Jose Antonio Vargas
Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, activist for the rights of immigrants, filmmaker and founder of Define American. He was also, as he revealed in a New York Times Magazine article, an undocumented immigrant. In response to carrying around this particular secret for much of his life, he made the decision early on to unburden himself of his other deep dark secret when he came out as openly gay during his senior year in high school.
Pres. Barack Obama
Obama is a major character in the narrative because he is President when Vargas writes his piece for the Times Magazine and had already earned the nickname Deport-in-Chief for his aggressive (despite what Donald Trump convinced his supporters of) anti-immigrant policy. Coincidentally (or maybe not so much) the very day that the magazine hit shelves was the day that Obama announced the creation of what would become the rallying cry Trumpist rhetoric: the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Nancy Pelosi
Vargas at one time had lived in the congressional district which Nancy Pelosi represents, but she appears in the book in her powerful role as Speaker of the House. She invites Vargas to attend the first state of the nation address delivered by Donald Trump as her guest. Vargas is ambivalent, knowing he will merely be part of a dog and pony show, but also receives a more dire word of warning against acceptance from an attorney friend warning him against not just the political danger of attending such theater, but the legal threat of showing up on federal property while still subject to deportation by a staunchly anti-immigrant President.
Mama
The specter of Vargas’ mother hangs over every page of the text. The book opens with the imagery of Vargas as a twelve year old kid in the Philippines being roused from sleep early one morning, hustled into a cab and sent in a plane to the U.S. where his story of being an undocumented citizen begins. The book ends on the image of a phone call of a now thirty-seven year old Vargas listening to his mother’s faint voice suggesting “maybe it’s time to come home.”
