The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  When I open my eyes the following morning it takes me longer than usual to remember where I am. For a few moments after I raise my head, I think I might still be overseas, but as I examine the objects and furniture in the room—a dream catcher, earrings made of animal bones, a few crystals splayed out on an old wooden desk—I know I’m in the room of a hipster in the United States. I can hear the shower, and I remember that Chelsea had come home with a case of beer and that we’d gone to sleep only very recently. Because of the short notice, my parents weren’t able to come for the ceremony, which didn’t seem to bother them, so Chelsea said she’d accompany me to take photos. On our way out, our mutual friend Dylan, who grew up in the Alleghenies, shows up wearing a shirt with a collar, which is unusual for him, especially in the summertime. I’ve forgotten that I’d texted him at some point the previous evening, but it seemed appropriate that this Appalachian friend, the son of a street preacher, would be joining us. I’d lied to both of them, telling them that the ceremony started an hour before it actually did, because I felt confident that something would go wrong.

  The first impediment presents itself in the form of a careening semi that comes inches from smashing into my driver’s side and runs us off the road. I try not to over-swerve, but we pop onto the shoulder and narrowly miss a concrete embankment. When the car comes to a stop we don’t acknowledge how close the bottom edge of the semi’s cargo box came to the driver’s side windows. We are still and silent for a moment, and then, not knowing what to do or say, I accelerate back into traffic. The female voice on the GPS leads us off the highway into an area with several office parks. Here we encounter our second impediment. The voice tells us we’ve arrived as we pull into the lot, but there isn’t a single vehicle here, only a small, one-level structure at the far end that looks abandoned or at least closed. We park, and, halfway expecting the doors not to open, we go inside. Two old men in guard uniforms are chatting about something and seem surprised to see us. It turns out the woman who I’d spoken with on the phone at USCIS gave me the incorrect address. The older of the two guards checks his watch and informs us that the naturalization ceremony is several towns over, in West Branch, which is about half an hour away. Dylan and Chelsea become agitated, thinking we’ll surely miss the appointment, until I tell them we actually have more than enough time.

  I have never been to West Branch, Iowa, before, but as we drive down what appears to be the main street, which we later discover is named Main Street, it looks utterly familiar. If not for a few new Camrys and minivans it would be like looking at a photograph from the forties or fifties. Many of the buildings are redbrick with ornate beige cornices and big windows with striped awnings, and one place has a faded US flag flapping in the wind, but several of the storefronts are closed, and there’s no one on the street. We pull into the parking lot of what appears to be a small grocery store called Jack and Jill, and I make a comment about how nice it is to see a small independent grocery store still in operation in this small town, but Dylan corrects me, telling me it’s a regional chain.

  “Besides, most of these people shop at the Walmart in Coralville,” he says.

  The young woman who checks us out doesn’t say a word as she slides our items across the scanner. She just stares at our eyes, smacking her chewing gum, looking uninterested and interested at the same time. She’s short and thin and wears a big faded camouflage coat and loose jeans. My ham sandwich is under three dollars. When I open it, the white bread is soaked, either from the shredded iceberg lettuce or the ham. We walk toward the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum where the two old guards told us the ceremony would take place. Main Street is still empty and the sky looks big, like it’s bearing down on buildings that might give under its weight at any moment. We round a corner onto another abandoned street that looks like a period piece film set, but this one appears much older. A weathered white sign reads “Downey Street” in hand-painted old-timey letters. We later learn that this historic-looking street is, in fact, a national historic site and the re-created neighborhood of Herbert Hoover’s birth. It’s lined with small cottages, a blacksmith shop, an old schoolhouse, a Quaker meetinghouse, and the tall native wildflowers and grasses that would have been here in the late nineteenth century. Some of the structures, like the small white cottage where Hoover was born, are only somewhat original. The cottage, for example, had been sold during Hoover’s lifetime, a second story had been added, and the cottage had been rotated to face another street, but decades later, after Hoover became president, the cottage was bought back, the second floor removed, and the structure was turned to face Downey Street again for the purposes of historic authenticity.

  We stand in front of the birth cottage, at the white pickets that line the small property. Chelsea points out that there’s a water pump and pile of firewood in the yard, and Dylan wonders aloud who cuts the grass and whether or not the pump actually produces water. The buildings on the street were never as they are now. They were placed in rows like this to facilitate a “historical” experience, and on some days, some of the locals, who live just blocks over in houses with vinyl siding, are paid to wear bonnets and period clothing and walk around, chop wood, and play games as though it were the late 1800s. The cottage is only fourteen by twenty feet, and it feels like this is what I’m supposed to walk away noting: its modesty. It’s strange to think all these little houses sit empty and actors are paid to sometimes pretend to inhabit them. For Hoover, the cottage was “physical proof of the unbounded opportunity of American life,” and this is what he tells us his story tells: “In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbound hope.” The house isn’t lived in and cannot be sold, so its only use is as a tool for myth-making.

  As we continue toward the library we come upon a pedestal topped by a seven-foot black statue of a woman sitting on a throne. Her face and body are draped in a thin black veil, giving her an ominous, almost ghoulish appearance. The veil, made of bronze, has been cast to look thin, airy, and somehow light. Her features, although obscured, are still perceptible. The three of us stand at the foot, and Chelsea points to an inscription at the base: “Je suis ce qui a été, ce qui est, et ce qui sera, et nul mortel n’a encore levé le volle qui me couvre.” I am that which was, that which is, and that which will be, and no mortal has yet lifted the veil that covers me. The figure, cast by Belgian sculptor Auguste Puttemans, is Isis, ancient Egyptian goddess of life and nature, whose name means throne, and whose headdress is often depicted in the shape of a throne. Belgians had meant the statue to be an expression of gratitude to Hoover for famine relief efforts during World War I, because Isis is sometimes used to represent the proliferation of grain, but in Egypt, Isis served primarily as the personification of the pharaoh’s power. Three bronze flames emanate from her right hand, and she holds the key of life in her left.

  “Weird,” says Chelsea, staring at her ghostly features.

  This version of Isis, cloaked almost completely, does seem peculiar. In Plutarch’s Moralia, there is a reference to a statue of Athena in the ancient city of Saïs that contains a similar inscription: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered.” Plutarch suggests that the statue of Athena represents the use of myth by the priestly and military classes from which kings were appointed. The cloaking of certain knowledge meant that only some would be privy to it, and so only some would be able to derive benefit from it. Moreover, the identification of Isis with Athena and the sculpture’s Greek rather than Egyptian aesthetic bring to mind Athena’s associations with courage, law, justice, and war strategy. It seems strangely appropriate on our way to the Hoover Library, then, to encounter this dark figure—cloaked and on her throne, overlooking a presidential birth cottage—like a sphinx at the entrance to the temple.

  Inside the library, a young Indian or Pakistani boy, maybe seven years old, stands alone in a corner, pummeling a portable v
ideo 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 my
self 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.