Come Out Into the Sun

Come Out Into the Sun

Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant by José Ángel N.

University of Illinois Press, 136 pages, February 2014, $19.95, ISBN 78-0-252-07986-3

My best friend from childhood moved to our Texas town from northern Mexico when we were about twelve years old. Monolingual then, we began to learn English and Spanish from each other, and over time we became adopted members of our respective families. Twenty-one years later he is still undocumented, although he has children who were born in the US and are, therefore, citizens. He has worked for several years as an HSE officer for a successful seismic exploration company. He has health insurance and a retirement fund, but he is constantly aware that everything could end if his migratory status is ever discovered. There have been many close calls and difficult situations which all too frequently become the main topic of our conversations.

José Ángel N., author of Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant (University of Illinois Press, 2014), knows these problems all too well. As an immigrant who crossed illegally from Mexico, attended college and grad school in Chicago, and went on to a successful career as a translator, N. is very familiar with the cruel ironies of being an “illegitimate” member of the US middle class. His book is a collection of essays on his condition that are presented as a loose narrative. He takes us from his first humiliating passage into the States seventeen years ago—through a sewer pipe connecting Tijuana and San Diego—to his time working his way up from dishwasher to server in a Mexican restaurant, his college and grad school years, his rise into the professional world and unwilling exit, and the establishment of a new family with his wife and daughter.

At the University of Illinois-Chicago N. studied what are generally regarded as impractical subjects: philosophy and literature. However, this education helped make him uniquely suited to reflect on his situation and communicate his experiences to his readers in a compelling fashion. His exposition is clear and eloquent, his perspective always philosophical. This does not mean, however, that he is aloof or detached from his experiences. Rather, he leads the reader to empathize with him as he attempts to find in the consolations of philosophy a way to overcome trials such as the constant anxiety of being discovered as undocumented, the embarrassment of speaking "broken" English and Spanish (so ironically different from his masterful English prose), or the pain of not seeing his mother in person for past seventeen years.

While he lacks the right to legally be in the country, N. does have the right to be counted in the census, an irony that he rightly identifies as a reflection of US hypocrisy regarding human rights. Our house, he says, must be clean and orderly, with everyone accounted for, “even those living off the crumbs falling from its table." He also critiques the “circus” of immigration reform—the biennial repetition of rhetoric surrounding a hot-button topic that ultimately does nothing to alter the status quo of the eleven million undocumented people in this country (see, for example, the current hoopla about the GOP’s statement of principles on immigration reform).

Despite his frustration, N. essentially remains an optimist. Indeed, he describes his own thinking as a combination of "American optimism," a belief in the possibility of progress first glimpsed in his reading of Emerson, and "Mexican cunning", the willingness and ability to enter into the kind of informal arrangements that have allowed people to survive in Mexico for the past 500 years. N.’s identity, in other words, is hybrid, informed by his experiences and how he has tried to make sense of them. In this way, he is similar to many other undocumented immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere who face the difficulties of being tacitly accepted and officially rejected by our society. Like many other immigrants, including my friend from Texas, N. also sees his family affected by his situation—his wife and daughter were born here and are citizens, while he remains illegal.

It is in his family, however, that N. finds his greatest comfort, strength and hope for the future. His expressions of love for his wife and daughter round out the self-portrait of an intelligent and sensitive human being who is as much North American as he is Mexican. He does not try to justify breaking any laws, but rather simply to communicate human experience. In doing so, N. is able to put a truly human face on the “shadow” that he is in our society and show us that he, along with the other eleven million undocumented people who live and toil in our nation, deserve to come out into the sun.

Brandon P. Bisbey. Assistant Professor of Spanish, Northeastern Illinois University

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To read an excerpt of Illegal, press the link. 

Illegal is available now from Amazon and the Book Cellar. Marco Antonio Escalante, author of Malabarismos del tedio and Julio Rangel, editor at Contratiempo magazine, will present Illegal at the Book Cellar on March 15, 7:00pm.