Customer Reviews

Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Four Mexican girls, two legal immigrants born in the United States, and two illegals born in Mexico with legal siblings born in the US, grew up as best friends in junior high and high school. Just Like Us reads like a detective novel as Helen Thorpe shows how they cope with these similarities and differences--how they manage to get real or fake IDs, drivers' licenses, jobs, and college financial aid--all the while dealing with deported parents, boyfriends, and peer pressure. Finally, when an illegal immigrant teenager murders a Denver police officer, additional obstacles emerge to thwart their happy friendships as their differences become even more evident. As Thorpe, wife of Denver's mayor, relates, "All of us found ourselves in new territory, far from our point of origin. I didn't know what the rules were anymore."

Through reading this book, I learned to care about how these girls survived the conflicting laws in the US that seemed, for the most part, to prevent them from achieving the American dream. Thorpe relates to their dilemmas, having been an immigrant herself. She documents how their fiercest opponent, Tom Tancredo, himself offspring of immigrant grandparents, tries to gain political capital by blocking illegal immigrants from receiving decent educational programs, health care, and respect. At the same time, the Mexican immigrants--both legal and illegal--must pick fruit and vegetables, clean dirty buildings, and remodel other wealthy citizens' houses in order to survive.

As Thorpe weaves these girls' lives through the events swirling around them, I found myself staying up late to read one more chapter, or two, or three before going to sleep. Thorpe wrapped up this incomplete story with a question as there really is no ending to the dilemma of illegal immigration with its many personalities and complex rules. She asks "Did the idea of a country--an abstract concept, really--truly matter more than the sum happiness of all the individuals living without its boundaries? No, I thought. People mattered more than governments. In fact, this country was founded on that very idea."

by Susan M. Andrus
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Helen Thorpe had a good idea: capture the saga of four Latina high schoolers, two of whom are legal citizens and two who are not. The cover with the doe- eyed depressed teen's photo should have warned me that this would have a thudding, "after-school special" quality, and it does. Great concept; good representatives are found in Marisela, Yadira, Clara, and Elissa. However, Thorpe's approach is somewhat helter-skelter: Is it political, personal profile, or third-person characterizations from afar? Unfortunately, it's a little bit of all three, and I felt as though the story is the equivalent of a carriage with its wheels stuck in the mud. Where, or how, are we going? Unlike oral historians such as Studs Terkel, we are not given the sense of each person; each young woman is always filtered through Thorpe's slightly priggish, English schoolmarm eyes. The section where she sat on the periphery during a graduation night party at a Mexican nightclub in Denver would be the prototype for my argument. Too many people, too many stories, too many agendas. The story would have been well told as a documentary with visual storytelling. I'm sorry to say I could never get excited about this book.

First of all, I was intrigued about and somewhat wary of the whole idea of tying the characters together with the prom. I was afraid that it would read like an extended cliche, but Just Like Us is no cliche: It is absolutely real. The girls who are the subjects of the book lead complicated and difficult lives at times, and citizenship is an ever-looming entity that both unites and divides the girls. I found this to be the most engaging part of the book. Immigration law is by no means clarified, and if anything, this is what the book exposes. Immigration and citizenship are more than simply passage of laws and enforcing policy- This is how such laws and processes affect real people. I agree with another reviewer in that the book has an "after-school special" feel to it, but it does delve deeper than that. I would encourage anyone who has strong opinions about illegal immigration, immigration policy, and amnesty to pick up this book and peek into the lives of real people whose lives are affected on every level by these issues.

Helen Thorpe presents an account of the lives of four young Mexican-American girls living in Denver in 2004. This is narrative non-fiction, in the spirit of works by Alex Kotlowitz, Tracy Kidder, Norman Mailer, or David Simon.

In the glow of my memories for reading those works, I approached Just Like Us with a lot of excitement. This story holds a lot of relevance. Our nation is riven with emotion about the question of immigration, and the impacts of the new demographics present forces that cannot help but change our country. It is not a new story - the Mexican arrivals are just another iteration of so many that have come before them.

These girls are all involved in the normal transitions for young people "coming of age." They have left high school and are beginning college. They have important social relationships. Their lives are in flux. That is disrupted by a larger event that explodes in Denver. An immigrant commits a murder in a local restaurant. The news strikes a chord in Denver. The fact that the restaurant is owned by a local politician, who had unknowingly employed the assailant in spite of his lack of working papers, provokes a lot of attention from anti-immigration leaders.

Thorpe has one advantage that most of these writers cannot claim. She has the ability to view the lives of the people in her story from two perspectives. She is the wife of the Mayor of Denver. That means that while she spends her days following these girls, she spends her private life participating in her husband's emotional and political sphere. The murder puts her husband in a crisis.

This book covers an event that become a focal point for the political campaign for a Presidential candidate - Tom Tancredo. He rails against the Mayor and the system, claiming that Denver is a Sanctuary City. The author's perspective is incredible, because she can genuinely claim to understand this event intimately from two opposite worlds: those in power, and those out of power. An example: upon attending the University of Denver, one of the girls meets boyfriend from a privileged Colorado background. He has a political consciousness, albeit one different from her. He is a Republican, with some of the isolationist perspectives held by the anti-immigration groups. He reverts to an opinion that rests upon a legal construct - that legal status should determine political right. Legals have the right to work, to attend school, to receive medical care. Illegals have none of those rights. It is a human narrative that nicely balances the political discourse of the Mayor, of Tom Tancredo, and the other people in power.

My complaint from this book is that the girls themselves are not really that interesting. That is a vulnerability of any piece of narrative non-fiction. If their lives were touched by tragedy directly, it would be one thing. That is not really the case - the larger legal system determines their privilege, but they are able to operate within those confines in a way that allows for relatively normal lives.

I think this book would be a stimulating subject for a book group. It provides a human perspective that aligns the book with the pro-immigration argument, but it still offers a relatively neutral account. I think it would be excellent for any group with a diverse set of opinions.

When you're married to the mayor of a major city, which mayor's restaurant chain has hired an illegal alien who allegedly murdered a police officer, it's pretty difficult to write a "non-fiction" book about illegal immigrants without a major conflict of interest. But this author would have us believe that, despite her station in exactly that position, she's managed to present an "unbiased" and "fair" account of the problems presented by the illegal immigrant status of high school students.

In this volume, Thorpe pretends to be unbiased concerning the status of four immigrant high school students, two young women whose families have obtained legality for them, and two whose families function within the shadowy status as illegal aliens --- unable to fly between U.S. cities for lack of proper documentation, unable to apply for college scholarships for want of social security numbers and unable to plan for bright futures.

The author pretends that she has no bias when entering into this story. In fact, her bias lies completely and totally with granting overnight legality to the "children" whose parents have brought them into the U.S. as illegal alien students and minors. Alas, she does not present half of the legal difficulties encompassed in the "DREAM Act," which in 2008 proposed to make illegal students under the age of 18 --- and anyone up to age 36 --- legal overnight, also enabling their extended families to acquire legal residency in the U.S. without much difficulty at all.

But anyone intending to buy this volume should know up front: Ms. Thorpe presents opponents of amnesty for illegal aliens as "bad guys," and illegal aliens as the poor victims of a system gone awry.

The trouble is this book contains no information what so ever on the laws of Mexico concerning illegal aliens, or of any other nation for that matter. It implies that the U.S. can provide endless largess to families who cross the border illegally, mostly from Mexico, with no consideration of the costs to the legal citizens and residents of the U.S.

While presented as a "balanced" account by blurb writers who should know better, this book is anything but unbiased.

Of course, the individual stories presented here are indeed sad; but that does not make the illegal status of the families described any less illegal, or any less hurtful to millions of unemployed American citizens who are also minority high school students, or disabled, or otherwise able only to earn the minimum wage.

All Americans certainly have sympathy for the plight of the people portrayed here. But U.S. laws were written for a reason, and no amount of obfuscation can hide the fact that the U.S. lacks the capacity to absorb all the poor people in the world. The only way to help them is to enforce U.S. laws --- and help foreign countries sufficiently develop their own economies to support their citizens and provide the same kind of opportunity the U.S. is obligated to provide for its own citizens before everyone else.

---Alyssa A. Lappen

The author follows 4 girls from an urban Denver high school who are both Latina and good students. Two are legal immigrants and two are not. The girls follow the same path in trying to get to college but some are hampered by lack of eligibility of financial aid and cost of international tuition. How they cope in high school, college and beyond are the subject of this book. Even more interesting is how the families are affected around them. Imagine going back to Mexico and leaving your American born children here to fend for themselves or tell the older sibling to watch them. This book puts the story of illegal immigration onto human faces. Very interesting.

This is a book that involves the illegal alien furor that is in our news almost everyday. However this story is about those that are legal and those who aren't and are already living in the U.S. The author portrays a very accurate account of the immigration picture and the political aspects involved. The author spent five years researching the subject and having lived most of my life near the Mexican border, it is a true drama that is lived out every day. This is a page turner that reads like a fictional best seller. My wife who was a school teacher in Southern Calif feels it should be required reading no matter how you feel about the immigration problem we face. I highly reccomend this book.

I especially wanted to read this book because I am an ESL teacher and I live in Denver. The author tells the story of four young Mexican American women who are good friends. It is their story but it is much more. It is the story of illegal immigrants and the many businesses who hire them, sometimes knowing that their documents are fake. It is the story of parent who are in the United States illegally and their children who are born here. It is the conflicting story of high school students who work hard and dream of going to college despite the obstacles some of them will face.

We meet them in their senior year. All are good students; two are legal and two are not. All four want to attend college, but the two without papers have problems figuring out how to pay for tuition without access to in-state tuition rates and financial aid. Thorpe describes the many dimensions of their lives, their academic experiences, their jobs, their families and their social lives.

Helen Thorpe also brings in the relevant political issues concerning immigration. She interviews Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado Congressman who has strong opinions about illegal immigration. Thorpe also describes various national votes and proposals and how they affect the girls and the possibilities for their futures in the United States.

Denver has many immigrants from many countries, but when the subject of immigrants comes up, many people think of Mexicans. And, even though Americans of Mexican descent share Colorado's history for generations, many people think of Mexicans as illegal.

Thorpe, as the Denver mayor's wife, is brought into the details of the shooting death of an off-duty policeman, working at a Mexican social club. The murderer, an illegal Mexican immigrant, was working in one of the restaurants partly owned by the mayor. Thorpe goes behind the tabloid headlines, and discovers that the policeman's mother was from Mexico and that the people at the party did everything they could to help after the shooting. Thorpe shows how the news accounts lumped the entire Mexican community together with the offender.

This is a thoughtful book that shows why there are no easy answers to these problems.

Four girls, two illegal aliens, are the subjects of this book. Marisela, in Denver, is an A student. To her Mexican father's dismay she is becoming Americanized. Her best friend is Yadira. Both girls are graduating from high school and both are undocumented. Two others are part of the foursome, Elissa and Clara. Yadira's boyfriend, Juan, doesn't have legal status, either.

As the book opens, the writer describes the girls spending five hours to get ready for their prom. Marisela tries to explain to her father that in America fathers don't go to their daughters' proms. Marisela is interested in attending the University of Denver. She has been classified as an international student. Yadira has a private benefactor. Elissa's place of birth is El Paso. Clara has been legalized through the family reunification program. They are eligible for Pell grants, private scholarships, the social security program, drivers licenses, (since the passage of the Colorado Secure and Verifiable Identity Act persons in the position of Marisela and Yadira cannot become legal drivers), government-backed student loans, in-state tuition at state schools. Their documentation suffices for airport screening and for border checks. Even Greyhound buses have been subject to checks by the Homeland Security Department. Yadira discovers she cannot even rent a movie from Blockbuster.

Their friends persuade Yadira and Marisela to finish high school. Since junior high school, using fake documents, Marisela has been working at a grocery store. Marisela is accepted at Metropolitan College, but needs nine thousand dollars to attend. Yadira is accepted at Whittier College and through scholarships and private fundraising she will probably be able to attend the school. Each girl may have a shot at attending the University of Denver on a full ride private scholarship. Yadira succeeds in being chosen and elects to stay in Denver. Marisela is not, although she gains admission to the university. Eventually it is worked out that Yadira's benefactor will shift her fundraising efforts to insuring that Marisela attends the University of Denver. Elissa receives a scholarship from the Gates Foundation for Regis. Clara is one of those selected for the scholarship Yadira is receiving and goes to the University of Denver with her friends.

The girls are disappointed over the spartan dormitory rooms. (Better accomodations are available in subsequesnt years.) Each of the girls signs up for four classes. Marisela's splashy personality draws other students to her dorm room. In the spring of her first year in college, Yadira's mother Alma ends up in jail for identity theft. The identity theft charge is reported by the author in fascinating detail. The Mexican families living in the USA portrayed here are comprised, oftentimes, of both legal and illegal immigrants. Some people get green cards, and some don't. Some children are born in the US and some aren't. The author reveals the full scope of the immigration issue in recounting the story of the four girls. The writer, Helen Thorpe, is the wife of John Hickenlooper, the Mayor of Denver. A substantial portion of the book treats political issues.

Graduation from college, they had been high-achieving students once again, creates the same anxiety for Yadira and Marisela that graduation from high school had. They still lack legal status. Marisela, pregnant, presents to the author the idea that she is fulfilling both Mexican and American dreams and that she, and the other three girls by analogy, are hybrid, a blending of both cultures. Through reading this book, one learns that immigration reform is complex, mosaic families are common, the gap between the rich and the poor in this country is widening, and that the four girls described are deserving and charming.

Helen Thorpe has done a national service while writing a fascinating story of four Latina girls, all high school seniors when she introduces us to them. She develops relationships with all four girls, two of whom are illegal and two of whom are legal. She follows them for the next four years of their lives giving us a powerful understanding of what their worlds feel like and what the complexities of being illegal bring into their lives. Surprisingly, the two illegal girls become the more promenent of the four as the stories unfold. Pleasingly, the author herself is a character throughout, sharing her own life story (she was also an immigrant to the US as a child) and her own reactions and views. Her forthrightness and questioning of the various issues deepens her reporting and adds to our appreciation of the difficulty of any simple fixes.

A remarkable and stunning event intrudes into her reporting when an illegal teenager kills an off duty Denver police officer working at a Mexican club. This young man had worked at Thorpe's husband's restaurant, and her husband is now the popular mayor of Denver, so the story unexpectedly plunges like a spear into the center of the author's own life. Even though her husband's restaurant was now run through a trust, anti-immigration sentiment boils. The author's calm and even-handed recounting of these events added depth and richness to her story for me, reminding me that these issues are unlikely to remain "out there" for any of us. Remarkably, she seeks out and undertakes to understand Tom Tancredo, the most outspoken political opponent of her own liberal immigration sentiments, and examines the origins of his views further enriching her story.

Thorpe is a skilled writer and the book deserves a read simply for the slice of life vividness of her story, but it offers a compelling insight into one of the most complex and devisive political issues before the country today.