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

After Yadira and Clara organize a dance with salsa and hip-hop instructors, there is a forum about illegal immigration on campus that is attended by Tom Tancredo and members of CAIR. Mike McGarry from CAIR allows a speaker from the American Friends Service Committee (the Quaker political organization) to speak in favor of immigration, even illegal immigration. (Thorpe is also a member of the local Quaker Meeting.) She has supporters and also people who heckle her, and Clara, Yadira, Marisela, and Zahra are sitting among the anti-immigration group. An anti-immigration speaker calls for the governor to declare a state of emergency in Colorado. A former INS agent speaks about positioning law enforcement personnel at every form of public transportation and is referred to as a “fascist” (193) by a heckler. An organizer tells the crowd that police will remove anyone who boos or makes noise. Tancredo speaks and advocates for making illegal immigrants felons and disallowing children citizens who are born to parents without legal status. A mother speaks about how her 32-year-old son was killed on his motorcycle when he was struck by an illegal immigrate who had previous run-ins with the law. The brother of this woman calls for a boycott of the Wynkoop brewpub owned by the Thorpe’s husband. Thorpe realizes that given the presence of one congressman, two state senators, and a gubernatorial candidate, “the movement against illegal immigration had gone mainstream” (196).

Marisela and Yadira offer to show prospective students around campus, showing that they are more at home there. Marisela had yelled at the anti-immigration groups presenting at the forum, stating that they had their figures wrong: “It reminded us of Hitler” (197). She says she is scared even walking down the street.

Marisela is still seeing Ramiro off and on, though his father has been deported and his mother is struggling with chronic kidney failure. At age 17, Ramiro is supporting his three siblings. Marisela runs around between her work, classes, Ramiro, and her family, and she decides to start a Latina sorority called Theta Theta Nu. Yadira has to give some of her savings to her sisters, as her mother, diagnosed with high blood pressure, decides to stay in Mexico, and her father refuses to pay for anything besides food and rent. The girls hold a study group for the sorority, and as they become more involved in the sorority, Elissa disappears from their lives.

Yadira continues to date Juan, who is working as a janitor for $8 an hour and resents her decision to join a sorority. Clara kisses a boy named Alfonso, a friend of Marisela’s, and is crushed when he isn’t serious about her. Yadira and Clara pursue a quiet social life that veers between being part of the "dominant culture"(202) and the minority culture, while Marisela and Zahra, who have a wilder social life, are clearly identified as "students of color" (185).

While the girls are on winter break, John Hickenlooper, the author’s husband, participates in an electronic town hall meeting about immigration at the University of Denver. The meeting involves Hickenlooper, Tancredo, Governor Owens, State Representative Carroll, and former governor Dick Lamm.

Tancredo is featured in the video that plays before the event, and he speaks first, calling for the enforcement of borders. Hickenlooper speaks next and advocates securing the borders but not sealing them shut. Owens speaks about what he considers to be the worsening problem of illegal immigration, and Carroll suggests that the state resolve the problem if the federal government cannot. Lamm says that the U.S. cannot absorb a large quantity of people, given the environmental crisis going on. Owens defends the current guest worker program, which Tancredo decries. The consul general of Mexico speaks about how the current administration in that country is helping to pull people out of poverty and states that while remittances are being sent back to Mexico (a bone of contention among the anti-immigration group), two times that amount stays in the US. Hickenlooper invites Tancredo to dinner, and he urges Thorpe to get to know Tancredo better.

To do so, she goes to an event in which he’s featured with a member of the Cato Institute, a fiscally conservative group. The Cato representation is against Tancredo’s immigration plan and argues that the homeland security forces have enough to do without rounding up "peaceful workers" (209). Tancredo forcefully disagrees. After the event, he greets the author warmly and thanks her for the condolence card her husband sent when Tancredo’s mother died. The author still considers Tancredo an “enigma” (210).

Yadira’s sister, Cristal, is born to Alma in Mexico, and Alma is back to the same place where she started—having a baby in Mexico while her husband is in the US. Clara and Yadira are taking a Spanish class taught by one of the few tenured Latino professors at school, and they enjoy it because she validates their use of Spanglish.

Yadira and Clara spend time hanging out with Luke, while Yadira’s home situation worsens. Zulema is in the custody of her aunt and grandfather, but her aunt works while her grandfather is in Mexico, and Laura has no custodian. Zulema is arrested when a friend picks her up in a stolen car, and she has to plead guilty to the count of a misdemeanor. Yadira’s sisters come to stay with her on weekends, where they play with the puppy Juan has given her. Laura tells Thorpe about her time in Mexico, and she reveals that she left Mexico thinking that her mother was going to come to the US also. Yadira told the author in a newly confident way not to bring up their mother again, as the sisters never spoke about emotional issues or their mother.

The author spends time with Kelly Young, the widow of the slain detective Donnie Young, and asks her how she feels about illegal immigration. Kelly says that she feels mixed about the issue, and she turns down endorsing any of the candidates running for election. She also says that her husband’s murder has turned her against the death penalty, and she’s glad the extradition treaty with Mexico prohibits it. She defends her husband’s reputation, as he used force against GómezGarcía, and she tells the author that her husband was half Latino. Donnie’s mother was descended from Europeans but raised in Mexico, while his father was Anglo. He had had a falling out with his mother over accusations that his stepfather had sexually abused his nephews (his stepfather was convicted), and he never was close to her again.

Donnie did not identify himself as Latino when looking to work for the Denver police department, as he did not want to claim any advantages, and he had earned many commendations in his work. He worked at Salon Ocampo to make extra money, and he had befriended the owners. When he bought a house, he hired people he knew from Salon Ocampo to work on it. Kelly feels that is why she cannot reject the community that she and Donnie were part of, but she also feels as though people had let her down. She is now raising two kids on her own, and she feels that a sense of "machismo" (220), of not wanting to be embarrassed, had led GómezGarcía to shoot her husband. She plans to be at the hearing in which it’s decided if there’s enough evidence to send GómezGarcía to trial.

Donnie Young came from Marisela’s world and the author feels he would have understood her. The author visits Marisela in her dorm, where her boyfriend Omar, a construction worker, wants to take her to see a band called Liberación. As Yadira and Clara get dressed, Juan and Luke kid around in their room. Luke sees Clara’s green card tumble out of her dresser, and he jokes that he had always thought she wasn’t legal.

The author accompanies them to the dance club, where she understands why Marisela likes the clubs: “Here she could forget about the rejections and the slights she sometimes suffered in the white world—here there was no question about whether she belonged” (225). The author tells Marisela that she understands she is leading a double life, and she sees young girls who add a sense of innocence to "the seedy club" (226). Thorpe comes to understand that going to clubs is necessary to Marisela’s academic success. 

The author attends GómezGarcía’s preliminary trial as a reporter. The first to testify is Captain Michael Calo, who was at Salon Ocampo on the day of Young’s shooting. Calo testifies about the aftermath of the shooting, when he found Young on the floor and found another officer named Bishop going into shock. The forensic pathologist testifies, followed by lead detective Martin Vigil, who says that there are witnesses who heard GómezGarcía say he was going to shoot Young and who heard him confess to the shooting afterward. The defense attorney, Fernando Freyre, says that Sandra Rivas, GómezGarcía’s girlfriend, had been pressured by police into changing her story about her boyfriend’s innocence because she was not legal. He also says that there is no physical evidence connecting GómezGarcía to the trial. The judge, Larry Naves, decides that there is enough evidence to move forward to a trial. The judge also decides that statements that GómezGarcía made in Mexico asking which cop had died can be admitted into the trial. 

The girls, except Clara, take a class with Lisa Martinez called Latinas and Latinos in American Society, and, as most of the class is Latino or partly Latino, the girls feel comfortable speaking in class. They study topics such as Latino representation in the workforce and higher education, as well as assimilation. The professor speaks about how it is hard to assimilate if you are markedly different in terms of skin color. In another class called Portrait of a Pariah, Yadira is reading a book called Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess by Hannah Arendt about a woman who moves from Prussia to France to escape anti-Semitism.

The US Senate seems to dangle the possibility of offering a path to citizenship for people like Marisela and Yadira, and Marisela throws herself into organizing community rallies to support this idea. The state legislature also considers and rejects bills to deny illegal immigrants the ability to attend school or register a vehicle. The author’s husband, John Hickenlooper, urges a Democratic state representative to allow the Republicans to pass anti-business legislation related to immigration so that the Democrats can look like the party that supports business. Hickenlooper is working with an oilman named Tim Marquez, who wants to fund scholarships for Latino students, but Marquez does not want to deny them to illegal immigrants. 

The girls prepare for a pro-immigration march, and they make posters with English on one side and Spanish on the other. Clara’s poster reads “Yo pago impuestos” on one side and “I pay taxes” (241) on the other. Yadira reveals that after sophomore year, she is planning to live off campus with her boyfriend, Juan, and her two sisters, as they have left her stepfather’s house.

On the day of the march, about 100,000 people swarm into Denver’s downtown and into cities across the nation. It is the first time these workers have made themselves visible to the nation in such large numbers. Marisela speaks before the entire crowd in Spanish, telling them to tell their congressional representatives that they aren’t going to leave: “It was such an American hope for a Mexican girl to harbor” (246). Her mother listens to Marisela on the radio because her boss threatened to fire her if she did not come to work.

Counter-protestors are having a demonstration nearby, and they begin to get into verbal fights with the marchers. Captain Mike Calo, wearing a neutral expression, maintains the peace. On the television news, the protests and counter-protests receive equal coverage, though there had only been a few dozen people in the counter-protest. Tancredo appears on TV to say that every time there is a rally in favor of immigration, his movement gains more support.

Clara, Luke, and Yadira watch a speech President Bush gives in 2006 in which he calls for endorsing the immigration laws. Luke says that people who entered illegally should not be given citizenship. Dana Rohrabacher and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who is in favor of legalizing people in the U.S. without papers, face off on TV. The girls have matured so that they realize there is no easy answer to the immigration question.

The students in Lisa Martinez’s class engage in a mock immigration forum in which they play different roles, as the real-life attempt in the U.S. Congress to forge immigration reform falls apart. For their final presentation, Marisela and two other students create a board game that replicates immigrants’ experiences and that shows how their lives are controlled by chance. As Marisela says of immigrants, “They live by the roll of the dice” (254).

Over the summer, the Colorado state legislature tries to move into the void created by the federal government’s failure to act on immigration. Governor Owens calls a special session in July of 2006. Several proposals are bandied about and move simultaneously into committees. One idea is to require employers to have employees show a state ID. However, the business community looks askance at this idea, as businesses such as ski resorts and farms have to hire people quickly and can’t wait for the government to process people’s IDs. Marisela visits the statehouse for the organization she works for and is eager to speak to the media. Eventually, most of the Republican bills die when squashed by Democrats in committee. Marisela appears on the television news and has equal time with the speaker of the House and the governor of Colorado.

The governor’s bill dies in the legislature, after the largest Republican donor in the state, a homebuilder, tells the governor to "kill" (263) it. The only bill that passes in the mayhem is one to require more documents to get welfare benefits, but this bill clashes with a federal law requiring different forms of ID. No one can sort out the differences. Meanwhile, migrant workers avoid the state, and fruit and vegetables rot because there is no one to pick them.