51 pages • 1 hour read
Helen ThorpeJust Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
Helen ThorpeNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Instantaneous Rate of Change”
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Life’s Mighty Questions”
The author goes to Roosevelt High School to spend the day with Yadira. The week before, Clara found out that she had won a Daniels Fund scholarship and could go to any college she is accepted to. Yadira realizes that she would have won too, if she had been eligible, as her grades were higher than those of Clara. To Yadira, “[i]t was like living through what might have been” (59). Yadira has been accepted into Colorado College, but she has to find the money. She has a partial scholarship that she was able to get with the help of Irene and Justino Chavez, who helped Yadira tell her story to a reporter from the Denver Post. The reporter advocated for the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, which had been introduced by Senators Orrin Hatch and Richard Durbin and that would have allowed students of undocumented parents who graduate from a US high school to have a path to citizenship. However, Hatch faced opposition from conservatives from his own party.
A Denver Post reader named Cynthia Poundstone could not get Yadira’s story out of her mind, and she tried to raise the money for Yadira to attend her alma mater, Whittier College, in California. Yadira found Poundstone ignorant of her reality, as Poundstone had suggested that they fly to the campus (Yadira could not fly without identification) and then that they take the bus (which Yadira could not do, as border agents searched for illegal immigrants on buses). Yadira applied to the college without ever having seen it. Yadira had earned a partial scholarship, and, when Irene called the college, Yadira’s scholarship was increased. She received additional aid, which had originally been designated for international students. Yadira still had to raise $10,000, which Poundstone was trying to do by having parties with "upper-middle-class women" (62).
Yadira had told Marisela about her original scholarship but did not share her news about the additional money because she didn’t want to make her friend feel even worse. Referring to her scholarship, she said how “that built a wall right there” (63) in her friendship with Marisela. Yadira’s mother, Alma Sandoval, had grown up in Durango and had married Mario Vargas while still a teenager. Yadira was born 8.5 months later. Soon after Yadira had been born, Mario left for California, where he worked as a cook. Her father was able to get a green card by claiming that he did agricultural work, and Alma decided to move to California too. They got as far as Tijuana, where Mario left them with relatives. A few months later, Alma crossed the border, where a guard passed them through after looking at the driver’s documents. Yadira did not remember anything about Mexico, and her parents had two more children in the U.S., Zulema and Laura. Mario abandoned the family when Yadira was 7, and though Alma had put in an application for citizenship based on her relationship with Mario, she abandoned it once he left the family.
Alma collected welfare checks for her two younger children, who were American citizens, and she worked off the books as a cashier at a flea market. They had to move continually when they could not pay the rent, as an earthquake destroyed their apartment and furniture when Yadira was 8. At that point, they had to live in a homeless shelter. Yadira says of these incidents, “I gained an incredible thirst for stability” (64). FEMA helped them settle into an apartment, which was the nicest Yadira had ever had, and her mother was reunited with a man named Jesus, who had been her sweetheart in Mexico. They had a child together named Raúl, who was, like Yadira’s sisters, a citizen. Only Yadira was not American. They moved to Colorado when Yadira was 13, and Jesus got a better-paying job laying pipes, while Alma, with a fake Social Security card, worked busing tables and then sorting clothes at a Goodwill Store, where she was "amazed" (66) by what Americans threw away.
Yadira met the other girls in 8th grade, and they assumed she led a perfect life because of how meticulous she was. Over time, she began confiding in them, as they were the first people she had known long enough to build trust in. Her relationship with her stepfather became conflictual when she began dating a boy named Juan, and Jesus began following her around. Marisela felt Jesus might have been interested in Yadira himself, but Yadira denied that her stepfather had sexually abused her. When the economy soured, Jesus decided to move the family back to California. Irene Chavez offered Yadira the chance to live with her while Yadira finished high school, and Alma accepted, as she had been denied the chance to continue her own education.
Irene Chavez and her husband, Justino, knew about the legal battles faced by undocumented children. They lived in Texas when the case that went to the Supreme Court in 1982 as Plyler v. Doe had formed. The case was the result of a state law that allowed local districts to refuse to educate "undocumented students" (68). Justino had formed a grassroots organization to fight against the law. US District Court Judge Woodrow Seals ruled in favor of the undocumented students, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in a 5-4 decision that the lower court had been correct. For the first time, the court ruled that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause applied to people who were not citizens but who were in the US. The justices were unanimous on this point, but they were divided on whether education was "a fundamental right" (69), such as the right to free speech. This law, supported by the Chavezes, was what allowed Yadira and Marisela the right to attend school in the U.S.
In Chicano studies class, Yadira, Marisela, and another student named Leon discuss a recent protest at Abraham Lincoln High School, where the students walked out to protest the inferior status of their school—which they had discovered by visiting a white school. Similarly, the girls had once gone to Cherry Creek High School, an "85 percent Anglo" (71) school in Tancredo’s district. Though it was only 10 miles from their school, it had many more resources and seemed like it came from a different world.
The girls head to dance class, where they mix with students from the English Language Acquisition Program. Although they speak English, they sit with the "mexicanas" rather than the "Chicanas" (73). However, they are not totally accepted by either group. Marisela is called down to a counseling office, where she learns that she has been accepted at Metro, or the Metropolitan State College of Denver. However, the tuition is $9,000, as she has to pay out-of-state tuition, and her father makes only $22,000 a year and has to pay $12,000 in rent and utility bills. She does not know where she is going to get that money. When the girls go to lunch, they meet a French teacher who asks Yadira about the Daniels scholarship, as he forgets they are undocumented. He tells Marisela that she is going to be successful and that “it is going to feel so much better for you than it does for other people, because you are going to have to struggle more.” (74).
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “American Woman”
When Thorpe returns to Roosevelt High, she finds Marisela and Yadira in a state of excitement after meeting at their school with Cezar Mesquita, director of diversity at the University of Denver, a prestigious private school. A recruiter had sought all four girls after having read about them in the local newspaper. The university administration knew a Republican businessman who provided money for immigrants without documentation to attend college. Mesquita met with Yadira and Marisela, who had dressed conservatively at Irene’s suggestion for the meeting. Mesquita also met with Clara, and he helped Marisela fill out her application. Yadira is much more excited about attending a local school, and the school represents a last chance for Marisela to attend college.
The author attends the girls’ dance performance with Irene and Justino Chavez, at which their parents are not present. They dance to Lenny Kravitz’s “American Woman” and to a song called “Mi Gente” by the Kumbia Kings. They are far more familiar with "cumbia" (78) than other music, and Yadira comes alive, even smiling, as she dances. This is rare for her, as she is self-conscious about her stained and "crooked" (79) teeth, the result of not being able to see a dentist when she was little.
When Marisela calls the University of Denver admissions office a few days later, they tell her that the sponsor has chosen not to fund her. The school can give her a scholarship for $10,000, but the school costs four times that. She passes the phone to Yadira, who learns that she has been sponsored. Marisela is able to get through another dance performance, but later breaks down. When her mother comes to pick her up, she tells her daughter not to worry—she will pay for "beauty school" (81). She then tries to hide her disappointment and feeling of worthlessness beneath a devil-may-care facade that does not fool anyone. They know that she is the most sensitive of all four. At home, she is "listless" (81) and depressed and feels that she will disappoint her parents by growing up to have the same jobs that they do.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Sympathy”
Marisela hopes that state legislation, proposed halfway through her senior year, will allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at state colleges. The author goes to the statehouse in Denver to watch politicians who want this bill passed face off against others supporting a bill that would deny undocumented students the right to pay in-state tuition. Justino Chavez, who was born in the United States to a migrant farmworker father, testifies. In response to Nancy Spear, the chair of the Education Committee who says that students who drop out of school because they know that they can’t go to college lack "pride," Chavez counters that "[t]hey do have pride" (85)—and they prove it in the hard work they do for their families after leaving school. The anti-tuition bill squeaks out of the committee, while the pro-tuition bill is stalled.
When the bill comes up on the floor of the state senate, a senator named Paula Sandoval introduces an amendment to allow in-state tuition to students who have attended schools in Colorado for at least three years. The senators engage in heated debate, and Ken Gordon makes the point that denying these students an education is denying them the chance to "contribute to society" (86). He also makes the point that no one has denied their responsibility to pay taxes, while another senator pointed out that a Mexican immigrant who has graduated from college will pay more in taxes and cost the state less in welfare and criminal justice expenses. The amendment passes, and the bill, called the "Harvey bill" (84), with the amendment also passes. People like Marisela who had been against the Harvey bill now support it, but the bill languishes and then the session ends. Marisela had been born in 1986, the year the Immigration and Reform Act had been passed, but no serious legislation had been passed since then. She represents the vanguard of people who had entered the US after that act, but the status of students like her who graduate from high school is still undecided.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Crash Test Dummy”
As the girls began practicing the speeches they will give at their graduation, Marisela’s fate is still uncertain. She is next in line to receive the scholarship from the rich businessman if Yadira decides to attend Whittier, but Cynthia Poundstone has still not raised all the money Yadira needs. Irene decides that Yadira should convince one of her benefactors to help Marisela, and Yadira calls Cynthia Poundstone, who thinks it might be possible. Yadira’s total is now $20,000, and Irene thinks she get another $10,000 out of donors. Irene tells Marisela the news, but Marisela receives it warily, thinking that “this, too, might prove a mirage” (90). Yadira decides to attend University of Denver, and she is awarded a $1,000 Papa John’s scholarship, along with a delivery of several pizzas to her school. Elissa turns down the Daniels Scholarship after she wins a "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" (92) scholarship and finally feels free of worries.
As the students practice their graduation rehearsal, a man from a local nonprofit urges them to register to vote. When a student asks what to do if one is not a citizen, the man tells her she cannot register. The girls are among "only 235 seniors" (92) graduating out of an original class of more than 600 students. The faculty has nominated Yadira, Marisela, and Elissa to deliver speeches in Spanish. Clara was certain she would cry and opted not to co-deliver.
At the end of May, the girls graduate at Denver’s performing arts center, where the girls sit in the front row as honor students. Everyone has "blood relatives" (95) there, except Yadira. The graduation party is held in Clara’s backyard. She lives in a two-bedroom house, and her father sleeps in the dining room after cleaning casinos at night. Her mother works as a maid at the Westin Hotel, while Elissa’s mother, straddling two worlds, works as a secretary. The girls, dressed up, sit in the backyard where two cars are turning to rust: “I found the contrast between the girls’ attire and the squalor of their surroundings almost painful” (96). Everyone who has supported the girls attends, and only Yadira does not have family there, though Irene and Justino Chavez are there. The mothers seem worn out in contrast to their young daughters. Cezar Mezquita from the University of Denver attends, and he encourages Marisela and Yadira to live together in college. The girls haul out the misshapen piñata they have made, onto which they have drawn a face and affixed a diploma. When the piñata will not break, Mezquita refers to as a “crash test dummy” (100). As they dance to norteño music, the author leaves, writing that, looking back later at that evening, “what strikes me now is our naiveté” (101).
Part 1, Chapters 5-8 Analysis
The author notes in Chapter 8 that the girls look like “migrating birds that had been blown off course” (100) at their graduation party. They are, unlike their parents, dressed in American-style finery in a backyard that has chain-link fencing and rusting cars. The author writes that they would seem odder if there had been four of them dressed as they were. The author’s observations highlight the girls’ distinction from their families and from their surroundings. While they are full of life, their parents, who have sacrificed a great deal to get to this place, seem careworn. The girls’ ornate dress is a symbol of the way that they are rare birds in a world that gives them little hope or encouragement to move beyond their beginnings.
In these chapters, the author alternates between the girls’ stories and the larger political climate surrounding the question of immigration in the United States, showing how the girls’ personal story is also political. There is a larger fight in the Colorado state legislature about whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to have in-state tuition at state universities, and the activists Irene and Justino Chavez recall the Texas case Plyler v. Doe that resulted in a Supreme Court decision that compelled schools across the country to provide an education for undocumented students. While the story of Marisela and Yadira is a personal one, it is also the story of the way in which U.S. immigration policy has not evolved to decide whether undocumented students should be allowed to qualify for financial aid for college. The result is that these students, like Yadira and Marisela, are left stranded while legislation such as the DREAM act languishes in Congress.
While the author conveys the story of the four girls she covers in great detail, emphasizing the emotion of their circuitous route to college and everything that hangs in the balance if they do not get to college, her aim is also to show that politics do not exist in a vacuum. While politicians might make blanket statements about immigrants, Thorpe’s writing shows the effects that policies have on real people like Yadira and Marisela.
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