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

During an orientation week for scholarship students at the University of Denver, Marisela, Yadira, and Clara try to look into the rooms of their future dorm and joke that the guard will think they are breaking in because they have dark skin. They go to Office Depot to buy supplies and are worried about having to buy an expensive software package for the new computers Poundstone and her friends have bought for Marisela and Yadira until Poundstone figures out a less expensive option for them. Yadira and Marisela are rooming together, while Clara lives with a girl named Alison, who is half Korean and half Japanese and who comes from Hawaii. Clara does very well on her first essay, while Marisela, more of a math student, originally does poorly but meets with her professor and rewrites her paper for a better grade.

Clara is able to get a work-study job, while Yadira’s scholarship covers her expenses. Marisela, without a social security number for a work-study job, clerks at a liquor store at night, though the store has been held up before. The girls befriend a boy named Luke Harrington, who goes skiing—something that their lack of money has never permitted them to do. Luke marvels at a picture of Clara’s house that shows bars on the windows. The girls befriend the Latino cafeteria workers, and Yadira and Marisela keep their undocumented status to themselves: “You wouldn’t reveal such a thing to an outsider” (117). They are worried people would not be discreet, and they wind up making small lies to people like Alison. They argue with Luke, who is anti-immigrant and very conservative politically, but he is a good friend to them. Marisela makes a slip in front of Luke, and the girls conclude that they can never tell him the truth after he says that he would not forgive someone who came to the U.S. illegally. Nonetheless, they go to hockey games with him, as his appeal is that he provides them with the sense of being a normal student.

Yadira plans to be a teacher, Clara plans to be a psychologist or social worker, and Marisela’s plans are still in flux. Yadira goes with Irene and Justino Chavez to an immigration lawyer, who tells them there is no way Yadira can gain documents because she entered the country without valid entry visas. Yadira considers marrying her friend Julio, but then learns that this avenue to citizenship is also closed to her. She knows that she cannot be a teacher without documents, but she and Yadira try not to think about their futures. 

The wealthy Republican businessman who had given Yadira a scholarship holds a dinner at an upscale Denver hotel. Yadira’s parents attend but seem ill at ease when the donor’s wife comes to sit with them. The girls are encouraged to go abroad while at college, but Marisela and Yadira try to evade questions about when they will go abroad.

Marisela’s family has a difficult time in North Carolina, and her father goes to Arizona, where his cousin makes a lot of money as a coyote. He gets a job working for National Maintenance, and his wife gets a janitorial job as well. The state of Arizona is embroiled in controversies around immigration, and there is a ballot initiative, which is passed, that bars services to illegal immigrants.

When Marisela visits her parents in their apartment in Phoenix, she feels disoriented: “Marisela was living a ghost’s life” (129). Her parents struggle financially, and she feels “invisible” (129) when she goes to clean with her mother. She also feels guilty for living a life of relative comfort compared to her parents. She finds out that she has earned three “As” and one “B+” during her first quarter, which she translates to her bewildered father as “three tens and a nine” (130). Her father replies that she always gets "tens" and doesn’t understand how hard it is to do so in college. Marisela, who had a hard time getting into college, does better than her three friends, though they all do well.

In her second quarter, Marisela works twenty hours a week in the liquor store but still manages to get straight “As” while sending money to her parents. Marisela begins hanging out with a group of students of color, many of them immigrants, while Yadira and Clara hang out with Luke and Anglos. Yadira wants to have a more typical experience, “not a brown one” (132), in her words.

Yadira and Marisela get into a fight when Marisela promises to drive a friend to work. Marisela is pulled over by the police. Since she does not have a license, her car is impounded, and she fails to show up to drive her friend. Others are drawn into the fight, which Irene Chavez believes is about race because Yadira and Clara are trying to get along with the Anglo students, while Marisela was "too dark-skinned" (134) to do so. Irene explains: “They are trying to assimilate, and Marisela can’t” (134). Yadira and Clara decide to live together and to make Marisela room with Alison, and they complete this move against the wishes of their resident advisor. Luke continues to hang out with Yadira and Clara, and he seems to approach having a romantic relationship with Clara.

Marisela’s parents return to a suburb of Denver to be near their daughter and help support Josefa’s nephew, who she believes has been wrongly accused of "gang rape" (136). Yadira finds out in a panicked phone call from her mother that her mother is in jail, but she can’t track her mother down. Finally, Irene figures out that Yadira’s mother is in a local jail and has not been detained by federal immigration authorities for using a stolen identity to work. Yadira’s mother only lists her legal children and does not list Yadira: “Yadira never seemed to exist in the eyes of officialdom” (137). Yadira’s father calls her to demand that she return home to take care of her siblings, but Irene tells her not to. Her dad erupts in anger, and Yadira feels emotionally divided between home and school. She goes to Marisela to find a bail bondsman for her mother who not does require a Social Security number. Yadira’s mother does not know how they will deal with Alma’s charges, as Alma is pregnant and they fear the child will be taken away from her if she goes to jail. Jesus cannot take the child because he is not legal. Yadira says that she had not expected so many problems after solving the issue of how to get into college.