Now Reading: Jose Antonio Vargas on “[His] Life As an Undocumented Immigrant”
I think about this gap often in terms of Ana. I mention her from time to time, the woman I used to babysit for. Ana fled the civil war in El Salvador and landed in America, only to flee the abusive husband that had come with her. She and her two kids had made a life for each other, but it was one ruled by fear – fear that their father would arrive in the night, and they would have to run again, and fear that others would show up at their door and ruin what she had worked for. I’m not sure, to this day, of Ana’s legal status – since she was a refugee, she could have been admitted to the United States under legal pretenses – or there may not have been time for that. What I remember the most clearly was Ana’s doctorate degree hanging on the wall. One day, as she was going to work as a nanny for a wealthy white couple, she saw me looking at it and informed me she had been a doctor in El Salvador. She often wanted to practice English with me, in hopes of practicing medicine again one day.
Class factors heavily into perceptions of undocumented workers – so I am glad Vargas chose to share his story. The profile that people who are anti-immigration like to paint are people who come to draw on government benefits or people who just commit crimes. Vargas has ascended to the white collar elite – a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, currently employed at The New York Times.
But Vargas explores still more aspects of the immigration debate through one more disclosure:
Later that school year, my history class watched a documentary on Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city official who was assassinated. This was 1999, just six months after Matthew Shepard’s body was found tied to a fence in Wyoming. During the discussion, I raised my hand and said something like: “I’m sorry Harvey Milk got killed for being gay. . . . I’ve been meaning to say this. . . . I’m gay.”
I hadn’t planned on coming out that morning, though I had known that I was gay for several years. With that announcement, I became the only openly gay student at school, and it caused turmoil with my grandparents. Lolo kicked me out of the house for a few weeks. Though we eventually reconciled, I had disappointed him on two fronts. First, as a Catholic, he considered homosexuality a sin and was embarrassed about having “ang apo na bakla” (“a grandson who is gay”). Even worse, I was making matters more difficult for myself, he said. I needed to marry an American woman in order to gain a green card.
Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming out about my legal status. I kept my other secret mostly hidden.
Vargas’ decision to embrace the truth so publicly hasn’t been easy. His editor, Chris Suellentrop, posted to the Times’ 6th floor blog about accepting the piece:
That afternoon, Peter called back with the news: Jose Antonio Vargas is an illegal immigrant. He had been planning to tell his story in The Washington Post, but for reasons unknown to him, The Post killed his story on Monday. [...] I called Peter and told that we wanted to see Jose’s story, but if there was any chance of closing it in time — of editing it, fact-checking it, photographing Jose, designing it, etc. — we needed to see it right now. Just before 5 p.m., 48 hours before the magazine is supposed to close, Jose e-mailed me a draft of the story.
And within a hour, we decided this wasn’t a story we were going to give to anyone else.
The Washington Post passed. There statement was unsatisfactory to me, but hey, it’s my hometown paper. My heart really wants to believe that the piece was killed because they were worried about Vargas’ safety and legal status – but my more cynical gut says they are worried about seeming too liberal friendly going into 2012.
NPR has been digging up bits and pieces of the story. First they checked in at the Washington Post, to see why they passed.
Post reporter Paul Farhi does give us a clue, though, to the reason the Post spiked the story:
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