The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  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.

  I don’t feel any different after saying “I will,” but I know there are some real changes that have just taken place, not to my body—and it’s really too soon for anything to have changed in my mind—but to the relations I have to the place in which I live, its bureaucracy, and its ability to restrict my movement. The virtual me—constructed and siphoned from various sources of data—will be transmitted across their interlinked databases differently, coded differently. The list of potential punishments for my actions has been reconfigured and shrunk. I’ve been allowed to join the club, brought into new spheres of influence and slipped out of others, and all in one breath. It isn’t lost on me that people die in pursuit of this condition I’ve just entered.

  The official Customs and Border Protection number of migrants’ lives lost in the Southwest during fiscal year 2010 is 365. This number is almost certainly too low. The number of South and Central American migrants killed in their transit through Mexico on their way here is unknown. Migrant massacres numbering close to one hundred are not uncommon. Falling off the side of La Bestia, a freight train used for transport through Mexico, and never being identified is not uncommon. About eleven thousand South and Central American migrants were kidnapped in a six-month period last year. Globally thousands of people perish making this wager, attempting to make their way to the global North. They die in the Sahara, along the US-Mexico border, in Mexico, in the Mediterranean, in Australian waters, around the Horn of Africa, in the Bay of Bengal, and in the Caribbean. They are the poorest, those who cannot afford to make their way into a country on a tourist visa or on an airplane. Many come from indigenous populations. Most are dark-skinned.

  The ceremony in West Branch, Iowa, reaches its nadir when a video is cued up and a twangy guitar or maybe synthesizer begins Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” A video montage that reminds me of every propaganda film I’ve ever seen begins diffusing cliché images intended, I suppose, to kick-start our patriotism for the new homeland: a snow-capped mountain, a swooping helicopter shot of a golden field of grain, a bald eagle soaring above a forest, a roaring river, a flag undulating in the sky. Usually I would find this comical, but about halfway through I feel a shudder. This song had been playing a lot on the radio lately, and I’ve come to find out that it was originally popular as US-led coalition forces dropped ninety thousand tons of bombs during the Gulf War. It became popular again just after Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and it’s in the middle of a resurgence that started a little over a month ago when Beyoncé premiered her cover on Piers Morgan Tonight, three nights after the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The song reminds me not only of the televised images I’d seen during my childhood of Kuwait on fire, but also of the drunken crowds I recently saw taking to the streets in the small Iowa city in which I live. At first I didn’t know what was happening because I didn’t own a television, and I assumed it had something to do with football, but my neighbor knocked on my door to tell me the news. Crowds of drunken college students and locals spilled out of apartment buildings, frat houses, and bars onto the streets. It looked exactly the same as the white rioting that happens when the football team wins, except instead of black-and-gold banners they were waving the stars and stripes and chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” Rather than celebrating a sporting victory, though, they were in ecstasy over the revenge assassination of Osama bin Laden, which we would later come to learn allegedly happened in front of his twelve- or thirteen-year-old daughter.

  Without a trace of self-awareness, the old white judge tells us that America is the home of im
migrants: “Baryshnikov, the dancer; Einstein, the scientist; Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor; Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player.” I retrieve a handful of papers from inside my large white envelope. The first sheet is a form letter from Obama. I skim it as the judge announces he’ll be taking photographs with people on stage. I glance over, and number 38 is wiping away a tear. “You’re one of us now”—this is the overwhelming sentiment of the letter. A woman who’s just been naturalized takes her whole family up for a photo: several children, a husband, and a baby. The judge holds the baby—his idea. Something falls from the papers I’m holding onto the ground. It’s a government-printed informational pamphlet about applying for a US passport. The front reads, “With Your U.S. Passport, the World is Yours!”

  CHAPTER 8

  Friendship Park, USA

  Over my left shoulder is a series of rolling hills that look like brown waves frozen mid-swell. The highest one spits out Border Patrol vehicles that pop over the horizon and then kick up clouds of dirt as they wind down the road toward me. To my right is a desolate beach—not a soul on it except someone inside a green-and-white Border Patrol Jeep parked on the wet sand where there should be children digging holes or building castles.

  In front of me is an iron fence, about twenty feet high, which extends several hundred feet in each direction. This barrier fences off another fence, about the same height, made of rusted iron beams that bifurcate the rolling hills and extend into the Pacific Ocean. It looks like a spine protruding from a giant rotting fish. All of the standard reasons given for erecting such a thing become suspect after even the most cursory investigation. I’m standing directly in front of the only entrance to the area between the two fences, which may or may not be part of Friendship Park. About twenty feet over my left shoulder is a Border Patrol SUV, motor running, angled diagonally so its front is pointing at the entrance like a hunting dog pointing at game.

  I’m not entirely sure what constitutes Friendship Park, because nothing here looks park-like or friendly. The sky is gray but also somehow bright. Things look crisp but anemic, glaring but drained of color. It’s as if the sun itself is emitting gray. This corner of the nation resembles a cleared prison yard or a camp. It looks like a ruined Tarkovskian landscape: the rusted wall that extends past the horizon, the lone beach with the solitary vehicle, the conspicuous absence of people. A lopsided sign on the first fence reads “THIS AREA UNDER 24 HOUR SURVEILLANCE.” I snap a photo just as a wad of white seagull shit plops on the concrete next to me. Somehow I’d missed seeing the eighty-foot surveillance tower just a few hundred feet away where a few fat gulls squawk, perched on the edges of a triangular catwalk beside infrared cameras and ground surveillance radar.

  Nothing about the infrastructure here makes clear sense. It’s well documented, for example, that the crime rate among foreign-born and first-generation immigrants is much lower than the crime rate of the US-born population. Studies suggest “second-generation immigrants” assimilate precipitously, and their experiences are shaped by the same vulnerabilities, influences, and temptations as other Americans, so their crime rates “catch up” to those of native-born non-Hispanic white people. “Second-generation immigrants” is itself a misleading designation, because people in this category aren’t immigrants at all but persons born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent. In any case, there is no evidence to suggest that the fortification at this boundary diminishes illegal entry into the United States in any way. More accurately, it displaces it.

  “This is creepy,” says my partner, Caitlin, scanning the landscape. She says she’s a bit ashamed she’s never been here before, because she grew up in Escondido, only about forty-five minutes north of here, but I tell her that even if she had come it wouldn’t have been this place exactly, because until 2009 it still looked like something that could pass for a park.

  On our drive here we had talked about how it seemed that a significant part of what shapes immigrant experience is the premise that immigration is a single issue rather than matrixes of issues with distinct contexts and various scales. Caitlin had accused me of being grumpy, and I’d responded by asking her if she knew how many of Mexico’s recent heads of state were Harvard and Yale grads. I borrowed her iPhone and pulled up a photo my cousin had recently posted on Facebook of my elderly great aunt. I showed her the photo and told her it was my Tía Elena who lived in Fortín, and I showed her the location my cousin added to the post, which read: “Walmart—México.” The photo was a full body shot of an elderly, light brown woman wearing a cardigan and an ankle-length skirt, standing in front of an out-of-focus shelf. Much of the blurry area in the frame was taken up by blue rectangles from Walmart aisle signage.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  The fact that we could re-create an almost identical image less than five miles from our Iowa City apartment meant there were many kinds of migration taking place.

  As we traveled down the highway I found myself mindlessly repeating the word “Escondido” the way Caitlin said it, Ehs-cun-dee-doh. Most of the street names, town names, city names, and names of natural features were all in Spanish here, for obvious reasons—something I already knew—but until I repeated the word over and over, the meaning, the hidden one, hadn’t registered. I thought about how since yesterday, when we arrived in Solana Beach to visit her parents, I’d been reading street signs and hearing names, all Spanish words, but none of their actual meanings were carried by the utterances I heard: sun trap, solarium, the hidden one, ranch of little bluffs, the jewel, the drawer, the sea, knoll of holy faith, the king, the golden one.

  Yesterday evening Caitlin and I took her parents’ dog on a walk down their block, passing lovely ranch-style homes nestled behind hedges and hills covered in ice plants. The block descends to an entrance for the San Elijo Lagoon, a wildlife preserve and estuary. We followed the trail for a minute or so before it opened to a sprawling wet valley of intense greens and dark shallow ponds that reflected the pink sky. It seemed impossible something like it could be there just at the end of their residential street. One white egret stood motionless, not rippling the oval of water it was standing in, and a lean white arrow streaked across the horizon, diminishing upward into the distance. We continued winding through the trails where the occasional jogger trotted past us, nodding or saying hello.

  As I sipped coffee the following morning, the tranquility I still felt from the estuary was disrupted when two Mexican men walked into the backyard carrying work gear. Caitlin, her mom, and I had been chatting casually, puttering around the kitchen, which looks out onto the backyard. When the men appeared, the room tightened. Caitlin’s eyes were fixed on mine, and I could tell she didn’t want to turn to see the men, even though she’d already seen them in her periphery. Her mom busied herself wiping the counters, avoiding eye contact with us both. We spent a few hard seconds locked in place like this until I excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I came back, they’d both gone into their bedrooms to get ready for the day. I finished the rest of my coffee standing at the window, wondering what I would do when one of the men looked over and saw me, but that moment never came.

  Afterward I felt a tinge of foolishness for having allowed myself to be lulled by the serenity of the morning, the lushness of the estuary. An awareness of myself in relation to this place was brought back by the men and the feeling that materialized in the room when we all saw them. If I were to walk out to the first intersection, and turn down any street I would pass homes worth over a million dollars, even in this cold market, and chances are I wouldn’t see anyone who looked like me unless they were doing work, because despite California being populated by so many brown people, this enclave’s population is 85.8 percent white. And just beyond the estuary’s eastern horizon are the mansions of Rancho Santa Fe, the zip code with the highest percentage of million-dollar homes in the entire country. The marsh itself is an accessory, a place for these people’s leisure activities. I doubt any of the men who arrive in work tr
ucks full of gear have ever stepped foot in it. I wouldn’t go in it alone without a white person by my side, or at least a leashed dog.

  When Caitlin returned the two men were gone. We didn’t acknowledge the incident, but there was a period of tense silence between us in the car as we drove toward Friendship Park in her parents’ old Mercedes wagon. We’d met in a dingy bar in Iowa City called George’s Buffet. And after our first encounter I found myself doodling the shape of her smile—a scalene triangle with the longest side up—in my notebooks. I remember Googling her a day or two after we met and finding a recording of her reading two of her poems. Most of the other writers I’d met in Iowa City struck me as overprivileged children playing at making meaning or resisting it by performing irony and other affects. After hearing her read her work I wanted to know her. I’d just broken up with my previous girlfriend of a decade because I’d slept with another woman and in doing so realized I was trying to ensure the dissolution of our relationship. I didn’t want a life of acquiring and maintaining comfort, which is what it would have been. When I heard Caitlin’s poems I imagined an unruly person who wouldn’t be able to fit into any of the regular schemes life tends toward today. I was in love with her after only a week.

  A line of gray pelicans glides low over the double barrier and then out and over the Pacific. A few rays of sun have managed to burn through the marine layer and fall on the hulking rusted wall, making it look for a moment like the edge of a forest fire.

  On August 18, 1971, First Lady Pat Nixon was photographed in this very spot, laughing nervously and somewhat coquettishly beside a shirtless, long-haired surfer. In the photo, she’s wearing a white skirt suit with overlaid white circles, and just beyond her bouffant is a view of the bullfighting ring in Tijuana where fights were telecast to Los Angeles and called in English on radio simulcast by Sidney Franklin, the first successful Jewish-American bullfighter from Brooklyn. A crowd of Mexicans stands behind a few strands of barely visible barbed wire to watch the first lady plant a tree to inaugurate the park. After saying a few words, a member of her security detail led her to a section where the wire had been clipped. She crossed the international boundary line and shook hands with bell-bottomed Mexicans, and she embraced some of their children for photographs. “I hate to see a fence anywhere,” she said. “I hope there won’t be a fence here too long.”