Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America

The author meets the girls two-thirds of the way through their senior year: Elissa, an "athletic" girl; Clara, a church-going, "sensitive" girl; Yadira, a "model"-thin, reserved girl; and Marisela, a "dramatic" and "flashy" (21) girl. They live in the west side of Denver, home to many Latinos. In the 1990s, the foreign-born population in Denver tripled, and 25% of the students in the schools were "English Language Learners" (22). They met in 8th grade at an urban Denver middle school. Clara had formerly not been legal, after she had slipped under a wire fence from Nogales, Sonora, to Nogales, Arizona, with her mother and three siblings en route to see her father, Carlos Luz, who had a green card. Six years later, Clara had acquired legal status but not before a crooked lawyer had stolen several hundred dollars from her father. They were fortunate that the usual restriction against permitting citizenship for people who entered the country illegally had been lifted. Elissa was born in the United States, as her mother had crossed the Mexican border to give birth to her daughter in El Paso. Though she felt Mexican inside, she was American according to her documents. The girls came from the three states in Mexico that send the greatest number of people to the U.S.: Elissa is from Chihuahua, Clara is from Zacatecas, and Yadira and Marisela are from Durango.

Their differences in status did not become clear to the girls until Marisela attempted to get her driver’s license but had instead to use a fake Mexican license: “And that’s when I realized how I was going to grow up—doing everything the wrong way” (25). The two illegal girls ran into obstacles from going on the class trip to Washington, D.C., to renting a movie at Blockbuster, but college looms as the greatest obstacle. Yadira and Marisela watched as Clara and Elissa qualified for scholarships and Pell grants while they did not. The girls had all participated in a qualifying contest to win scholarships through the Daniels Fund, and Marisela and Yadira had spent time at college dorms only to find out later that illegal immigrants were not qualified to apply through this fund. Marisela and Yadira were so angry that they even cut school, but Elissa encouraged them to continue. However, a rift developed between the girls who were legal and those who weren’t. Marisela and Yadira considered developing a club called “Girls Like Us” (28).

Thorpe goes to Roosevelt High School, where "85 percent of its students were Latino" (29). Some of the most successful students are not legal. Elissa visits the college counselor to speak about attending Regis University in Denver if she can secure funds. Marisela arrives later, after announcements are broadcast in English and Spanish, and the girls go to an AP calculus class together. Marisela asks several questions that show that she is very interested in the subject matter. Later, in an AP Literature class, Marisela composes a concrete poem in the shape of a question mark in which she writes, “I’m confused/Am I going/to college?/Should I obey/my parents?” (34).

Marisela recalls what it was like to cross the U.S. border. She had crossed once when she was 3 years old and later when she was 7. She was born in Durango in 1986 when her mother was 16 and her father was 24. Her father, who had worked in the U.S. before, returned to the U.S. when Marisela was 11 months old to work as a janitor at night and as a day laborer. He tried to earn citizenship through the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which the Mexicans called "la amnistía"(35), but he could not.

When Marisela was 3, Fabian decided to give up sending money home to build a house there, and he and his family crossed the border in Baja California, where Marisela turned blue in the cold temperatures and they had to hide in a culvert. They made their way to the Canoga Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Fabian fell off a roof and Josefa had to work as a maid. Fabian was deported when border agents boarded a bus he was on, and they had to pay a coyote to smuggle him back into the US. They lived in Bakersfield, California, but they found it hard to make a living, and Josefa had been trapped inside a convenience store when there was shooting outside. Fabian had paid an immigration lawyer money, but the INS told Fabian that the lawyer had given him fraudulent advice and that he was not likely to qualify to be a citizen. Fabian gave up gaining legal citizen after that, and the family decided to return to Mexico after two years.

Josefa gave birth to Nestor in the US, so he was a citizen, and she gave birth to Rosalinda in Durango. When the economy worsened in Mexico, they decided to head north again. Fabian crossed first, and Rosalinda was smuggled in as the child of a cousin, while Josefa, Marisela, and Nestor crossed with a coyote. Everyone scattered when border agents arrived, and Marisela was whisked into a truck without knowing where her mother was. Her brother Rafael was born in the US, just like her older brother, Nestor. The boys had advantages the girls did not, as Marisela said: “All the benefits, it was the guys” (38). When Fabian heard about a job at National Maintenance, he moved the family to Denver when Marisela was 10. There, they lived in rental houses with other families, then an apartment, and finally to a house they owned. Marisela did well in school, to the amazement of Josefa, whose family had taken her out of school after second grade and who could not read or write. Marisela started working full time at a supermarket when she was 13, after her parents bought her a fake Social Security card. She paid taxes, even though she would not receive Social Security payments. Despite working until 11pm, Marisela still did well in school. Her friends called her “Superwoman” (39).

Marisela also threw herself into her social life and lost her virginity as a sophomore, much to her parents’ chagrin (they overheard a conversation to that effect). Her friends were far more cautious about sex, while she had different sexual relationships: “Pulled in one direction by the nightclub scene and pulled in the opposite direction by her parents, Marisela started to come apart” (40). She downed Tylenol to end her life, and she spent time recovering in the hospital, where her friends were amazed by the way she looked without all the makeup that she usually wore.

Meeting Marisela at her school one day, the author finds out that the family had to move to Lakewood, as they had lost their house. Fabian had taken out a second mortgage to make repairs, and a relative had stolen it (they were only able to recover some of the money). The population at Marisela’s school has to move quite often, and only "one-third" of them had attended the school "for three consecutive years" (42). As Marisela attends a sociology class, the author hears the students refer to themselves as mexicanos or "Chicanos" (43)—the latter term defines someone who is born in the US Marisela does not let on to the Chicano students she meets that she is not able to apply to colleges, while she hears that they have been accepted into college. Clara reveals during Calculus class that she has earned a full ride to Colorado College, and Marisela acts so excited that she swallows her gum:“Marisela had done a seamless job of acting” (45) and hiding her disappointment. She feels “ashamed of her unworthiness” (46) and tries to hide her feelings beneath a brittle veneer.

The author writes about the changing politics in Colorado, in which politicians such as Tom Tancredo in the suburban 6th District turn against immigration. Thorpe writes of Tancredo and Marisela’s family: “They were opposite sides of the same coin, sparring partners in the same debate” (47). The author goes to see Tancredo speak at a suburban bookstore as he discusses the issues he is passionate about, including his belief that illegal immigration is destroying western civilization. When Tancredo started the Immigration Reform Caucus in the US House of Representative in the late 1990s, it was seen as a fringe issue. However, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he gained influence in the media as someone who spoke about "cleans[ing]" (49) the country of immigrants. Nonetheless, he used illegal workers to finish the renovation of his basement. Tancredo believed that students who were in the US illegally should be deported with their parents.

When Marisela and the girls were juniors in high school, a student named Jesus Apodaca wrote the Denver Post about how he could not go to college because he was undocumented. Tancredo called the INS to urge them to deport the family, while the Apodaca family had to move to another part of the metro area of Aurora, Colorado, and different businessmen sponsored Jesus’s college education. Tancredo earned a greater following among conservatives who felt politicians were not stringent enough on the question of immigration.

The author’s husband, John Hickenlooper, decided to run as a fiscally conservative Democrat for mayor of Denver. He was a former geologist who had lost his job and then started a brewing company called Wynkoop Brewing Company and owned eight restaurants. Though he came under criticism for having workers whose social security numbers did not match their names at his restaurants (as the author notes, it can be hard to verify these numbers with the government), he won in a landslide and resolved the city’s large budget deficit within the first year of holding office.

Soon, Hickenlooper began to argue politically with Tancredo, who felt the mayor should use the city’s police force to round up illegal immigrants, though Hickenlooper felt this was the job of the federal government. Hickenlooper promised kids at an underperforming public middle school that he would find money for college for them, but he then ran into the question of whether he would fund the education of illegal students, as the public system was not required to ask students if they were legal or not. In conversations with the author, Hickenlooper said he wondered if immigrants were a "good investment" (56). They paid taxes but were often a drain on the city’s public hospital. While he felt that people should receive care if they were truly sick, he thought basically healthy people without insurance should be turned away.

The author met Tom Tancredo and was surprised to learn that all four of his grandparents had come from Italy and that he had grown up only a few blocks from the house Marisela’s family had owned. Nonetheless, he believed in closing our borders. Politics also played a large role in the girls’ lives: “The furor over immigration occupied a hulking presence in the emotional geography of the two girls, much in the way that the Rocky Mountains dominated the physical landscape” (58). The two illegal girls hoped to have a resolution of their crisis before the end of high school, a resolution that Tancredo was opposed to.