The Educated Reporter: Fall Books

These Girls Are Undocumented but Unstoppable
By Linda Perlstein, EWA public editor

Do you suspect there are undocumented immigrants among the students you cover? Have you ever talked to them about their situations, or in any way addressed the issue directly? I’m guessing, if you are like most reporters, the answers are yes and no. Which is too bad. We now have an entire education system based around raising the achievement of all students, yet we fail to properly explain the complications that a significant portion of them face every day.

So I was thrilled when I heard about “Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America.” In the book, which comes out later this month from Scribner, journalist Helen Thorpe spends five years with a group of accomplished Denver students who are joined in shared experience—family, ambition, gorditas, reggaeton—yet cleaved by circumstances over which they had no control.
Two are legal, two are not.

I remember hearing a five-minute snippet about the two undocumented girls, Marisela and Ydira, years ago on “This American Life.” It stuck with me, the voices of these teenagers who would have made Jay Mathews proud with the number of AP classes they aced, yet it still wouldn’t get them a Social Security number. These girls matched the challenge they faced with determination and hard-core studying (along with tedious jobs at liquor stores and supermarkets), but not everyone had their moxie. At the time of the radio report I following a 10-year-old boy who already had thrown up his hands. Mateo was a Mexican fifth grader who had crossed the border with his family a few years earlier. He was naturally smart but was frustrated with English and didn’t work hard, and his teachers, desperate for him to score at least proficient on the state test, pleaded with him to persevere.

“What’s the point?” he said. “I don’t have my papers.”

Thorpe’s narrative shows us the point: dignity, knowledge and at least a sliver of a chance. What Marisela and Ydira had to do to get there blew my mind. We’ve read plenty about the challenges of poor children—and these girls are poor—but what about the fact you can’t take out books from the public library, or visit the college you get into because you lack the identification to board a plane? That you can’t visit the doctor when you have the flu, but your (legal) siblings can seek health care for the littlest cold, because they have Medicaid? That you can’t qualify for financial aid (or, in the case of North Carolina community colleges, even admission)? That the generous people who want to sponsor your education sometimes back out at the last minute because of your status?
The Urban Institute estimated six years ago that 65,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools every year. How many don’t bother, because they lack the grit of Ydira and Marisela’s? Because their mothers, like Marisela’s did, greet the loss of another scholarship opportunity with the comfort that she could, after all, go to beauty school?

Thorpe addresses the political issues surrounding immigration in Colorado with the diplomacy you might expect from a politician’s wife—she is married to John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver—but with a degree of personal revelation that can be surprising, given the ways the immigration issue factored into her husband’s career and reputation. There’s a side narrative in the book about a police shooting, which makes sense to include, but the detail sometimes feels a little much. Same with the detail about what all the girls wear, or who is friends with whom at any given moment. I love detail—any of you who have sent me a story to critique know that—but at a certain point, I don’t care what color eye shadow Marisela is wearing today. I want to know if she’s going to get to college! To law school! To work!

The paths of undocumented immigrants is a particular interest of mine, sometimes in personal ways, and I wish I could read more about them. It’s hard to write about; you’re dealing with fear, mistrust. The flexibility to change names and, in Thorpe’s case, a few potentially identifying details, is greater in a book project than in daily journalism.

But the issue is timely, as the DREAM Act floats around yet again. (The legislation, which was introduced in the Senate this spring and since stalled there, would make permanent residency possible for people like Marisela and Ydira.) And there are people brave enough to talk to reporters, as you can see from these reports in the Lexington, N.C., Dispatch; in ColorLines Magazine; and on B-Side Radio (the latter produced by a group of students led by EWA’s Kathy Baron). This reporting—about people on the cusp of or already attending college—is valuable. I’d also love to see more work done about students far earlier, when they are just 10-year-olds deciding whether or not to care.

This is the first in a series of looks at fall education books. Linda Perlstein is available to help you. Contact her at 410-539-2464 or lperlstein@ewa.org.