Americanized: Rebel without a Green Card

Throughout the book, Saedi uses humor to tell her story as an undocumented immigrant. Saedi explicitly explains that her choice to use humor is intentional and, in many respects, unavoidable as her memoir is based on diary entries she wrote as a teenager. The narrative style of the book thus adopts two perspectives. The first is the perspective of Saedi as a teenager who, caught in the throes of hormonal angst, reveals her innermost thoughts and feelings. The second is a more analytical perspective that pairs the unfiltered thoughts and feelings of teenage Saedi with sociological insights gleaned through adulthood and hindsight. In both cases, Saedi uses humor as a narrative device.

From the opening pages of Americanized, Saedi adopts a comedic tone and writes:

I, for one, don’t miss 1993. That was the year I naively thought my biggest problems were my underdeveloped breasts, the cystic acne that had built a small colony on my chin, and the sad fact that my prettier best friend and I had set our sights on the same guy. Would our friendship fall apart over a boy? Would I ever outgrow my training bra? Would my skin ever clear up? These were the dilemmas that kept me up at night.