‘Felipe’ Comic Puts Fun Into Amnesty Process

No superheroes grace the pages of Javier Juarez’s comic books, no arch villains with maniacal plots to control the world and not a single “Pow!” “Zap!” or “Bam!”

But the black and white booklets that depict ordinary people trying to conquer a mountain of bureaucratic obstacles to become legal U.S. residents may be the most dog-eared literature in California.

Distributed free at employment offices, churches and social service agencies, the stories of “Felipe” and his friends are lessons in applying for residency under the complex 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, better known as the amnesty program.

The nonprofit refugee advocacy organizations that produced the comic books say they are so successful they can’t fill all the orders, which include requests from adult education and community college instructors using them as texts for teaching English to non-native speakers.

Emily Goldfarb, executive director of the San Francisco-based Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services, called Juarez a genius and said his comic books are “our No. 1 outreach tool” and “very popular.”

“We’ve never had this kind of response with any material before,” Goldfarb said. “The combination of being interesting and informative is hard to find in any other material.”

INS Publishes Version

The idea was so good, the Immigration and Naturalization Service soon followed suit.

Juarez said the INS turned down an offer last year to publish his comic books, citing a lack of funds, but the federal agency later published its own version.

Scott Nyborn, outreach coordinator at the INS legalization office in San Francisco, said the government publication also proved popular. “I don’t think we have any left, actually,” Nyborn said.

A former Mexican government economist who wears his hair in a long ponytail, the 39-year-old Juarez said in a recent interview that he got the idea for the comic books after he married an American citizen and moved from Mexico City to California.

“All this subject matter is deadly boring if you aren’t affected by it,” Juarez said of the intricate immigration regulations. “If you are affected by it, it’s not deadly boring. It’s terrifyingly boring.”

So he lightened it up, capitalizing on a gallows sense of humor and love of story telling that he said is the heritage of Mexico, where political cartooning has enjoyed a long tradition and soap opera-style novellas are popular.

“Lots of people say, ‘Why a comic book? That’s for a kid or the mentally retarded,’ ” Juarez said. “There’s nothing comic about the situations portrayed in the comic books. Actually, it’s a matter of life and death (for immigrants from impoverished and war-torn countries). It’s going to determine where they live and work. But there’s no reason to lose your sense of humor.”

When the comic book characters discuss the difficulties of obtaining documents and witnesses’ sworn statements to prove they’ve been in the country since Jan. 1, 1982, the cutoff date for amnesty applications, Felipe laments: “Even my mother-in-law wanted to use the opportunity to get rid of me.”

His friend, Arturo, responds: “Sometimes I wonder if we can really blame her.”

Gets Help From Family

Juarez writes the scripts in Spanish, then translates them for English editions. A former student of dramatic arts, he gets help with illustrations from his media-wise family--his father works in advertising, his brother in film-making and his sister is a television director in Mexico.

Juarez said he strives to write the scripts in the idioms of everyday Spanish, while accurately imparting information about the amnesty program--a task he said can be a nightmare because the experts frequently disagree about the meaning of the complex immigration law.

“Javier is just a genius,” said Goldfarb. She said that, unlike with government brochures, people hang on to the comic books and read them out loud to their families, reaching illiterate people who otherwise might be misinformed or exploited by swindlers.

‘They’re Fun to Read’

“The comics, they’re interesting,” she said. “They’re fun to read. The graphics and the conversations and the cultural aspects of it are things that people can identify with.”

The potential audience for the comic books in California exceeds 1.58 million people, the number of applicants for residency status under the amnesty program.

Juarez’s first edition, “Amnistia,” which discussed the first phase of applying for temporary residency, was out of print soon after the release of 50,000 copies a year ago.

The application deadlines were last May 5 for aliens here since 1982 and Nov. 30 for seasonal agricultural workers who picked perishable crops for at least 90 days between May, 1985, and May, 1986.

Sequel Published

But applying for temporary residency is just the first step, so Juarez published the sequel, which covers the second phase of applying for permanent residency and avoiding disqualification--arrests, unemployment and dependency on welfare can make applicants ineligible. The “Second Phase” issue is already in its second printing four months after distribution of the first 30,000 copies.

Two more issues are in the works. They’ll address mandated AIDS tests; qualifying for government assistance, such as free and reduced-price school lunches and prenatal and infant medical care for low-income families; and meeting requirements for a basic understanding of the English language and American civics and history.

Magazine Planned

If the next issue wins a state grant, Goldfarb said the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition plans to print 70,000 copies for distribution by its 80 nonprofit member organizations in the San Francisco Bay area, then make it available to other organizations throughout the state to reprint.

Juarez said the widespread readership is its own reward, and has inspired him to try producing as his next project an analytical Spanish-English language magazine for California’s rapidly growing Hispanic population.

“You write a book, you may have a certain number of readers. Those readers are going to be highly educated. In my case, as an economist writing public policy documents, I have a very, very restricted audience.

“With this (comic book series), I have 50,000 readers just like that and I know that it does have an effective, practical usefulness.”