Jose Antonio Vargas: 'I don't have my own place,' wrote new book 'on planes and in hotels'

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of Define American Jose Antonio Vargas attends a private book-launch event for his new book "Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen" at Mountain View High School on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018, in Mountain View, Calif. less Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of Define American Jose Antonio Vargas attends a private book-launch event for his new book "Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen" at Mountain View High ... more Photo: Jim Gensheimer, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Jim Gensheimer, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 47 Caption Close Jose Antonio Vargas: 'I don't have my own place,' wrote new book 'on planes and in hotels' 1 / 47 Back to Gallery

Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist and immigration rights activist from the Bay Area, has been living without a permanent address since Trump got elected in 2016, he revealed in an interview with SFGATE. He said that he wrote his new book, "Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen," which came out on Tuesday, mostly in hotels and on planes.

"This is all my stuff," Vargas, who grew up with his grandparents in Mountain View, wrote in a Facebook post addressed to private friends, according to Richard Prince's Journal-isms blog. A photo accompanied the post, showing items the writer has in storage. Vargas said many of his friends didn't know he was virtually homeless until then.

"At least, all the stuff that matters in my life: mementos, papers, clothing, collectible books, cherished photos, etc.," Vargas continued. "They're all in my grandma's garage. For the first time since I graduated high school in 2000, I don't have my own place."

Vargas told SFGATE that his grandmother's garage was where his grandfather revealed to him that he was an undocumented immigrant when he was 16. He chuckled when asked about the experience of moving his stuff back to Mountain View and said that "when I was young I made a vow that I wasn't going to live there again."

"I mean I love my grandmother, but I really wanted to be independent," Vargas said. "It's funny how life works like that. I've come full circle, going back to the same place where I discovered all of this. That garage is the place where my life changed."

Vargas, who once worked as a copyboy for the San Francisco Chronicle, has become one of the most well-known, outspoken undocumented immigrants since he revealed that he was undocumented in an essay he wrote for The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

After Trump's election, Vargas told NBC News that the building manager at the apartment where he was living in Los Angeles told him it wasn't a good idea for him to have a permanent address.

"A few days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the building manager in the apartment complex I was living in, a nice guy named Mel, told me that if immigration agents showed up, he wasn't sure the building could hide me. He felt ashamed to say it, but tension had been building since the election," Vargas wrote in a separate piece for NBC News.

He told SFGATE that his building manager suggested what he did out of concern. "When you're in this precarious position, you sometimes try to delude yourself into thinking that things are going to be okay," Vargas said. "But I think at that moment that I had to really face what my life is."

A "huge" black-and-white photo of the legendary black author James Baldwin hanging in his apartment reminded him of one of Baldwin's quotes: "All safety is an illusion."

"That quote became very real to me ... So that's when I started thinking about writing something. I had been avoiding writing a book since I outed myself in 2011," he said. But after the exchange with his landlord, he went on the move again, to write the book and really get clear on who and what he was in the context of being public as an undocumented immigrant.

The first time Vargas moved, it was from the Phillipines when he was 12, to live with his grandparents in Mountain View. But he didn't discover he was undocumented until four years later when he tried to get a driver's license — and found that his identification documents were falsified.

Since he revealed his immigration status in the 2011 essay, he has written a cover story for Time magazine about living as an undocumented immigrant, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and advocated for the DREAM Act.

He also started an organization called Define American aimed at changing the media narrative about immigrants, identity and citizenship in America. He sees the organization Define American and his book as an continuation of his work as a journalist.

During a stop in Washington, D.C. to promote his latest project, "Dear America," he said that he wrote the book while riding on planes and living in hotels. In the Facebook post, he said that the book is about his "own liberation."

"I had to face what years of lying, passing, and hiding had done to me. The emotional toll. The psychological cost. The trauma," he wrote. "I had to look at myself to make sense of myself, to put myself back together."

But coming out of the other end of having written the book, he told SFGATE that he has clarity.

"I have forced myself to really look at myself, and that's what the book has been about to me," he said. "People have been asking who I wrote the book for. One way to answer that is [to say] that I wrote it for all of the undocumented people who reached out to me since Trump was elected, and talked to me about how depressed they are, how hopeless they are and the state of their mental health...

"The whole time that they talk to me, I feel like I have to put up this face of being strong," Vargas continued. "...But with this book I wanted to show the toll the past 25 years of being in this country has been for me."