The Weight of Shadows (16 page)

Inside the library, a young Indian or Pakistani boy, maybe seven years old, stands alone in a corner, pummeling a portable video game with his thumbs. A long single-file line snakes out of the main auditorium, and clusters of family members stand around avoiding eye contact. Chelsea leans toward me to whisper in my ear that the mood isn't as jovial as she'd expected. The kid's device is clinking and pinging, and he thrashes about from time to time. I wonder if he was born here or elsewhere, and, if it's elsewhere, I wonder whether he has any memories of the place of his birth. I wonder how his parents explained this ceremony here today.

It seems significant that after living in Chicago for twenty years I'm being naturalized here, now, under the sign of Obama, the record-breaking deporter in chief, with Hoover, the president during the beginning of the Mexican Repatriation, in retrograde. The walls are covered in photographs showing Hoover's accomplishments. What isn't displayed
on the wall, of course, is anything regarding the policy authorized by Hoover that led to the coercive, often violent removal of between four hundred thousand and two million Mexicans living in the United States. Many of whom were US citizens or legal residents whose families hadn't moved in generations and who had only become “foreigners” after the United States invaded Mexico, took half of its landmass, and drew a new political boundary line. This period between 1929 and 1944 shares many similarities to the moment in which we live. And like Operation Wetback in the fifties straight through our current period, the categories of Mexican, immigrant, “illegal immigrant,” and “wetback” get ground together in the public consciousness. The xenophobia and racial terror that continues to this day certainly isn't new, and neither is the collective amnesia regarding the economic, political, and military interventionism that has in large part driven migration to the United States.

Chelsea snaps a photo of me standing in front of glass doors etched with the presidential seal. The backlight turns me into a black, featureless silhouette in the center of a ring of stars. My body covers the eagle and the olive branch it clasps in its left talon, but the thirteen arrowheads peek from behind my right elbow and a halo of rays emanates from around my head. The single-file line starts moving so I get in the back, and an attendant comes out to tell everyone's family members they can go into the auditorium and sit down. An older woman wearing a long green sari grabs the kid from the corner who is still pummeling his device. He lets out a grunt when she tugs him by the arm, but otherwise his attention is uninterrupted. She tries to sneak a kiss on his cheek, but he pulls away without turning his gaze from the game.

There's a young black man standing in front of me. The back of his head is dotted with a few small white puffy scars. He turns to wave and smile at an older white couple looking
excitedly at him. They wave back. These have been long journeys, I don't doubt that. Everyone here—everyone in line—has personal complications, unique thoughts and feelings regarding what they're about to do or what is about to happen to them. Really it's already done. Many of the families in the hallway look genuinely excited. One young woman tears up as she hugs a man who looks like he might be her brother or maybe her boyfriend. Others look anxious, and a few look entirely unmoved. One man's relatives stand in complete silence, with no expressions, and don't acknowledge when he breaks away from them to get into the line.

Many of these trajectories have been labored in ways I'll never have to know. My own has been rather mild because my parents bore the brunt of our migration, and I had the luxury of being too young to remember the place we left. I can't miss it because I never knew it, so I don't feel the sadness some of them probably do, but it does feel like I've been denied something essential. I'm a stranger to most of my blood relatives and not by my own choosing. Neither of the two languages I speak are indigenous to the place in which I was born. My parents left a way of life, which means the way in which they'd grown to relate to the things and people around them, the spaces they had carved out for themselves. They left fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters. They left the familiar rhythms of the quotidian in their corner of the world; the thick loamy smell that came off the mountain during rain; the sound of crickets landing on the neighbor's tin roof through an open window; the walk around the park on Sunday; watching their viejos grow old; being there to help them die.

When I started the process of “naturalization,” feelings that had abated, that I'd become somewhat accustomed to, were agitated. A few months back I'd confessed to my mother that for a long time, maybe always, I'd felt a deep abiding guilt for being the reason they left everything. Without
any siblings to shoulder any of this, it fell squarely on me. She sat silent for a long moment, her bottom lip tightening the way it does when she's pained. Then she offered something she knew I would understand to be true, rather than something that sounded nice but wouldn't bring me any solace. She said even if they had stayed, those things would have been taken away, that everything always gets taken away, and that I wasn't the reason why, that the reasons were too many, too complex, too permanent to understand. She said what had happened to them had also happened to me—in my own way—and she'd always worried I might carry this kind of guilt.

The line starts to move and everyone's family is corralled into the auditorium to be seated. We walk toward a stage at the front where four individuals sit at a folding table covered in papers and envelopes. As I'm moving forward I remember a joke Yoli had said about the ceremony, about everyone being handed blond wigs and blue contact lenses as they swore allegiance to the US flag. I knew my parents had wanted to come, but I could also sense they weren't too torn up about not being able to take the time off from work on such short notice. I feel a similar ambivalence about being here without them because being here doesn't feel like a celebration or an accomplishment. It's something of a relief, of course, but it also feels like acquiescence—like I'm tacitly agreeing this is necessary and legitimate, that, yes, in fact, I am one of the “good ones” and I have “done it the right way.”

One of the women at the folding table asks me for my letter in the pinched, nasally accent some Iowans have.

“What letter, ma'am?” I ask.

She explains that it said right on the letter that I needed to bring it to the ceremony. I try to explain why I don't have it but only manage a few vowel sounds before she raises her finger—telling me to wait—while she quietly confers with the others at the table. She asks me to step to the side and
wait a moment. A man comes from somewhere, and they all quietly confer with him, periodically looking in my direction. The man leaves, and the woman waves me over.

“Okay then. I'll need your green card, and I need you to fill this out.”

I hadn't thought about needing my green card, but I have it on me because there is rarely ever a moment when I don't. Printed right on the card is the direction that I'm required to have it with me at all times. For a moment I think about asking if I can keep it, but I don't. She takes it from me and drops it in the “O” section of a small plastic bin on the table. She hands me a clipboard with a form that contains several questions I've already answered. When I'm done she takes it and explains that she just has a few questions she has to ask me.

“Have you been out of the country since the civics interview?”

“Yes.”

She looks up from her papers.

“Since the civics interview?”

“Yes.”

She leans forward putting some weight on her elbows.

“How long were you continuously out of the country?”

“About a month.”

“One month?”

“Yes.”

She writes things down on her clipboard, and it seems like I've given her the wrong answer. She grabs a file box and fingers through some papers until she stops at what she's looking for. She pulls out a single sheet of paper and holds it out to me.

“There you are.”

For a moment I don't know what I'm looking at. It looks like a giant dollar bill rimmed in the same baroque filigree. There's a passport-size photograph of myself that I don't immediately
recognize, with my signature next to it. I stare at it for a moment, and realize, because of the trench coat I'm wearing in it, that it's the photograph that was taken during my biometrics appointment. The woman at the table tells me to sign it, and it's only as I'm signing it that I realize it's my certificate of naturalization. She writes a number, 37, on a small square of paper and tells me to find my seat.

The chairs in the first few rows have large white envelopes with numbers on them. I find 37. The person assigned 36 is not yet to my right, but sitting to my left is 38, an older pale woman with bright orange hair. She keeps turning around to wave at someone, and her perfume overwhelms me every time she does. She's very fidgety and obviously excited, and I know enough about her experience, just because she's number 38, to feel a vague kinship with her. There are several gold rings on each of her fingers, and a thick crucifix is wedged between her breasts.

A bald judge in robes walks in from behind the stage. Eleven middle-aged white men follow him out, wearing red button-down shirts. They assemble into a small semicircle on the left side of the stage, and one man introduces them as members of the Harmony Hawks, a seventy-member barbershop chorus. Several of the men resemble Kenny Rogers, and others have the blunt look of Bavarian stock, all foreheads and thick fingers. The judge reads an introduction, which is really just a list of the requirements we've met in order to be naturalized. They increase in absurdity, reaching an apex when he tells us that we've established our good moral character during the legally mandated statutory period, have demonstrated our attachment to the principles of the US Constitution, and have shown ourselves to be well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States. We've demonstrated, unless exempt by law, the ability to read, write, and speak words in ordinary usage in the English language. We have demonstrated our understanding of the fundamentals
of the history and government of the United States.

There are forty-seven of us. I open my white envelope. Inside is a small US flag made of thin vinyl. There are a few other papers inside that I don't retrieve. Looking around, others have also pulled out their tiny flags, not knowing what we're supposed to do with them. The Harmony Hawks begin “God Bless America” in the hammy barbershop style, which I can usually walk away from if ever confronted with it, but here I'm stuck. The singers smile between phrases, and when they're done they look happily upon the crowd. But any happiness directed toward me, toward us, feels contingent on the fact that we've jumped through the correct hoops.

In today's liberal democratic states a substantial portion of law is dedicated to erecting a “just” basis for exclusion, to pretending that the universal right to leave any country exists when it doesn't. The wealthy, despite their racial identity or country of origin, transcend borders. But here, in the domain of restrictive immigration policy, democracy reaches its vanishing point. Considering the history of colonialism and the continued economic and political force exerted by the global North on the global South, restrictive immigration policy looks more like affluent states shielding themselves against the misery they create elsewhere than anything international jurists could ever come up with. The more I turn these thoughts over in my mind, the more grating the chorus's harmonizing becomes. This is pure spectacle, one in which forty-seven people are offered as proof the system is working, that the spirit of democracy exists for everyone, that human dignity is respected, that inalienable rights are recognized, and that liberty is for all who show up to claim it.

A representative for Iowa congressman Dave Loebsack reads a statement. “You are proof that the American dream is alive and well!” he says. Then there is more singing.

The judge tells us we are not yet citizens, that we'll become citizens the moment we utter the words “I will,” affirming
our willingness to take up arms and uphold hollow ideals put on paper by people who bought and sold human beings, while our military's drones “legally” rain death from above and violate the sovereignty of other nations, some of whose people are being naturalized here today. The judge reads through each person's country of origin individually: Canada, Eretria, Latvia, China, Montenegro, Pakistan, Romania, the Central African Republic, Bolivia, Vietnam, China, India, Kosovo, Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines, Sweden, Somalia, Jamaica, Venezuela, Kenya, Poland, Liberia, Vietnam, Algeria, Canada, Ukraine, Bosnia, Ukraine, South Korea, Bosnia, India, Mexico, Latvia, the Philippines, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka, India, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Togo, South Korea. I think the young man with the scars on his head is Liberian, and the woman with the bright orange hair to my left is from Latvia. Number 36 to my right is a small man with dark brown skin from India who turns and smiles at me when the judge reads India, and the kid who was pummeling the game in a corner belongs to a family from Pakistan.

We all raise our right hands. The judge reads his prompt.

We each say, “I will.”

The lights grow dim and a video is projected on a screen onstage. Barack Obama, presumably somewhere in the White House, looks just above and beyond us because he's not looking into the camera but at cue cards or a teleprompter just to the side.

“I am proud to welcome you as a new citizen of the United States of America.”

How strange to be welcomed now, since I've lived my life here from before I can remember. My cultural references are decidedly eighties and nineties United States—Urkel, Alex P. Keaton,
Tom & Jerry
, Biggie—and despite my best efforts I sometimes slip into a Chicago accent, cutting my A's short. When I did visit Veracruz as a middle-schooler, the kids I
played pickup games of soccer with would immediately detect that something about me was off. I had my first kiss in a bathroom in Bucktown in Chicago in grammar school, and I lost my virginity less than a block away in a church parking lot. The first place I remember living was a yellow brick apartment building across the street from Holstein Park on the corner of Shakespeare and Oakley. The super had plaque psoriasis and lived on the ground floor, and I used to think he was related to me somehow because he was always around. My dad saved my life when he tackled me on Palmer walking toward Western—we'd gotten caught between two teenagers shooting at each other. I wrecked the first car my parents ever bought three days after they'd made the last payment, crossing North Avenue on Honore.