Book review, Just like us: the true story of four Mexican girls coming of age in Americ

Just like us: the true story of four Mexican girls coming of age in America

Hellen Thorpe has successfully achieved the difficult task of putting the real life of legal and illegal Mexican American young girls into words. Trough her book pages, we can feel the endless despair and the little joys of daily life of Marisela, Yadira, Clara and Elisa. Thorpe followed and documented the life and struggles of these young women from their senior year of high school (April 2004) to the day they graduate from Denver University (June 2008). In a first impression, we could think this is a story of success, but on a second thought I think that success is not that clear.

In her chronicle of these girls friendship, Thorpe takes the readers to the intimate development of Mexican American life in inner Denver. As we read, the characters start taking form: Marisela is a natural leader, extroverted, always looking dressy and the first to do everything; Yadira is the introverted and reserved; Clara usually dresses like a tomboy, but is witty and creative, and Elisa is the athlete of the group. All of them attended Roosevelt High, a troubled High School serving mainly Latino population with poor results due to high dropout rates, teen pregnancy, gang fights, etc. The four girls graduate from high school when they are 18 years old, and all of them ranked among the best students of their class. They all want to go to college and pursue a career, but just Clara and Elisa have the legal papers to follow their dreams. Elisa is the only one who was born in the USA and Clara has a green card because of his parents’ permanent resident status. Marisela and Yadira are illegal, and they have to find a way to make it to college. Their friendship is menaced when they discover how easy it is for the legal ones to get financial aid and continue their studies while, for the illegal ones, it is almost impossible. Growing as an illegal alien in Denver forbids these girls to enjoy simple pleasures people take for granted like going to college, getting a job, boarding an airplane or getting a driver’s license.

Marisela and Yadira are in the worst situation. The origin of all of their problems is their parents’ illegal emigration from Mexico. Their parents brought them when they were little kids to the USA, and they could not find any way to legalize their situation. Since they are not American citizens they cannot have a normal life, so they have been hiding from the government to avoid deportation. They finally make it to college after a long and exhausting process of asking for help from many sources. They finally find a solution with a combination of scholarships and funds from private donors. Three of them go to Denver University; just Elisa goes to Regis University.

            While in college, Thorpe follows the girls from dancing clubs to Mexican bands concerts, from sorority meetings to sociology classes. They meet new people and their circle of friendships grows. They conduct the regular life of a college student: they declare their major, discuss their concerns with professors, fall in love, fight among themselves, join a sorority, get excellent grades and share their fears. Only one thing remains the same for Marisela and Yadira during the four years: what they will do once they graduate since they do not have a green card to work. Their only hope was that the congresses voted on favor of the legislative proposal called DREAM act, the bill that will permit the legalization of undocumented people like them.

Thorpe combines the life of these four girls with the story of congressman Tancredo whose position on immigration is remarkably clear: all illegal immigrants should be deported and Denver mayor should stop “sanctuary city” policy. In 2004, the immigration issue started to become a national topic, and things got a little bit complicated when Raul Gomez Garcia an illegal Mexican murdered Donald Young a police officer in may of 2005. The assassination took place in Salon Ocampo, a popular Mexican dancing club where Young was working off-duty as guard. This event influenced the development of future severe policies towards immigration.

As she did with the girls, Thorpe also follows congressman Tancredo; she visits Donald Young widow, Kelly; and she even travels to Durango to see Yadira’s mom Alma who went back to Mexico when she discovered she was pregnant. She had been previously in jail accused of identity theft, so she was afraid to go back to jail while pregnant. All these different stories combined make the immigration issue exceedingly  difficult to tackle.

Analysis

This book had a huge impact in my thinking about immigration. I grew up in a middle class Mexican family, and migration was never a real option. However, migrating to the USA was always present as an option for poor people. This book made me realize how privileged I have been. Being a Mexican studying on a legal visa in a research university is an opportunity that a lot of people who migrated to this country would wish.

The immigration topic is complex, and the best way to talk about it is using Perna’s conceptual model of college choice. Why this girl’s decided to go to college? They could have decided to follow what most Mexican girls do and get married and have children by 18. The classic impediments that keep people from going to college are the lack of financial aid and poor academic preparation. None of these problems kept the girls from going to college. What Perna adds is that an “individuals assessment of the benefits and costs of an investment in college is shaped by the individual’s habitus, as well as the school and community context, the higher education context, and the social, economic, and policy context” (Perna, 2006, p. 101). Most of these factors played against the girls desire to go to college, because not only they did not have money for tuition, but the community where they grew up did not value girls education. Besides, they went to a disadvantaged high school, and the University they chose had an insignificant Hispanic population. This makes their academic efforts even more outstanding when compared with their peers from different backgrounds.

According to Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, et al. (2005), to develop a supportive campus environment it is necessary to promote high-quality student relationships with other students, faculty members and the institution’s administrative personnel. For what we know from the book, the University of Denver did not exactly excel in this area. For some time, the girls struggled to fit in the campus life. They chose to get many classes together, and they mingle mostly with people they felt comfortable with like Zahara a Somalian American, Matias, Rosalba, Jaime and other Hispanics. The book only mentions one white guy, Luke. The big opportunity for the girls to become engaged with campus activities beyond classes was the Latina Theta Theta Nu sorority. They help start a new chapter and from that time on the sorority consumed increasing amounts of time, and served as an outlet for their anxieties.

According to Kuh and Hu (2001), “educators at all levels believe that frequent, meaningful interactions between students and their teachers are important to learning and personal development” (p. 309). From this perspective, there was an powerful presence during the girls’ college experience. On their first semester of sophomore year, they signed up for a class with professor Lisa Martinez. This professor was a Hispanic whose story was similar to the girls’. Her classes helped the girls develop a clear conscience of their role in American society, she introduces the girls to influential thinkers, and the discussions they held in that class ignited their desire for a permanent solution to their conundrum. The influence of Martinez in the girls’ lives was bigger than portrayed in the book. I think it was the main factor that took the girls to participate in the immigrant rights rally on May 1^st 2006, where Marisela spoke in front of Denver’s Capitol building addressing a multitude of one hundred thousand people.  It also played an prominent role on the girls’ decision of founding a new chapter of the Theta Theta Nu sorority. In Kuh’s words: “a presumed salutary effect of interactions between students and faculty members is that students will become more comfortable in the academic environment and will more willingly adopt institutional norms and values. This outcome increases their sense of belonging and “fit” with the institution, factors that are positively related to persistence and graduation”.

I enjoyed this book profoundly. Thorps greatest achievement has been to avoid easy stereotypes from adrift Mexican thugs to merciless republicans.  Thorpe pictures a comprehensive status of illegal immigration and her conclusion is that the solution to illegal immigration in congress has to take into consideration real lives like those of Marisela, Yadira, Clara and Elisa. The good news is that the four girls graduated from college in four years, but their particular circumstances make graduation a partial success: Marisela wass pregnant and wass going to start a life with Julio, an undocumented Mexican; Yadira is taking care of her siblings and working on a low salary because she has no green card; Elisa cant’s find a job and got into a long depression; and Clara is also unemployed after six months of graduation. Mexican girls, American lives, and global crisis: an explosive cocktail that only God knows where will lead the four girls in the future.

References

Kuh, G. & Hu, S. (2001).  The effects of student-faculty interaction in the 1990s.  Review of

Higher Education, 24, 309-322.

Kuh, G., Kinzie, J., Schuh, J., Whitt, E. et al. (2005). Student Success in College: Creating

Conditions that Matter. Jossey-Bay, San Francisco.

Perna, L. W. (2006). Studying college choice: A proposed conceptual model. In J. C. Smart

(Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (Vol. XXI, pp. 99-157). New

York: Springer.