We talk a lot about immigration in contemporary American discourse. What do we mean when we dwell on this distrinction. The recent memoir by Jose Antonio Vargas, a filipino who immigrated to the United States when he was a child, not knowing he didn’t have the proper legal documents until he was in highschool. Now at 36, a distinguish Journalist and an emgaging writer, he tells his story from the inside out.
I began to wonder about my own grandparents who came from Croatia in the early nineteenth century. What were their circimstances and what would it have been for me if my father had not anglecized his name when he was young.