Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card
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| Quote from "Americanized: A Rebel Without a Green Card" The picture of the young woman is Saedi as a teen. |
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| Author, Sara Saedi |
Biography about the Author: Sara Saedi
Sara Saedi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978 during the Islamic Revolution, entering “ the world to the sounds of bombs exploding near the hospital” (Brightly). In 1982, when Saedi was 2 years old, she and her family immigrated to the Bay Area where they weren’t granted citizenship for eighteen years. After fleeing Iran to California, Saedi was not aware of her family’s undocumented status until she was thirteen. This news was shocking to Saedi as she and her family had been living in the U.S for ten years, she had only known life in the Bay Area. Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card is a non-fiction memoir based on this story, her story of being undocumented and her anxieties that followed her life because of it; up until the end when she finally gets her green card.
Saedi wrote her first tragic romance about a boy who loves a girl but kills her cat, loses her, buys her a new cat, and she goes back with him. Saedi’s first young adult novel, Never Ever, was published in 2016 and its sequel, The Lost Kids, was published in the spring of 2018. Her memoir, Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card was released in February 2018.
Saedi received her Bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkely majoring in Film and Mass Communications. Then beginning her career at ABC Daytime as a creative executive, she left in 2010 to pursue her dream of being a writer. Since then she has won a Daytime Emmy for a web series she wrote, has three TV movies for ABC Family, wrote for the FOX series The Goodwin Games, and is currently writing for The CW show, iZombie. She now lives in Los Angeles along with her husband, son, and pug, Mable.
http://sarasaediwriter.com/about/ (Her personal blog)
https://www.readbrightly.com/contributor/sara-saedi/ https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8421739.Sara_Saedi
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597600898/americanized-recounts-what-its-like-to-grow-up-undocumented
Summary of the Novel:
In the Novel, Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card, a smart thirteen-year-old, straight-A student named Sara Saedi uncovers a terrible family secret: she is breaking the law simply by living in the United States. During the ‘90s, when Sara was only two, her parents ran away from Iran because of a revolution going on in their home country and she didn't know she was undocumented until her older sister wanted to apply for an after-school job, but couldn't because she didn't have a Social Security number.
Although Sara is scared of being deported, this doesn't keep her from being a regular teenager. She desperately wants a green card, along with clear skin, wants to fit in and even have her own car and boyfriend. throughout the book, Sara discusses her Iranian history and even jokes about it. Her sense of humor makes that particular history more accessible to her readers as she describes things with sarcasm. Sara's story helps deconstruct preconceived notions about Iran and the Middle East because she even tackles certain stereotypes assumed about middle eastern Americans.
Americanized follows Sara's progress toward getting her green card, but that's only a portion of her experiences as an Iranian-"American" teenager. From discovering that her parents secretly divorced to facilitate her mother's green card application to learning how to tame her unibrow, Sara shifts gracefully from the terrifying prospect that she might be kicked out of the United States at any time to the almost-as-terrifying possibility that she might be the only one of her friends without a date to the prom. This moving, often hilarious story is for anyone who has ever shared either fear.
Towards the end, Sara touches base on her experience through the 2016 presidential election and describes the fear and "waves of panic" she and her family felt knowing she can be kicked-out any minute (256). She also writes a letter referring to herself if she had never left Iran, and she advises herself to keep going. She thinks about what would happen if her parents had never left Iran and how different her life would be. Sara's story is important for many immigrants in the United States and it helps them understand that they are not alone.
Links:
- Timeline: A Modern History of Iran
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/middle_east-jan-june10-timeline - This link provides a simplified timeline of Iran’s modern history. It helps students recognize and retain key figures and names that correlate with Iran’s major events and history. The timeline begins from the early 1900s and continues through 2009.
- Islamic Life and Sharia Law: A video
https://study.com/academy/lesson/islamic-life-and-sharia-law-faith-culture.html - This link takes you to a video about the Islamic Law (also known as The Sharia Law) and describes the key features of this law. It provides students with a different representation of government, one that is combined with religion, and helps them contrast it against their own US government, which separates church and state. At the end of the video, the site has a tab in which they can take a brief quiz to test what they retained from watching the video.
- Basic Information Regarding Immigration
https://www.wku.edu/oip/documents/immigrationbasics.pdf - This link will take you to a reputable online handbook that explains basic information on immigration including the types of legal statuses that can be obtained and the requirements for each.
- Iran's Revolutions: Crash Course
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w4Ku6l7OEI - This is a link to a video that briefly explains the history of Iran and simultaneously debunks some of the common misconceptions associated with the country. This would be a great video to show students after reading the first chapter, in order for them to have a better picture (literally) of what the situations in that country where and why the main character and her family wanted to emigrate.
- Educational Leadership
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec12/vol70/num04/Nonfiction-Reading-Promotes-Student-Success.aspx - Nonfiction reading promotes student success. They learn more vocabulary, become more proficient readers, and find reading enjoyable
- FAQs for Iranian Applicants. This shows students the steps Iranians have to go through to apply for visas.
- Lots of Americans have a preconceived notion about Iran. Here is the country before the revolution in 1979.
- Iranians in California
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-06-07/war-or-no-war-iranians-california-try-make-sense-us-iran-tensions - This article is about Iranian-Americans living in California. It discusses why they chose to live in California, and the tension between U.S. and Iran and how it affects them.
Lesson: This lesson meets the Common Core (CC) outcomes by helping them determine the meaning of words and phrases used in a text, analyzing text, critical-thinking, and comprehension.
- -CC: Craft and Structure #4: Determining the meaning of words/phrases as they are used in the text.
- Find a quote from the book that is related to the word.
-CC: Key Ideas and Details #1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
- Identify how the text relates to the word and her experience as a whole.
-CC: Craft and Structure #6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.
Activity:
- Define the word on the page (both their own definition and the dictionary definition)
- Find a quote from the book that is related to or contains that word.
- Identify how this text, as a whole, relates to the word and her experience.
- To Understand real life immigrant experience through a memoir of a young adult.
- To participate in class discussion about the issues revolving immigration
- To convey basic knowledge about the legal status of a person and know the difference between a naturalized citizen, a refugee and an undocumented immigrant
