JUST LIKE US: THE TRUE STORY OF FOUR MEXICAN GIRLS COMING OF AGE IN AMERICA by journalist Helen Thorpe
Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, tells the story of four high school students, Marisela, Yadira, Clara and Elissa, whose parents entered this country illegally from Mexico. The story begins the night of their senior prom in Denver, Colorado, April 2004. All four of the girls have grown up in the United States. All four want to live the American dream, continue on to college, and have a meaningful profession. But only two have legal documents. With papers, two girls can easily work towards their goals and dreams. But the other two meet daily discrimination, even when they simply want to rent a movie!
A murder occurs. A real one. A Mexican immigrant kills a police officer. Strange but true, the murdered works under a fake Social Security card at one of the Mayor’s restaurants (Thorpe’s real husband and the mayor of Denver). National arguments over immigration stirs even stronger feelings about who has a right to live, to work, to seek “the American dream.”
The author, Helen Thorpe, married to Denver mayor John Hickenlooper and a professional journalist, met these four girls, followed their daily lives all through their high school years, and realized how difficult it was for the two without documents to attend college, drive or even rent a movie. “It was hard for Marisela and Yadira to see why they should labor over their homework if they were just going to end up working at McDonald’s,” Thorpe writes. “Marisela slid into trouble with ease, but Yadira found the experience profoundly disorienting.” With striking candor, Thorpe chronicles the girls’ lives over four years, delineating the small and major differences that eventually separate the girls and shape their futures. Thorpe relates specific events in such a poignant style that even the staunchest opponents of immigration liberalization will think again with a new perspective.
Just Like Us is also about friendship, as well as the determination required to overcome poverty. It is also about identity—“what it means to steal an identity, what it means to have a public identity, what it means to inherit an identity from parents. “ The reader is challenged to think about one of the most important social issues of our times – what it means to be an undocumented citizen, or a refugee, even of the “poor” or the minority. Who has the right to reach for the “great American dream?”
Review
“Thorpe puts a human face on a frequently obtuse conversation, and in so doing takes us far beyond the political rhetoric.” —O Magazine.
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