How To Be Black
by BARATUNDE THURSTON
Paperback, 254 pages, HarperCollins, List Price: $14.99
Hardcover, 254 pages, HarperCollins, $24.99, published January 31
2012
Book Summary
Drawn from more than 30 years of living and redefining
blackness, an editor at The Onion presents this tonguein-cheek guide to being black that pokes fun at the socalled experts, purists and racists who think they know
what black people believe, do, stand for and like.
Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive.
Excerpt: How To Be Black
Chapter One: Where Did You Get That Name?
Barry. Barrington. Baracuda. Bartuna. Bartender. Bartunda. Bartholomew. Bart. Baritone.
Baritone Dave. Baranthunde. Bar—. Brad.
This is a representative sample of the world's attempts to say or recreate my name. For the
record, it's Baratunde (baa-ruh-TOON-day).
I've trained for decades in the art of patiently waiting for people to butcher my name. It's
often a teacher or customer service official who has to read aloud from a list. I listen to
them breeze through Daniel and Jennifer and even Dwayne, but inevitably, there's a break
in their rhythm. "James! Carrie! Karima! Stephanie! Kevin!" Pause. "Bar—." Pause. They
look around the room, and then look back at their list. Their confidence falters.The
declarative tone applied to the names before mine gives way to a weak, interrogative
stumbling:
Barry? Barrington? Baracuda? Bartuna? Bartender? Bar-tunda? Bartholomew? Bart?
Baritone? Baritone Dave? Baranthunde? Bar—? Brad!!
The person who called me Brad was engaged in the most lazy and hilarious form of wishful
thinking, but all the others kind of, sort of, maybe make some sense. This experience is so
common in my life that I now entirely look forward to it. Like a child on Christmas
morning who hasn't yet been told that Santa is a creation of consumer culture maintained
by society to extend the myth of "economic growth," I eagerly await the gift of any new
variation the next person will invent. Can I get a Beelzebub? Who will see a Q where none
exists? How about some numbers or special characters? Can I get a hyphen, underscore,
forward slash? Only after letting the awkward process run its public course do I step
forward, volunteering myself as the bearer of the unpronounceable label and correct them:
"That's me. It's Baratunde."
I love my name. I love people's attempts to say it. I love that everyone, especially white
people, wants to know what it means. So here's the answer:
My full name is Baratunde Rafiq Thurston. It's got a nice flow. It's global. I like to joke that
"Baratunde" is a Nigerian name that means "one with no nickname." "Rafiq" is Arabic for
"really, no nickname," and "Thurston" is a British name that means "property of Massa
Thurston."
In truth, Baratunde is derived from the very common Yorubwa Nigerian name,
"Babatunde." A literal translation comes out something like "grandfather returns" but is
often interpreted as "one who is chosen." Rafiq is Arabic for "friend or companion." And
Thurston, well, that really, probably, is the name of the white guy that owned my people
back in the day.
Of all the groups of people who react to my name, I've found that white people are the
most curious about its meaning and origin. Upon hearing of its origin, they want to know
when I last visited Nigeria. Other non-black people are nearly as curious, assuming
"Baratunde" to be a family name that goes back generations, that was passed to me
through a series of meticulously traceable Biblical begats. Black Americans, on the other
hand, rarely even pause to ponder my name. Considering how inventive black Americans
have been with their own names, that's not very surprising.
Where I never expected any particular reaction, however, was from Nigerians themselves.
Nigerians have very strong opinions about my name. They don't like it, and they want me
to know.
Constantly.
I call this phenomenon The Nigerian Name Backlash. Rarely does a week go by without a
Nigerian somewhere on the Internet finding and interrogating me. I first encountered the
NNB when I was near twelve years old. I called my Nigerian friend, who went by "Tunde,"
on the phone, but he wasn't home. Instead, his extremely Nigerian father answered, and
our interaction proceeded
as follows:
"Hello, who is calling?"
"Hi sir, this is Baratunde."
"Where did you get that name!?"
Let's pause the exchange right here, because you need more context. Father Nigeria did
not simply ask where I got the name as one might ask, "Oh, where did you get those shoes?
They're really nice. They're so nice that I need to know where you got them so I can
possibly get myself a pair." No, that was not the tone. The tone was more along the lines of
"Who the hell do you think you are coming into my house, stealing my gold, priceless
family jewels, my dead grandmother's skeleton, my porridge, and attempting to walk out
through the front door as if I would not notice? By all rights, I should kill you where you
stand, you thieving, backstabbing boy."
Shocked by the question, but determined to be both honest and respectful, I answered.
"I got it from my parents," I told him.*
"Do you even know what it means?" Father Nigeria asked me in the same way you might
ask a dog, "What model iPad do you want?" Fortunately, I knew exactly what it meant, and
I proudly answered, "It means grandfather returns or one who is chosen."
He reacted swiftly and loudly. "No! It means grandfather returns or one who is chosen."
As I was about to explain to him that I'd just said the very same thing, he launched into a
tirade: "This is the problem with you so-called
African-Americans. You have no history, no culture, no roots. You think you can wear a
dashiki, steal an African name, and become African? You cannot!"
Remember, when this self-appointed Father Nigeria decided to indict, judge, and reject all
of African America for its attempts to rebuild some small part of the ancestral bridges
burned by
America's peculiar institution, I was twelve years old and not in the best position to argue
that maybe he should calm down and stop acting like a bully.
His reaction stunned me, but it also prepared me for the regular onslaught from members
of the Nigerian Name Backlash community.While he made a sweeping dis against all black
Americans who sought cultural identification with Africa, most other Nigerians I've
encountered have more technical complaints. Every few weeks a new batch finds me on
the Internet, usually Twitter, and swarms with the same basic set of questions and
challenges:
"Are you Nigerian?" they excitedly ask.
"No. My parents just wanted me to have an African name."
"You know your name is Nigerian right?"
"Yes."
"But it is wrong, your name. What is this 'Baratunde'? You mean 'Babatunde' right?"
"No."
"Where did you get that name?"
Sigh.
My name has served as a perfect window through which to examine my experience of
blackness. For non-blacks, it marks me as absolutely, positively black. However, most of
the vocal Nigerians I've met (which is to say, most of the Nigerians I've met) use my name
to remind me that I'm not that black.
Excerpted from How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston. Copyright 2011 by Baratunde
Thurston. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
My Life as an Undocumented
Immigrant
One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put
me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the
few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the
Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a
family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was
my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was
1993, and I was 12.
My mother wanted to give me a better life, so she sent me thousands of miles
away to live with her parents in America — my grandfather (Lolo in Tagalog)
and grandmother (Lola). After I arrived in Mountain View, Calif., in the San
Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new
home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was
hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang. One
of my early memories is of a freckled kid in middle school asking me, “What’s
up?” I replied, “The sky,” and he and a couple of other kids laughed. I won the
eighth-grade spelling bee by memorizing words I couldn’t properly
pronounce. (The winning word was “indefatigable.”)
One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my
driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it
was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S.
residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered.
“Don’t come back here again.”
Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted Lolo. I remember him
sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him,
showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this
fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens — he worked as
a security guard, she as a food server — and they had begun supporting my
mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and
inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’ separation. Lolo was a
proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told me he purchased the
card, along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other
people,” he warned.
I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an
American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I
would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.
I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college
and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous
people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the
American dream.
But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different
kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It
means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am.
It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them
on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly,
even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant
relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people
who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.
Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington
to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would
provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been
educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama
administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years —
they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United
States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries
or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it
turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my
home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider
America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.
My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the
Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours at a
time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement” and
reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from “Goodfellas” to “Anne of
Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various characters
enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines, books and
newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar, my highschool English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I
wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having
my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans — validated
my presence here.
The debates over “illegal aliens” intensified my anxieties. In 1994, only a year
after my flight from the Philippines, Gov. Pete Wilson was re-elected in part
because of his support for Proposition 187, which prohibited undocumented
immigrants from attending public school and accessing other services. (A
federal court later found the law unconstitutional.) After my encounter at the
D.M.V. in 1997, I grew more aware of anti-immigrant sentiments and
stereotypes: they don’t want to assimilate, they are a drain on society.
They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have something to
contribute.
To do that, I had to work — and for that, I needed a Social Security number.
Fortunately, my grandfather had already managed to get one for me. Lolo had
always taken care of everyone in the family. He and my grandmother
emigrated legally in 1984 from Zambales, a province in the Philippines of rice
fields and bamboo houses, following Lolo’s sister, who married a Filipino-
American serving in the American military. She petitioned for her brother
and his wife to join her. When they got here, Lolo petitioned for his two
children — my mother and her younger brother — to follow them. But instead
of mentioning that my mother was a married woman, he listed her as single.
Legal residents can’t petition for their married children. Besides, Lolo didn’t
care for my father. He didn’t want him coming here too.
But soon Lolo grew nervous that the immigration authorities reviewing the
petition would discover my mother was married, thus derailing not only her
chances of coming here but those of my uncle as well. So he withdrew her
petition. After my uncle came to America legally in 1991, Lolo tried to get my
mother here through a tourist visa, but she wasn’t able to obtain one. That’s
when she decided to send me. My mother told me later that she figured she
would follow me soon. She never did.
The “uncle” who brought me here turned out to be a coyote, not a relative, my
grandfather later explained. Lolo scraped together enough money — I
eventually learned it was $4,500, a huge sum for him — to pay him to
smuggle me here under a fake name and fake passport. (I never saw the
passport again after the flight and have always assumed that the coyote kept
it.) After I arrived in America, Lolo obtained a new fake Filipino passport, in
my real name this time, adorned with a fake student visa, in addition to the
fraudulent green card.
Using the fake passport, we went to the local Social Security Administration
office and applied for a Social Security number and card. It was, I remember,
a quick visit. When the card came in the mail, it had my full, real name, but it
also clearly stated: “Valid for work only with I.N.S. authorization.”
When I began looking for work, a short time after the D.M.V. incident, my
grandfather and I took the Social Security card to Kinko’s, where he covered
the “I.N.S. authorization” text with a sliver of white tape. We then made
photocopies of the card. At a glance, at least, the copies would look like copies
of a regular, unrestricted Social Security card.
Lolo always imagined I would work the kind of low-paying jobs that
undocumented people often take. (Once I married an American, he said, I
would get my real papers, and everything would be fine.) But even menial
jobs require documents, so he and I hoped the doctored card would work for
now. The more documents I had, he said, the better.
Staying Papers The documentation that Vargas obtained over the years — a fake green card, a fake passport, a
driverʼs license — allowed him to remain in the U.S. In Oregon, a friend provided a mailing address.
While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of
the local Y.M.C.A., then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship
at The Mountain View Voice, my hometown newspaper. First I brought coffee
and helped around the office; eventually I began covering city-hall meetings
and other assignments for pay.
For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers
have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I
showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began
checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility forms.
(Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent
resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an
alien registration number.)
This deceit never got easier. The more I did it, the more I felt like an
impostor, the more guilt I carried — and the more I worried that I would get
caught. But I kept doing it. I needed to live and survive on my own, and I
decided this was the way.
Mountain View High School became my second home. I was elected to
represent my school at school-board meetings, which gave me the chance to
meet and befriend Rich Fischer, the superintendent for our school district. I
joined the speech and debate team, acted in school plays and eventually
became co-editor of The Oracle, the student newspaper. That drew the
attention of my principal, Pat Hyland. “You’re at school just as much as I am,”
she told me. Pat and Rich would soon become mentors, and over time, almost
surrogate parents for me.
After a choir rehearsal during my junior year, Jill Denny, the choir director,
told me she was considering a Japan trip for our singing group. I told her I
couldn’t afford it, but she said we’d figure out a way. I hesitated, and then
decided to tell her the truth. “It’s not really the money,” I remember saying. “I
don’t have the right passport.” When she assured me we’d get the proper
documents, I finally told her. “I can’t get the right passport,” I said. “I’m not
supposed to be here.”
She understood. So the choir toured Hawaii instead, with me in tow. (Mrs.
Denny and I spoke a couple of months ago, and she told me she hadn’t
wanted to leave any student behind.)
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.
Pre-Flight In the Philippines with his mother, who was supposed to follow him to the United States but never did.
Photograph from Jose Antonio Vargas
While my classmates awaited their college acceptance letters, I hoped to
get a full-time job at The Mountain View Voice after graduation. It’s not that I
didn’t want to go to college, but I couldn’t apply for state and federal financial
aid. Without that, my family couldn’t afford to send me.
But when I finally told Pat and Rich about my immigration “problem” — as
we called it from then on — they helped me look for a solution. At first, they
even wondered if one of them could adopt me and fix the situation that way,
but a lawyer Rich consulted told him it wouldn’t change my legal status
because I was too old. Eventually they connected me to a new scholarship
fund for high-potential students who were usually the first in their families to
attend college. Most important, the fund was not concerned with immigration
status. I was among the first recipients, with the scholarship covering tuition,
lodging, books and other expenses for my studies at San Francisco State
University.
As a college freshman, I found a job working part time at The San Francisco
Chronicle, where I sorted mail and wrote some freelance articles. My
ambition was to get a reporting job, so I embarked on a series of internships.
First I landed at The Philadelphia Daily News, in the summer of 2001, where
I covered a drive-by shooting and the wedding of the 76ers star Allen Iverson.
Using those articles, I applied to The Seattle Times and got an internship for
the following summer.
But then my lack of proper documents became a problem again. The Times’s
recruiter, Pat Foote, asked all incoming interns to bring certain paperwork on
their first day: a birth certificate, or a passport, or a driver’s license plus an
original Social Security card. I panicked, thinking my documents wouldn’t
pass muster. So before starting the job, I called Pat and told her about my
legal status. After consulting with management, she called me back with the
answer I feared: I couldn’t do the internship.
This was devastating. What good was college if I couldn’t then pursue the
career I wanted? I decided then that if I was to succeed in a profession that is
all about truth-telling, I couldn’t tell the truth about myself.
After this episode, Jim Strand, the venture capitalist who sponsored my
scholarship, offered to pay for an immigration lawyer. Rich and I went to
meet her in San Francisco’s financial district.
I was hopeful. This was in early 2002, shortly after Senators Orrin Hatch, the
Utah Republican, and Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, introduced the
Dream Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. It seemed
like the legislative version of what I’d told myself: If I work hard and
contribute, things will work out.
But the meeting left me crushed. My only solution, the lawyer said, was to go
back to the Philippines and accept a 10-year ban before I could apply to
return legally.
If Rich was discouraged, he hid it well. “Put this problem on a shelf,” he told
me. “Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”
Benefactors Vargas with the school officials Rich Fischer and Pat Hyland at his high-school graduation.
Photograph from Jose Antonio Vargas
And I did. For the summer of 2003, I applied for internships across the
country. Several newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston
Globe and The Chicago Tribune, expressed interest. But when The
Washington Post offered me a spot, I knew where I would go. And this time, I
had no intention of acknowledging my “problem.”
The Post internship posed a tricky obstacle: It required a driver’s license.
(After my close call at the California D.M.V., I’d never gotten one.) So I spent
an afternoon at The Mountain View Public Library, studying various states’
requirements. Oregon was among the most welcoming — and it was just a few
hours’ drive north.
Again, my support network came through. A friend’s father lived in Portland,
and he allowed me to use his address as proof of residency. Pat, Rich and
Rich’s longtime assistant, Mary Moore, sent letters to me at that address.
Rich taught me how to do three-point turns in a parking lot, and a friend
accompanied me to Portland.
The license meant everything to me — it would let me drive, fly and work. But
my grandparents worried about the Portland trip and the Washington
internship. While Lola offered daily prayers so that I would not get caught,
Lolo told me that I was dreaming too big, risking too much.
I was determined to pursue my ambitions. I was 22, I told them, responsible
for my own actions. But this was different from Lolo’s driving a confused
teenager to Kinko’s. I knew what I was doing now, and I knew it wasn’t right.
But what was I supposed to do?
I was paying state and federal taxes, but I was using an invalid Social Security
card and writing false information on my employment forms. But that
seemed better than depending on my grandparents or on Pat, Rich and Jim —
or returning to a country I barely remembered. I convinced myself all would
be O.K. if I lived up to the qualities of a “citizen”: hard work, self-reliance,
love of my country.
At the D.M.V. in Portland, I arrived with my photocopied Social Security
card, my college I.D., a pay stub from The San Francisco Chronicle and my
proof of state residence — the letters to the Portland address that my support
network had sent. It worked. My license, issued in 2003, was set to expire
eight years later, on my 30th birthday, on Feb. 3, 2011. I had eight years to
succeed professionally, and to hope that some sort of immigration reform
would pass in the meantime and allow me to stay.
It seemed like all the time in the world.
My summer in Washington was exhilarating. I was intimidated to be in a
major newsroom but was assigned a mentor — Peter Perl, a veteran magazine
writer — to help me navigate it. A few weeks into the internship, he printed
out one of my articles, about a guy who recovered a long-lost wallet, circled
the first two paragraphs and left it on my desk. “Great eye for details —
awesome!” he wrote. Though I didn’t know it then, Peter would become one
more member of my network.
At the end of the summer, I returned to The San Francisco Chronicle. My
plan was to finish school — I was now a senior — while I worked for The
Chronicle as a reporter for the city desk. But when The Post beckoned again,
offering me a full-time, two-year paid internship that I could start when I
graduated in June 2004, it was too tempting to pass up. I moved back to
Washington.
After his college graduation with his grandfather, Lolo, who provided most of his resources for his journey to
America.
Photograph from Jose Antonio Vargas
About four months into my job as a reporter for The Post, I began feeling
increasingly paranoid, as if I had “illegal immigrant” tattooed on my forehead
— and in Washington, of all places, where the debates over immigration
seemed never-ending. I was so eager to prove myself that I feared I was
annoying some colleagues and editors — and worried that any one of these
professional journalists could discover my secret. The anxiety was nearly
paralyzing. I decided I had to tell one of the higher-ups about my situation. I
turned to Peter.
By this time, Peter, who still works at The Post, had become part of
management as the paper’s director of newsroom training and professional
development. One afternoon in late October, we walked a couple of blocks to
Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Over some 20 minutes,
sitting on a bench, I told him everything: the Social Security card, the driver’s
license, Pat and Rich, my family.
Peter was shocked. “I understand you 100 times better now,” he said. He told
me that I had done the right thing by telling him, and that it was now our
shared problem. He said he didn’t want to do anything about it just yet. I had
just been hired, he said, and I needed to prove myself. “When you’ve done
enough,” he said, “we’ll tell Don and Len together.” (Don Graham is the
chairman of The Washington Post Company; Leonard Downie Jr. was then
the paper’s executive editor.) A month later, I spent my first Thanksgiving in
Washington with Peter and his family.
In the five years that followed, I did my best to “do enough.” I was promoted
to staff writer, reported on video-game culture, wrote a series on
Washington’s H.I.V./AIDS epidemic and covered the role of technology and
social media in the 2008 presidential race. I visited the White House, where I
interviewed senior aides and covered a state dinner — and gave the Secret
Service the Social Security number I obtained with false documents.
I did my best to steer clear of reporting on immigration policy but couldn’t
always avoid it. On two occasions, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s position on
driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. I also wrote an article about
Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, then the chairman of the Republican
National Committee, who was defending his party’s stance toward Latinos
after only one Republican presidential candidate — John McCain, the coauthor of a failed immigration bill — agreed to participate in a debate
sponsored by Univision, the Spanish-language network.
It was an odd sort of dance: I was trying to stand out in a highly competitive
newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out too much, I’d invite unwanted
scrutiny. I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on
the lives of other people, but there was no escaping the central conflict in my
life. Maintaining a deception for so long distorts your sense of self. You start
wondering who you’ve become, and why.
In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the
paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a year
earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The first
thing she said was, “Anong mangyayari kung malaman ng mga tao?”
What will happen if people find out?
I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the bathroom
on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and cried.
In the summer of 2009, without ever having had that follow-up talk with
top Post management, I left the paper and moved to New York to join The
Huffington Post. I met Arianna Huffington at a Washington Press Club
Foundation dinner I was covering for The Post two years earlier, and she later
recruited me to join her news site. I wanted to learn more about Web
publishing, and I thought the new job would provide a useful education.
Above A doctored version of this card has helped keep Vargas in the United States. The magazine has blurred his
number in the photo.
Still, I was apprehensive about the move: many companies were already using
E-Verify, a program set up by the Department of Homeland Security that
checks if prospective employees are eligible to work, and I didn’t know if my
new employer was among them. But I’d been able to get jobs in other
newsrooms, I figured, so I filled out the paperwork as usual and succeeded in
landing on the payroll.
While I worked at The Huffington Post, other opportunities emerged. My
H.I.V./AIDS series became a documentary film called “The Other City,”
which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and was broadcast on
Showtime. I began writing for magazines and landed a dream assignment:
profiling Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker.
The more I achieved, the more scared and depressed I became. I was proud of
my work, but there was always a cloud hanging over it, over me. My old eightyear deadline — the expiration of my Oregon driver’s license — was
approaching.
After slightly less than a year, I decided to leave The Huffington Post. In part,
this was because I wanted to promote the documentary and write a book
about online culture — or so I told my friends. But the real reason was, after
so many years of trying to be a part of the system, of focusing all my energy
on my professional life, I learned that no amount of professional success
would solve my problem or ease the sense of loss and displacement I felt. I
lied to a friend about why I couldn’t take a weekend trip to Mexico. Another
time I concocted an excuse for why I couldn’t go on an all-expenses-paid trip
to Switzerland. I have been unwilling, for years, to be in a long-term
relationship because I never wanted anyone to get too close and ask too many
questions. All the while, Lola’s question was stuck in my head: What will
happen if people find out?
Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small
reprieve: I obtained a driver’s license in the state of Washington. The license
is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable
identification — but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect
and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am.
I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.
So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story
to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses and
employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and
liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this
article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and
friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my
options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.
I do know that I am grateful to my grandparents, my Lolo and Lola, for giving
me the chance for a better life. I’m also grateful to my other family — the
support network I found here in America — for encouraging me to pursue my
dreams.
It’s been almost 18 years since I’ve seen my mother. Early on, I was mad at
her for putting me in this position, and then mad at myself for being angry
and ungrateful. By the time I got to college, we rarely spoke by phone. It
became too painful; after a while it was easier to just send money to help
support her and my two half-siblings. My sister, almost 2 years old when I
left, is almost 20 now. I’ve never met my 14-year-old brother. I would love to
see them.
Not long ago, I called my mother. I wanted to fill the gaps in my memory
about that August morning so many years ago. We had never discussed it.
Part of me wanted to shove the memory aside, but to write this article and
face the facts of my life, I needed more details. Did I cry? Did she? Did we kiss
goodbye?
My mother told me I was excited about meeting a stewardess, about getting
on a plane. She also reminded me of the one piece of advice she gave me for
blending in: If anyone asked why I was coming to America, I should say I was
going to Disneyland.
Annotation Worksheet
Source:
I.
Rhetorical Context (Who wrote it or created it? Why was it written? What is
it trying to do to or for its readers? What is it? Where does it appear? When
was it published? What is its genre?)
II.
Summary (What does the text say? What are its main points? What did you
find most interesting or important?)
III.
What are THREE golden lines from the text? (Quotes that stood out the most.)
Quote 1:
Evaluation/Significance of the Quote (Why did you choose it?):
Quote 2:
Evaluation/Significance of the Quote (Why did you choose it?):
Quote 3:
Evaluation/Significance of the Quote (Why did you choose it?):
Annotation Worksheet
IV.
Evaluation (Is the text convincing? Why or why not? What new knowledge
did you get from reading this text?)
V.
Questioning (What questions do you have about the text? What would you ask
the author if you could speak to him or her directly? Do you have any
questions to ask your fellow students or the instructor?)
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