Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas

Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American."  --Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

"l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured." --Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins

"This book couldn't be more timely and more necessary." --Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of Mokha

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called "the most famous undocumented immigrant in America," tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.

"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 in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself 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 25 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."

--Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America

José Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, and Tony Award-winning producer. His writing has appeared in Time magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post, among other publications. He earned the PEN Center USA's Freedom to Write Award in 2014. He created the non-profit media and cultural organization Define American, which Fast Company named one of the World's Most Innovative Businesses. He is a major proponent for immigrants' human rights. In 2019, he will have an elementary school named after him in his hometown of Mountain View, California.