Jose Antonio Vargas
Author of Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
About the Author
Image credit: Author Jose Antonio Vargas at the 2018 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States. By Larry D. Moore - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73960431
Works by Jose Antonio Vargas
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1981-02-03
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Philippines
- Birthplace
- Antipolo, Philippines
- Education
- San Francisco State University (BA | Political Science and Black Studies)
- Organizations
- Define America
- Agent
- Jennifer Rudolph Walsh (WME)
Jay Mandel (WME)
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 4
- Also by
- 3
- Members
- 470
- Popularity
- #52,371
- Rating
- 4.1
- Reviews
- 16
- ISBNs
- 24
- Languages
- 1
"I swallowed American culture before I learned how to chew it."
"I was no longer the blameless kid who wasn't aware of the circumstances of how I arrived in America. I was now a nineteen-year-old making a difficult and necessary choice to survive, which meant breaking the law.
What would you have done? Work under the table? Stay under the radar? Not work at all?
Which box would you check?
What have you done to earn your box?
Besides being born at a certain place in a certain time, did you have to do anything?
Anything at all?
If you wanted to have a career, if you wanted to have a life, if you wanted to exist as a human being, what would you have done?"
"Understanding the experience of black people in America - why black was created so people could be white - pried open how Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups have been historically oppressed through laws and systems that had little or nothing to do with what was right. White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness - how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal - hurts not only people of color who aren't white but also white people who can't carry the burden of what they've constructed."
"If just five people - a friend, a co-worker, a classmate, a neighbor, a faith leader - helped one of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in our country, then illegal immigration as we know it would touch at least 66 million people."
"The lies had gotten so big that they swallowed everything up, including all the good things. ... I couldn't be present for my own life."
"According to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants nationwide pay an estimated 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes on average. To put that in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent."
"Our country's mainstream news organizations often fail to report basic facts about how much undocumented workers pay into a government that vilifies us. Whether because of ignorance or indifference, or both, failure to report these facts and provide context has perpetuated the myth of the 'illegal' who is taxing social services and taking away from 'real Americans.'"
"How do we demolish white supremacy without pushing more white people to white nationalism?"… (more)