J. A. Vargas’s Transgressive Life in Exile

In Jose Antonio Vargas’s memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018), there is an inextricable nexus between theoretical/critical reflections and the reconstruction of his lived experience. Dear America is an autobiographical balancing act in which the autobiographical subject, split between the individual and the community, bears witness to the collective struggles of undocumented and legal migrants in the US, subverting the racist master narrative of immigration. This article focuses on the cross-cultural politics and counter-hegemonic force of Dear America as a paradigmatic example of how transgressive life writing and exilic criticism can make political interventions. I argue that transgression and exile are deeply interconnected in the memoir, which pushes against boundaries that pathologise the subject position of the undocumented migrant. The memoir resists epistemic closure, ultimately overcoming mimicry (passing, lying, and hiding) as a survival mechanism and asserting difference as essential for equality, human dignity, and freedom.