51 pages • 1 hour read
Helen ThorpeJust Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
Nonfiction | 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.
Key Figures
Marisela Benavidez
Marisela is an illegal immigrant whose parents brought her over the border into the US (for the second time) when she was 7. Her parents work very hard, mostly cleaning at night. She is an intelligent, animated person who manages to graduate from college while holding a job and clubbing. Marisela identifies with other people of color and is incensed by the unfairness towards Mexican immigrants and people of color. She dreams about going to law school but decides not to in the end. She becomes involved in politics and works for a community activist organization, even without papers. She goes through many boyfriends but ultimately has a baby and marries Julio, a labor organizer she knew in high school.
Yadira Vargas
Like Marisela, Yadira does not have documents and entered the US illegally as a child. Her father left the family when she was young, and she has a stepfather who also later breaks up with her mother. She is a serious, reserved person who rarely shows emotion, and she has some conflicts with Marisela because their styles are very different. She attends the University of Denver with Marisela and Clara. Over time, her mother, Alma, must return to Mexico after she is arrested for having stolen another person’s ID to work. Yadira winds up taking care of her two sisters, Zulema and Laura, who are shuffled between her dorm and her aunt’s house. She works for the same community action organization that Marisela works for.
Elissa Ramírez
Elissa Ramírez is an American citizen because her mother crossed the border and gave birth to her in El Paso, Texas. She attends Regis for college, while the other girls go to the University of Denver, so the other girls lose touch with her over time.
Clara Luz
Clara also is a legal resident because, although she entered the US illegally, her father has a green card. She eventually becomes a citizen. She is a conservative person at first who is quiet and shy, though she becomes more daring and extroverted over time. She is able to spend a semester in Italy during her time at the University of Denver.
Helen Thorpe
The author, Helen Thorpe, is involved in the lives of the girls she writes about over time. She writes about how her parents brought her to the U.S. when she was a child, so she feels some degree of kinship with the girls she writes about. She is married to Jim Hickenlooper, the Democratic mayor of Denver, and she has access to people, such as the US Representative Tom Tancredo, because of her relationship to Hickenlooper. She is sympathetic to the plight of all the girls, particularly Yadira and Marisela because they do not have documents making them legal US citizens.
