nandito ka na,” Uncle Conrad said in front of the entire family as Lolo looked on. “We are very happy you are here.”
To Lolo, America was something you wear, something you buy, something you eat, and he wanted to spoil his first and only grandson—me. It was consumption all around. In the Philippines, I got to eat ice cream only on my birthday, sometimes during Christmas dinner, and to ring in the New Year. I don’t think I’d consumed as much ice cream in my entire life as I did in my first few weeks and months in America. To welcome me to my new home, Lolo’s way of showing his love for me and showing off America was buying a tub of Neapolitan ice cream (vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate flavors, all rolled into one) for $5.99. I must have eaten a tub a week.
Another way that Lolo showed his affection was by printing my name, using a bold, black Sharpie, on every piece of clothing I wore, most of which were the T-shirts, shorts, pa
nts, and underwear that Lolo and Lola had purchased before I even arrived.
“Ako ang nagdala sa iyo dito,” Lolo told me on the day he signed me up for school. “I brought you here.” He said it in a voice that emanated pure joy and familial ownership.
I didn’t have a relationship with my father; I saw him no more than five times in my whole life. Shortly after I arrived in Mountain View, it was clear that Lolo would become the father figure I never had.
3.
Crittenden Middle School
“Oh, Jose, can you see?”
During my first weeks at my first American school, surrounded by my first American friends, I imagined my name was somehow in the national anthem, flashing a big smile whenever the whole class would sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Hey,” whispered my classmate Sharmand one morning when he caught me smiling while singing. “We’re not talking about you.” Sharmand sighed before saying, “The anthem goes, ‘Oh, say, can you see.’ You see?”
To say that I stood out at Crittenden Middle School is an understatement.
I wasn’t fluent in English, and I stood out for my thick Tagalog accent. Tagalog, my native tongue, was not what anyone would describe as a soft language, at least not the way I speak it. My Tagalog was all hard consonants and chopped syllables with a quick, rat-a-tat-tat sound, like the sound of tropical rain pouring down on cement. Also, the Tagalog alphabet does not have “h” and “th” sounds, which meant I struggled pronouncing a very common word like “the.” So “the” in English sounds like “da” in Tagalog, and whenever I said “da” instead of “the,” I stood out. One morning, when Mrs. Mitchell, the homeroom teacher, asked me to read a passage from a book out loud during class, my classmates giggled when I said “o-tor” instead of “au-thor.”
I stood out because of everything I did not know.
I didn’t know what kind of food was appropriate to bring for lunch. I was the student who brought sticky rice and fried tilapia with a sauce while my classmates munched on food I’d never heard of, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. “What’s that nasty smell?” my classmate Sharon asked. “It’s called patis,” I said. Fish sauce.