Excerpt
Citizenship
InvitationsThe year I turned forty, my mother, sister, and I flew north to Toronto, and together, almost giddy, we marched to the United States consulate. We squinted in the morning sun, and I took selfies with the consulate’s glass door in the background until a security guard jogged over and said, You can’t take photos here. You have to erase them.
My mother’s eyes narrowed at me. She did not understand the man’s English, but she knew from his tone that I was the guilty party.
It’s a selfie, I stammered.
Doesn’t matter, the guard said. It’s a security issue. You can’t take pictures.
I tried, but failed, to find the words to tell the guard that once upon a time my mother had needed to exist beyond the borders of the United States to receive a fiancé visa, and she had come here to Toronto, to this building. She had been pregnant with me. I wanted to tell the man that my Colombian mother was an extremely shy woman, but once when I asked her how she had convinced immigration officials that she was not marrying my Cuban father for a green card, that she actually did love the man, Mami had puffed her chest and exclaimed, I was pregnant! What more proof is there?
The sun dazzled overhead, and I wanted to tell the security guard: There’s a story here about citizenship and language, about the policies of the state and the bodies of women. There’s a story here about defiance. A story about the narratives we, as a nation, tell about who we are. For my mother and me, it started at this gray building with the hard glass and an American flag sagging in the morning light. But I glimpsed my mother’s face: her dark, worried eyes, her lips a firm line insisting that I follow the rules, as if the uniformed man were my father. I bit my lip and deleted the photographs, erasing Mami’s smile, my sister’s curls, the gloss of my red lipstick, and the doors to the consulate.
Satisfied, the guard turned away, and I tucked the phone into my pocketbook. I had managed to keep twenty-one photographs.
In northern New Jersey, in the early 1970s, my mother looked like a young Cher. She had thick black hair and a face that could be interpreted as Italian or Greek, Armenian or Jewish. When she wasn’t cleaning offices or working at a clothing factory, she sauntered through Jersey City in bell-bottoms and fitted tops. Those who didn’t understand Spanish probably mistook her for one of the most recent arrivals in that part of the state: the women fleeing Fidel Castro’s new Cuba.
A decade later, in 1981, at the age of six, I began silently recording my mother’s stories about citizenship. She did not use the terminology of those years: resident aliens, nonresident aliens, illegal aliens. She did not even tell me about visas or green cards. She spoke only of invitations.
Her stories were told at night, in the bedroom she shared with Papi, when he was working at the factory until dawn and it was only her, me, and my sister. All the lights off, we huddled under the comforter, my toddler sister on one side of Mami and my six-year-old body on the other, in that bedroom at the end of our railroad apartment in Union City. I must have said, Tell me a story, and she started with the first invitation.
My mother was in her twenties in this story. At the factory in Bogotá, during the late 1960s, she and a friend bent their heads over men’s blazers, day after day, the tailor’s chalk in their hands. They marked the fabric so the seamstresses would know where to stitch the pockets, so the men would have a place for their secrets. My mother and her friend lunched together with their co-workers, sometimes feasting on sopas brimming with potatoes and carne, and other times delighting in freshly baked buñuelos and pandebono. One day, her friend announced that she was joining her son in Jersey City. In the dark, my mother whispered, She said to me, When I get to the United States, I’ll send for you.
The woman kept her promise. She mailed a letter, and here the story took a difficult turn. My mother did not want to go north, but everyone told her not to be stupid. There was money to be made in the United States, more than she could imagine. She could work and come back. No one spoke about the recession in the United States, because the worst moments inside the empire were better than those at the edges, and besides, over there, the factories paid in dollars. Mami hesitated. An older sister urged her to go, and before Mami could decide, her sister bought the airline ticket with her own savings. What could I do? my mother asked in the dark. I left, she said with a sigh.
Cocooned under blankets, her sad voice in my black hair, I made a note to not trust the invitations of women, not even the ones I liked.
My mother did not tell me that she had to apply for a visa to the United States. She did not mention that procuring such a visa was not easy. People were routinely turned away. She did not tell me about the papers she submitted and the man at the United States consulate in Bogotá who approved her request. She did not speculate, at least not to me, on what that man thought when he looked at her: twenty-eight, childless, unmarried, living at home with her parents, a woman who would return or a woman the country did not need. She arrived in New York City, at John F. Kennedy International Airport, in the winter of 1970.
My mother never spoke of colonialism. She said nothing of fear or la migra. I was a child, and she was my mother, and so even though she had never read a novel set in Victorian London about wealthy women, she crafted a story where women extended invitations.
In northern New Jersey, she found work and two, maybe three years later, a local woman invited her to coffee. Someone had nicknamed the woman La Coca-Cola. I interrupted Mami to ask, Why did they call her that?
She was as popular as Coca-Cola, my mother replied, matter-of-fact.
La Coca-Cola brewed coffee on her kitchen stove. Maybe the woman served the café both ways: a tiny cup overloaded with sugar for the white Cuban man she had invited and ceramic mugs brimming with milk, sugar, and coffee for my mother and her sister Rosa.
By then my auntie had also become the recipient of invitations. In Colombia, Tía Rosa had taught elementary school in the campo, but once my mother settled in Jersey, she sent her a letter asking her to visit, and a man at the consulate approved Tía Rosa for a visa. My auntie boarded an airplane bound for New York City, then rented an apartment with Mami. By then, Tía Rosa was forty years old, more than a decade older than my mother, and with short curls, she had the confidence of a zealous talent manager, a woman who saw opportunity in every conversation. She had no patience for the factories with their demanding hours and their sewing machines squealing like small animals. Tía Rosa started cleaning the homes of the well-to-do.
La Coca-Cola invited my mother and Tía Rosa to meet a handsome man, a Cubano. In his mid-thirties and thin, Ygnacio turned up with his shirt tucked into his jeans, his black hair cropped short. He smiled easily and wore a stylish flimsy jacket that ended high on his waist and made him look even taller and more flaco than he was. He said very little but smiled.
Another invitation arrived for Mami. Ygnacio wanted to take her out. He showed up with pastries and sent more invitations. She said yes. He bought a red Chevy so he could drive her down the shore. He proposed marriage on a park bench, the trees flush with summer leaves and house sparrows. Let’s get married, he said, and there it was: another invitation.
My mother did not tell me stories of the Cold War. Neither did my father. He grew up in the mountains in Cuba, on the outskirts of Fomento, in a one-room home without running water or a toilet. He had a third-grade education. He was the kind of man the Communists intended to save from the clutches of capitalism, but Papi had his own ideas. He planned to be rich, and when the war began, he had already joined the army of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. In the late 1950s, that’s where the money was. A poor man could work his way up the ranks of the military, or at least have a uniform and a paycheck.
The revolution swept the island. The revolution won. Along with other soldiers, Papi, hours from Havana, surrendered his pistol to the new government. A year later, friends told him to flee. They whispered that the new government had begun its revenge by disappearing enemies of the state. In the first days of 1961, John F. Kennedy’s administration broke off diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s government, and the same week Papi boarded an airplane for South Florida with five pesos from a cousin in his pocket.
My mother could have said it this way: Citizenship is a game of tic-tac-toe. Your father was X and I was O. Here, on the sidewalk, the United States and the Soviet Union chalked three squares across, then up and down, until nine openings appeared. Your father was X and I was O. The Soviets supported Castro’s Communist government, and the Americans began offering green cards in 1966 to the Cuban exiles who reached the United States. Your father was born in Cuba. Your father had a Cuban passport. Your father landed on American soil. Your father won.
