What Happens After You Become the ‘Most Famous Undocumented Immigrant in America’
“I swallowed American culture before I learned how to chew it,” recounts Jose Antonio Vargas in his recently released memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. Equipped with two different public-library cards, Vargas gorged on newspapers, magazines, books, music, TV shows, and films that he hoped would teach him—then a 16 year old who discovered that he’d been smuggled from the Philippines into the United States—how to “pass as an American.”
Though Vargas was living in the Bay Area with fake residency documents, his mission was to acquire a citizen’s cultural fluency. Movies in particular made visible the immensity and diversity of America; they also taught him a key lesson on how the experiences and renderings of a single place can differ, depending on who’s telling the story. After watching four distinct films set in New York City, Vargas marvels, “How can Martin Scorsese’s New York City be the same as Woody Allen’s New York City, which is not the same thing as Spike Lee’s New York City and
