Rubi immigrated to the United States with her family only a year before I did, in 1992. Although she came from the coastal state of Guerrero, after living in Washington State and San Jose, in 1993 she and her family settled in Yuba City, California, the same town where I had just settled in from Mexico. We lived in the same government migrant labor camp for many years and must have, at one point or other, crossed paths as children.
All of the kids in the migrant camp knew each other, but it wasn’t until high school that Rubi and I became better acquainted. We were both in a cultural dance club at school, and eventually started dating in 2005. I wrote my very first poems to her and would slip them into her locker, and she would show them to her Spanish class, who would then try to interpret them, even though they were in English. I wanted to write poetry because I believed any practice in the English language would distance myself from my identity as an immigrant and I thought (naively, ashamedly so) that the farthest association from an immigrant was a poet. How foolish I was. Little did I know the lineage of immigrant poets I came from and would follow. But more than that, I wanted to write and speak English better than any white person, any citizen, because in the unthinkable case of ever getting caught by immigration, I thought I could impress them enough with my mastery of English to let me go. What a stupid idea.
It took me months before I was ever able to muster enough courage to confess to Rubi that I didn’t have papers, after which she admitted that she had only gotten hers a few months before. She was the first person I trusted enough to confide in about my documentation status, but it wasn’t easy. We kissed before I told her I didn’t have papers; I told her I loved her, and she said it back, before I ever mentioned I didn’t have papers; we made love, we fought, we met each other’s parents, before I told her I didn’t have papers—I didn’t want her to leave me before telling her I didn’t have papers, if it ever came to that.
We married six years later on September 10, 2011. We chose the date specifically because it was 9–10–11, and thought the sequence of numbers was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I liked things that felt rare and intentional. It was difficult to convince myself that people weren’t saying behind our backs that I only married Rubi for her papers, so I decided to wait a while before filing an immigration application. It was a way of saying, “I’m in no hurry, I’m with her because I love her.”
*
She finally submitted a petition for me to get a green card. It wasn’t a single process, and could sometimes take up to sixteen years, depending what route people take. Because I was able to leave the country and reenter legally with my DACA permit, I didn’t have to leave the U.S. for my immigration interview. When we submitted the form, again I said to Rubi, “You know I love you despite any of this,” to which she laughed and said, “I know.”
The order to appear for my interview came in 2014, in a letter printed on special thick paper. Getting the notice to appear meant that I had met all of the requirements needed to receive a green card if all went well at my immigration interview. The interview was set for July 28, 2014. I was twenty-six, twenty-one years after I first arrived.
*
An immigration interview follows the same rhetorical form as any other interview. The rules you’re expected to follow are the same. It’s a structure so common that I sometimes took its usefulness for granted. It happened every time I waited in line at the bank, at the store, or even when I made love.
“Do you love me?” I would say to Rubi in our first one-bedroom apartment with no AC.
“Yes,” she would say.
“Isn’t it love even if we don’t change?”
“Amor, I don’t understand the question.” We were so young and so much in love that we thought love could be anything we wanted it to be.
I repeated those words over and over. Sometimes in my head to myself—“Is it love even if we don’t change?” I wanted to approach questions as I would approach a large body of water, as things in which I could drown, knowing how easy it was to drown, knowing exactly the limits and dimensions of my body and what it would take to drown it.
*
If I ever stood in front of a crowd, I would like to interview them in secret to see what they thought of me, to see if I would allow them to love me. We would all be knee-deep in water.
I would want to know what their collective answer would be. I would hold my finger to my mouth and tell everyone to quiet. And they would. We would know things about each other at the end of it that we did not know at the beginning. We would all nod our heads but some for different reasons. There would be small cubes of cheese at the end and wine to wash them down.
*
The day of the interview, I took out my entire closet for the right thing to wear.
“What shirt says: I want to be an American?” I asked Rubi, holding up two blue collared shirts in each hand. One was slightly lighter, the blue of open ocean, and the other was of the deeper ocean, where bioluminescent creatures lurked.
Maybe if my cells tried just a little harder, they too could light up just like those creatures floating a mile beneath the surface. Why not? They carried inside their scales everything that was already inside me.
“I don’t care which one you wear,” Rubi said, “but hurry, because we have to go, it’s getting late.”
We got in the car and drove to the city. I chose the shirt that was the color of an expensive velvet dress I saw an older white woman wear to a symphony, the darker one. It was my first and only symphony I had ever attended, and I was wildly underdressed. Maybe I would light up, maybe I would drown inside my car from so many questions as we practiced what we would say.
I used to daydream that I was somebody famous. That people wanted to interview me on TV and radio, and I practiced my coy giggle with embarrassment. In these interviews, I balanced a very fine line between being humble and cocky in a way that was endearing to the crowd. They hated and loved me at the same time. Someone would walk up and give me flowers and I would thank them profusely, then walk away and toss them, even if they were still looking. Everyone wanted to be me.
Interviews reminded me how much of my life was lived through questions—interrogations—how much of it was just someone waiting for me to tell them an answer—how good I got at avoiding giving one.
“Where were you born?”
“Where do you think?”
But when I had no other choice but to answer directly, I still found a way to curve the truth about me; I took everything that was inside and put it outside, like how we don’t really know how some deep-water creatures really look because by the time they reach the surface, the change in pressure has deformed them. It was how an unknown became a known.
Things always moved in a single direction, from the interviewer to the interviewee. Even when the person being interrogated responded, it was in the direction of the interrogator’s next question, always moving forward. The U.S. government was good at asking questions, and it got in a lot of trouble when people learned just how it got its answers—it was a simulated drowning, but a drowning nonetheless.
*
In late-night talk shows, I saw beautiful people sit sideways on a chair with their legs crossed, drinking from a mug with the show’s name printed on the front—it always conveniently faced the front. I always wondered if it was actually coffee they were drinking that late at night. They leaned over a chair, crossed their other leg over, and smiled with a mouth full of large teeth, almost too many teeth, which were so white they seemed to glow in the dark. Sometimes they wore sunglasses even though the only visible lights were the ones from the televised backdrop of the cityscape at night. Los Angeles was so pretty from above.
They let you see into their lives, just enough to pique your interest, just enough to stay barely scandalous—careful not to seem sad or garner pity. No one likes a sad and washed-up star, but everyone loves a star that is on the verge of getting there, on the verge of breaking. Sadness itself is sometimes a good thing. Sadness is hot, sadness makes money, sadness has soft filters and ashtrays and turns a young Elizabeth Woolridge into Lana Del Rey cruising through Venice Beach on a Harley drinking PBR.
The hosts ask questions they know will not be answered, but that is not the point. The point is for the celebrities sitting in the hot seat to shy away from their questions ever so slightly. The point is for them to say “Stop, you know I can’t talk about that in public,” or “Well, you’ll have to ask them, not me.” And then they all laugh because they’re supposed to laugh. And the audience laughs and coos, and the hosts drink from whatever is in their mugs and chuckle again and turn to the musical accompaniment for additional commentary, which is underscored by a snare drum and “we’ll be back after this commercial break.” I loved every minute of it. I loved the live band. I loved the witty banter, which seemed so effortless, how quick and smooth they were with their answers, how everyone seemed to be a few seconds ahead in the conversation than the audience—ahead of me.
Then there was the moment when things went wrong. When someone didn’t follow the rules. People don’t like surprises. For instance, after a barrage of attacks, Cher (rightly so) tells David Letterman that he is an asshole. Her sadness stops being pretty to him. Though later it will turn out to be staged, Joaquin Phoenix stares inwardly from the reflection of his glasses, oblivious to the audience, and the world witnesses either a piece of performance art or a man who has lost his faith in an industry. The host, David Letterman again, aptly ends the interview by saying, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.” Joaquin doesn’t lean over his seat; he doesn’t whisper anything in anyone’s ear. He isn’t playing along like he is supposed to. You can see that he doesn’t want to be there; he doesn’t want to take part in the soliloquy. At least his portrayal indicates that. I’m sorry, you couldn’t be here tonight, as if you can be anywhere else.
In a more haunting episode, Crispin Glover, who played the dad on the Back to the Future franchise as George McFly, reads newspaper clippings about himself at a nightclub and seems surprised that he is being filmed at all when the audience erupts into laughter over his antics. He stares out toward the audience and looks directly at the camera as if wanting to see who is really there on the other side of the lens, who is really watching. He continues to read what the tabloids have said about him. He insists on arm wrestling David Letterman, who eventually walks offstage, visibly upset. A door has been opened that cannot be closed. The forward motion has stopped. Some of them were asked back on the show, and some weren’t. Some apologized, others tried to explain what it was they were doing in front of yet another camera, in front of another person asking them questions.
In 1991, two years before we left Mexico, my sister was voted pageant queen of our home town of Tepechitlán, Zacatecas. She was fifteen. Her dress was red, and velvet and long. Her king, another boy from school, was dressed in torn and dirty rags, “the ugly king,” as tradition goes. He groveled at her theatrical contempt.
No one knew what opulence meant, so her court tried their best in their suits and gowns two sizes too big, making grand gestures with their hands. For a moment she said she felt famous, except there were no cameras.
She was paraded through town on the hood of a truck, waving to the crowds.
The band, walking ahead of the car, asked for her favorite song, but she didn’t have one. She was touched by the Holy Spirit and wasn’t allowed to listen to worldly music. She knew the subtle art of fainting on Sunday mornings at church when she went up for the altar call as the pastor rubbed olive oil on her forehead and pushed her stiff body back.
Although the oldest, she was still the only girl, and though Apá reluctantly allowed her to participate after days of pleading, he grew furious when he saw her atop the truck and pulled her down. He yanked her arm all the way home, with the long train of her dress dragging behind; the music from the band continued playing, the party went on without her, without its queen.
The next day her pastor pointed to her in front of the congregation and proclaimed that she was a sinner. She was banished from leading the choir and had to beg forgiveness from God and the church for parading herself on top of a truck, a very worldly offense. She raised her hands and fainted every Sunday and rose back up as if she were a bored Lazarus who was tired of resurrection.
Apá sat her at the kitchen table and read off Bible passages to her even though he hadn’t gone to church in years. The town took the dress back and said they would use it again for next year’s queen.
I drove an hour into the city and asked Rubi to record a short video of me saying something—anything. I wanted to document my voice so that I could look back later to try to remember that moment.
“How do you feel?” asked Rubi, holding her phone up as we walked away from our car toward the federal building in downtown Sacramento.
“I’m fine,” I said, wringing my fingers together. Whatever happened after my interview, I would look back to that video to search for any signs, to see if something was trying to tell me that things would be okay. Maybe I would see that something in the background was trying to warn me to turn around, even if it meant giving up the prospect of ever getting a green card. If the interview didn’t go well, I knew I could be sent into removal proceedings.
We entered the large federal building with our lawyer. It seemed like no one was inside, as if we had just entered a building dedicated entirely to myself, to granite and paper. This was a place built for the questioning of people and their stacks and stacks of papers, a simulacra of human lives. I wondered who cleaned the building at night because I could almost see my reflection walking below on the granite floor.
The first floor was dedicated to ICE removal operations, and the second floor was Homeland Security business. Most people think they’re the same thing, but they’re not. People—for the most part—were removed from the country on the first floor, and others were considered for entrance on the second floor. We were going to the second floor. My father’s paperwork, gathered over the years, was probably somewhere in a box on the first.
My lawyer looked preoccupied with something else, relaxed, even bored. It must have been so routine to him, like dropping off mail, or waiting at the drive-through for a burger. The wood paneling made the whole second floor seem more judicial than the first, like a courtroom where we were either confessing or swearing allegiance already, even though there wasn’t a country at the other end to receive me. If we succeeded, there was a paper, not a country; I still belonged to Mexico.
*
After quietly waiting in a lobby on hard wooden benches, instructed not to speak, our names were called and we were led into a comfortable office that looked like a guidance counselor’s office with a large framed poster of Barack Obama smiling down on us, with all of his hair still dark. The picture was certainly taken on the day of his swearing-in to office—before the drones, before the quarter million deported on his watch, when things still seemed possible. Everything still seemed possible then.
Small indoor plants lined the window, and soccer pictures of someone’s kids adorned the walls. My lawyer edged closer to whisper in my ear, “We’re lucky, we got the good one,” and I wondered if he said that because of the soccer pictures and the ficus plants or if he actually knew the officer. And by “good,” did he mean understanding, compassionate, or jaded so as to not really care about the impacts of her decisions anymore? He knew more than me. He had surely been in that very office before. He sat back in his chair as if his job was done, as if we had passed the test already.
I wanted it to be like TV. I wanted there to be variations of a laugh track to the mundane answers of my uneventful life. I wanted my uneventful life to sound eventful, thought-provoking even—“You mix eggs with what!?” But the room was quiet. Unlike the interviews on TV, I didn’t have a mug to drink from on the table. I didn’t wear my sunglasses indoors, and there was no musical accompaniment to punctuate our comebacks.
In effect, what I was yet again doing was crossing the border, inside that small office, with Obama staring down at me.
I wore the bluer shirt because it reminded me of the water at Bridgeport, a swimming hole up in the Sierra Nevada in Northern California. It was the only place where I felt absolute stillness, where I could comfortably dive until my head felt like it was going to collapse from the pressure. I had been that deep before in the ocean, but only at Bridgeport did the pressure feel both safe and not. Unlike the ocean, where it seemed like you could go in any direction forever and the pressure would only mount, there at the river, it was shallow yet deep enough to provide the feeling of being pushed toward your center, so I was never afraid of descending, never afraid I would go too deep without being able to rise. I could see the finite dimensions of the river—I knew what was at the bottom, I knew what was at the top. I knew how long it would take to get there. I wore the darker shirt because I imagined that like those bioluminescent creatures, even I could be capable of light—the kind of light only visible from the bottom, looking up.
*
We knew how we were supposed to answer, and they knew how to expect us to answer. It was a show. There was nothing new about any of it. I asked Rubi the questions as we climbed into bed at night. I found them online one night and printed them out. On some nights, however, we didn’t interrogate each other with our interview in mind.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“No, I mean, do you actually love me?”
“Yes, I do, why do you have to keep asking?”
“What’s my grandmother’s name?”
“Which one, Sarah or Julia?”
My lawyer held a large legal folder against his chest that detailed everything about me, and yet nothing. It had dates, addresses, pictures, and names, but it didn’t have the things I was afraid of, nor what I longed for. It recorded the past but not what it meant for the future. I was interested in what would change about me after that interview. I wanted to record every moment to see if there was something I missed there in that office too.
Suddenly a woman opened the door, sat down at the desk before us and began the interview.
It’s a call-and-response. One announced the space into being, and the other filled it. “What is your name?” said the first voice. “Marcelo,” said the second.
“Why are you here?”
“Because we want to remain together.”
“And who is she?”
“I’ve known her almost all my life, she is my wife, and I love her.”
Between us was a synonym for a barrier through which only certain things could pass. My name could pass, Rubi’s name, how we met, how long we had been married. All of this could pass—information, which was free to move like air or animals over the border. However, there were still things that could not—how much we wanted it to be over, all the bad things we had to do over the years to survive as immigrants, and what I really wanted to say to the woman and to every guard I smiled to on the way up to her office. I still had to be polite.
I was speaking beyond the officer and to the entire country itself. Between us, a desk, but it might as well have been a long stretch of road. Long for its distance, but also for how narrow. She gave me something, and I turned it around and gave it back to her. Our language moved back and forth. It was like dancing reluctantly to a song that I hated—to a song that reminded me of someone I would rather forget. We were throwing stones into a deep pond and trying to figure out how deep it was by its sound. I would say something and see the ripples of its reverberation in the air. I would see it sink deep inside my interviewer as she nodded and pondered each of my answers to her questions, trying to decide if they were real. I imagined the entire building was vibrating with the small ripples of those afterthoughts when it was too late to take anything back—“I shouldn’t have said that, . . . I should have said this instead.” There were countless small rooms just like the one I was in where people nodded their head and said yes, or no, and watched a government worker scribble something on their notepad.
“Do you understand that marrying someone under any fraudulent circumstances in order to be granted any kinds of immigration benefits is a federal crime?”
“Yes, we do.”
*
Her tone was casual. It almost sounded like she wanted to be our friend, as if she was inviting us to her spin class at the gym. Perhaps we had stood in the same lines at the DMV, and taken our dogs to the same dog park, and waited in line at the same bank with the same blank face everyone has on when they wait at the bank. Yes, there was nothing different about her. She clocked in and out just like I did at work. She went home and probably had the same problems at home as I did—bills, and dog shit to clean, and more bills. But behind her easy demeanor was something my mother taught me to fear—the warmth and tenderness of someone who could hurt you. She didn’t look like La Migra. She didn’t talk how I imagined La Migra would talk. But did I ever imagine La Migra as having a body, as having a mouth? Did I ever think it could be reduced to one person sitting behind a desk in front of me?
“Where did you two meet? I’m asking her now, not you, sir.”
“That’s a tricky question,” Rubi said. “There wasn’t one particular place, we were always just there.”
I wondered if the officer followed the lives of the people she denied, or if each meeting was just another day at the office. I couldn’t imagine her keeping track of that many people, years after their encounter. But no doubt there were a few cases that remained in the back of her mind. People’s faces she couldn’t seem to forget, their stories that haunted her in the shower.
“Where do each of you work?”
“We’re kind of in between jobs right now.”
“I see.” She said and scribbled something on her note pad.
*
When someone asked me what I did for a living, I never said I was a poet. Instead I would cut the conversation short and just say I was a teacher, and after a smile and nod, no one would usually ask any follow-up questions. I preferred the terseness of such interactions. It was a boring response—it was safe. There was no more room for the imagination in that response. I didn’t want to tell people I was a poet because I didn’t want to explain (mostly to white people) what led me to writing, which would be followed by something like “I bet it was a great outlet of expression for such a hard life you lived.” I usually had to spend a considerable amount of time trying to convince them (and perhaps myself) that I, indeed, was a poet. If someone asked my immigration interviewer what she did for a living, I wondered if she said she worked as an immigration agent, deciding who stays and who goes from the country, separating families as par for the course, or if she simply said she works in government, or perhaps she kept it blander and simply said “the public sector,” yes, “I work for the state.”
“How long did you know each other before you started dating?” she asked
“I’m not sure,” I said.
*
I looked over at Rubi and remembered everything we had been through, like the time she left me in the summer of 2007, which led me to get a large tattoo on my back. When I saw her for the first time in the months after our breakup, I didn’t know what to say, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was that I got a tattoo, which wasn’t true. She asked to see it, but I said no, because there was obviously nothing there. Hours later that same afternoon, I went to the first tattoo shop I could find, pointed at whichever artist didn’t seem to be busy, as if I was getting a haircut, and sat for four painful hours over the course of two days as they needled the largest cliché I could point to in their portfolio of pictures of red chapped skin with fresh ink from the needle. I stood up and held a mirror against another mirror to see, still a little bloody, and headed straight to Rubi with large wings on my back.
With each new question our interviewer was getting to know us better—testing the waters. Her job was one predicated on doubt. It was her job not to believe us. It was her job to unravel the story of us until it was replaced with one absent of love—an absence she could prove on paper, distill to its basest form, and perhaps even measure. And wasn’t that what I did in my poems? Distill love into something that could never come close to love?
“What are his parents like? And same to you, what are hers like? Where do they live, and do you see them often?”
She trafficked in the images of legitimacy, trained in spotting the subtleties of body language in order to detect a sham green card wedding and tell it from the real thing. How close do they sit to each other? Do they smile, do they look at each other when they talk? It was our job to show her what we had shown the world, and to do it without thinking about doing it.
“What year did each of you enter the U.S.?”
“It’s funny, we arrived just about the same time—1992 and 1993.”
“Can you tell me all of the schools the other has gone to?”
But what if love had nothing to do with either her decision to legitimize our marriage or our decision to continue as such? If not love, then what? On what basis could they recognize us as a complete unit? Commitment? Were they looking for some kind of promise between two people? “I promise to pay half of the bills with you, I promise to not use up all of the hot water in the shower, I promise that if we ever have children, I will work tireless hours to give them a better life.” Or were the characteristics for validity more physical—did I have a tan line beneath my wedding ring, which indicated how often I wore it? Did I have calluses in my palm from wearing it?
Some people could spend their entire lives together without love. I went to a therapist once who told me that after a certain time, love had little to do with staying together, that we build our lives around comfort.
“Do you plan on having children?”
“Not at the moment, ma’am, we want to finish school first.”
If I told her, “Yes, I am married to this woman, but I am not in love with her. I will commit my entire life to her, but not my heart,” would she automatically deny my application?
If I said, “I’ve been married to this woman and am barely learning to love her, but I know I am possible of loving her more in the future,” would that be cause enough for rejection? What if I did not love her at that moment, but I was willing to let myself try? Would they take a gamble on me? Some people fall in love, and then they fall more in love with time. I thought about Amá and Apá. Maybe for them, the possibility of learning to love each other was disrupted when they were separated by immigration. Rubi and I had started to become distant since moving to the Midwest for school, even though we had been through so much. Perhaps I occupied the first scenario: “I am possible of loving her more in the future.”
“How did you propose, sir?”
“She actually was the one who proposed to me.”
What if I told her I loved this woman in particular, but I also spent many nights dreaming of a man? A no-name man who didn’t do much in my dreams except sit by himself at a diner, eating a big piece of American apple pie? What would she do with our desires? I imagine a line in her notebook, and a box, and a checkmark, and a long pause followed by some notes in the margins. And it was true, Rubi and I had begun to distance ourselves from each other ever since I came to terms with my sexuality. I told her I was bi that same summer, and she didn’t take it as well as I thought she would. I told her nothing would change between us because of this revelation, but perhaps that’s what bothered her most, that nothing would change.
What if my answer was the opposite of growth? What if I said: “I love her to death now, but I know I will no longer love her in the years to come, not out of choice but out of gradual neglect,” what would happen then? I couldn’t possibly expect them to believe that love was a constant, that once you had it you had all of it forever, that it was like an object you could hold and call yours.
“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“We never went on one, we couldn’t afford it.”
They wanted definite answers to the indefinite, beyond simply is your marriage real. They wanted the specific outline of love. Undoubtedly, between ours and the thousands of other interviews, happening in rooms just like that one, across the country with countless other dark-haired Obamas soon to be peppered with worry and compromise looking down, they must have believed that their data pointed to a collective consensus. Love equals [blank].
*
Of course our marriage was real, but she wanted to know if I married Rubi for the right reasons. And did I? In that moment, it was, if ever so briefly, that woman’s job to determine what love was and compare her definition to what she saw sitting before her.
Did I look like I was in love? Did I carry my body like that of someone who dreamed of another? Was there something in the way I said “yes,” or “no,” or even “please?” I could always tell when someone was in love; I could see it in their eyes.
She asked us questions about our bodies and things that came in contact with our bodies.
“Are there any distinctive moles or birthmarks on your wife?”
“What color is her toothbrush?”
“What side of the bed does she sleep on?”
“Is your husband left- or right-handed?”
She wanted to know if we had moved beyond being simply intimate and into the world of the mundane. Had we moved passed the moments of mere sexual excitement and into the more repetitive spaces of domestic life? But there was not enough time to explain the intimacy of silence, of our own secret language, so many years in the making. I doubted she would even understand.
I wasn’t certain if I knew Rubi’s body the way the law wanted me to. Had I ever spent my nights looking at the shapes of her birthmarks, wondering what they resembled? Was I supposed to look at her the way some people looked at the sky and made animals out of the clouds?
“Yes, she has a birthmark on her back that kind of looks like the state of Texas,” I answered rather abruptly.
Texas?
I hardly even knew my own body. We held each other at night not to count or measure each other but because we knew that we didn’t have to. We didn’t have to guess the shapes of our irregularities—our inadequacies. The world outside our bed was one that asked us questions that demanded answers—answers that had definite beginnings and endings, definite shapes. Inside, we could ask and ask and never feel compelled to answer if we didn’t want to. We could spend the entire day in bed, naked, asking each other questions that would only be answered by other questions.
Inside, it was a world of feeling our way through each other in the dark. How could I tell our interviewer what I felt and saw in the hazy darkness of our room? How could I tell her what Rubi said at two in the morning as we both climaxed inside each other? I couldn’t remember which side of the bed Rubi slept on. We didn’t really pick sides.
*
How much could we possibly know about another person? I was certain that the amount of ourselves that we allowed others to see was minuscule compared to what else was there. Sometimes our secrecy is unintentional. Even six years after being together, one day Rubi discovered that I had a crown in my left molar. Shocked, she grabbed my face with both palms close to hers, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Has that always been there?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at her, confused.
“You’re lying!”
“No, I’ve had it since I was little.”
Had I never opened my mouth that wide for her that it took nearly a decade to see inside completely? I used to enjoy asking Rubi, “How many times do you think we’ve kissed? A thousand, ten thousand, a million?” My mouth was always so close to hers, and still she had never seen my crown’s glint in the sun, even when I yawned. I wondered how many parts of her body I had yet to know.
*
We were under oath. We had raised our right hand and sworn to tell the complete truth. There was so much more I wanted to tell the interviewer, as if I was confessing my sins to a priest. Maybe telling her that I was afraid of clowns would ease my fear. In a way, it felt good to have someone give me their complete attention; her entire body was focused on every word that formed on my lips. But I didn’t say more than what was asked, and my answers were short. I pointed at pictures of ourselves that were laid out on her table and recounted the moments when we were happy over the years.
It was strange to think that somewhere in a federal warehouse were pictures of my mother, my brothers, my senior prom, field trips in high school, graduation day, my wedding day, and mine and Rubi’s first apartment together, among so many others. There were even ones in which I was doing absolutely nothing. It was those in which I was most mundane, most myself. It gave me a small joy to think of my monotony as a subject of interest, archived inside a box with a Dewey number, never to be opened. It reassured me that perhaps something of mine would survive this world after all. I was hoping that between the pictures and the documents submitted, I wouldn’t need to choose what parts of myself to tell. But as personal as that information was, it wasn’t the full picture. The intimacy of sharing those pictures did not escape me. Would the agent remember them on her drive back home that day? Would they remind her of her own marriage, or her own children?
“What would you do if granted the green card?”
“Nothing different, ma’am.”
“I see,” she said, and jotted some more notes on her paper.
Nobody could remember where we got the cameras. Amá, wearing bright red lipstick with her bangs puffed high in that early ’90s trend, stood next to Apá for the picture. His face was stern and stoic, with his shirt unbuttoned down to his large potbelly.
In the picture, Amá still looked slightly happy, even though moments before, Danny was crying and Apá was yelling at him to stop, which made him cry louder. The only way Amá had permission to make herself pretty in a picture was if Apá was in it. The other time was if she went to church. Amá became a very religious person.
We went to a church where the pastor told us our poverty was all part of God’s plan. “Believe,” he said every Sunday, “believe that God is great and will recompense you tenfold.” My mother fainted in the presence of the Holy Spirit every Sunday, and then she got up as if nothing ever happened, as if from one moment to the next the Holy Spirit was no longer in her—moved on to the next believer. I fainted too sometimes, but she hit me on the head and said, “That’s not funny.”
I practiced fainting in the backyard so she wouldn’t hit me at church anymore, so I could be more convincing, and people would believe I too was capable of being emptied by the very hand of God.
In preparation for the interview, I had to purge all of my social media accounts. I attempted to erase any trace of myself from the Internet so as to not let anything I had said be found. I was worried they would see something about me they wouldn’t like. Would this country want another poet? I regretted having published so young on the Internet. I hoped they wouldn’t conduct a background check, looking for some reason to deny me. There was nothing there to find, I had never committed a crime, but I was worried something would magically come up out of thin air. English was the language of misinterpretation.
Midway through the interview, the woman said, “I’ll be right back,” and returned after a tense ten minutes with my personal folder beneath her arm. I was sure they were looking for something.
“We just had some things to clarify and sort out with my boss. It says here you left the country and returned with advanced parole through DACA recently. How was your trip?” she said as she folded her arms and placed them on her desk.
“It was fine. I needed to go see my dad.”
“How long had it been since you’d seen your dad?”
“About ten years.”
“And why was he there so long?”
“Because he was deported.”
“Oh.”
She said the last “Oh,” as if she was surprised that that was what happened when people got deported, that ten years actually meant ten years. It was one thing for her to see it on paper, and another to see it in person. I was that person, I was the product of one of those removal proceedings she might make again before her lunch without thinking twice.
It suddenly became clear that in all of the pictures we presented to validate our marriage case, still laid out on her table, my father was missing. Maybe I’d said too much.
“Well, Mr. Hernandez, I think that’s it. I’m usually not supposed to say this to people, but I think you passed. It won’t be final until you receive an official letter in the mail, but I’m confident you’ll get that shortly. In the meantime, I suggest you take your wife on that honeymoon you owe her.” She smiled as she said this, and I tried not to make my affectation too obvious.
She shook our hands with a firm grasp, smiled, and kept nodding her head. That was it. There was no applause, no musical accompaniment, and none of us would go home to watch reruns of ourselves late at night. We followed the rules, we passed the questions back and forth between each other. We got up to leave, but before we did, she said, “Welcome to America,” as if I hadn’t already been here for twenty-two years. I feared she could take back her decision at any moment so I kindly smiled, said thank you, and quickly walked away.
Sometimes, when I had no business being nervous, even when everything in my life was calm and going well, I would still get this feeling of being sunken into the earth. Of walking through a deep sludge of mud. Thick mud. Dark mud. The kind of mud that exists where there is no water but no one questions where it comes from. I wanted the deepest roots of me uplifted. But there was another side to this feeling—it was sometimes good to know that I was at least holding on to something. That at least it was difficult for me to fall, even if I was going nowhere. That it was hard for me to burn.
After the interview, I wanted to go home and make love to Rubi and apologize for nothing in particular, just say “I’m sorry” over and over again and kiss her on her forehead and trace all of her birthmarks with my finger.
Do other people who also undergo this interview think of this country as belonging to them? In effect, all the green card meant was “You can stay,” not “It is yours to keep.” I still saw it as temporary, something that could be taken away for even minor violations of the law. Besides, before even considering accepting the U.S. as my country, I had debts to settle with myself, the landscape, and its people. There would always be parts of me that would want nothing to do with this country and what it has done to many of its people.
For a moment, I understood my father a little better and his desire to distance himself from anything “American.” More so than me, he came of age in the U.S. as a young farm worker actually hearing people say with disgust to him, “You cannot stay,” “This is not yours to keep,” instead of it being implied. So instead of being rejected, he rejected America first. Perhaps we had become too American for him. Maybe it wasn’t us he didn’t approve of, but what the U.S. had done to us. I could hardly keep up a conversation with him anymore. I felt his anger well up inside me, and I knew it was his anger and not mine because it came from an older part of me, a deeper part of my gut that had been hurt far longer than I had been alive.
Getting the green card and all of the benefits that came with it seemed like such a simple thing to ask for such a large price. All I was asking for was peace of mind, for protection, for basic human rights. And in return, for the duration of the interview at least, I was supposed to speak and look patriotic. I was supposed to show or prove an attempt at assimilation; that I aligned myself with undeniable American values—“values” that ensured the continuation of a system historically aligned against me. I had to align myself with a history of denial toward the violence committed on entire generations of people.
Perhaps to some, this was hardly a price at all. From their perspective, it was the other way around, how little I needed to give and how much was given in return. All I had to do was show a little love for a country that had given me so much, and in return I would be granted entrance into the greatest country on earth. Be grateful. Maybe it was my father’s voice in my head, which sounded more and more like my voice, telling me about everything that this country had done to us that made the price of the green card heavy. I already had to erase much of myself, trying to survive; how much more was needed?
*
I should have been happy. Didn’t I have something to be grateful for? Wasn’t that so generous of them? The interviewer’s final words rang inside me like the low baritone of a large bell, Welcome to America. Her message reminded me that there were people who actually believed I was not really here. That I was a ghost wandering through the corners of their eyes, easily dismissed as nothing more than fog.
She announced that I was finally here, in the flesh, whole, as if somehow before that moment there had been something essential missing in me, as if I was flawed before my interview and had been corrected by her generosity to grant me permanent residency status. Welcome [read]: you now have a name, [read]: come out now. Be grateful.
“How do you feel?” asked Rubi, holding her phone up to me to record as we exited the clean granite-and-limestone building.
“I don’t feel any different. Actually I feel worse,” I confessed.
This was supposed to be the end of a very long journey—a culmination of events all pointed at this moment. Our lawyer shook our hands and congratulated us. I could tell he was genuinely happy because his firm had been working with our family for decades. He had known me since I was little, when he was handling other family member’s cases. His work would never end. Perhaps his generations after him would continue to become attorneys assisting my future generations in the same thing we were doing.
There were people entering the building as we left, all of them with a stack of papers in a folder beneath their arms, most likely going for their own interviews. They looked dressed for a special occasion, like a wedding or a christening. I wondered if they thought the same things I was thinking early that morning. “Which shirt says ‘I want to be an American’?” There was hope in their eyes as well as fear.
No, there was nothing missing about them, there was nothing flawed. I could see them as well as I could see myself. There was nothing I had to be grateful about. What if I asked them questions? What if I asked if they were in love? “Who are you wearing? When did you know you were famous? Does your lover have a birthmark the shape of Texas?”
I entered that building the same way that I left it. I didn’t want to make of this another border in my life. I was tired of dividing things in two. I wanted there to be a name for what I was doing that had nothing to do with papers, that had nothing to do with legality, that had nothing to do with anything larger than me. No, it had to be small, smaller than me, something I could carry. Maybe something that didn’t even have a name, but just a sound. If I could call forth a sound that would embody what it was that I was doing, it would be low, an utterance not unlike the low moan an elephant makes that is carried just beneath the soil for miles. There should be a name for the time it took to exit that building; for the swiftness with which Rubi put down her phone and kissed me.
We celebrated our new “entrance” into American life by going to a Mexican restaurant in midtown, which boasted a dazzling array of shiny hats hanging on the walls and murals of rural Mexican country life. We liked the irony. Chips and salsa were brought to us in a little plate shaped like a pig with its back hollowed out for the salsa. The fact that I was a permanent resident, the tall walls, the bright colors, and the cold AC blasting down on us gave me the sensation of falling.
“What’s going through your head?” Rubi asked.
“I don’t know, I’m just irritated.”
I didn’t know what to believe anymore. I still wanted to believe that the paperwork and the process were all artificial, that they were just numbers on a piece of paper made to make me believe that they mattered, made to make me desire them.
In the years before my interview, to pacify my anger, I tried to convince myself that having papers didn’t matter because legal documentation was a social construct. And as a child, before I had that language, I said I was a perfect boy without them. By the time I was in college, I knew they were created by artificial laws founded on a history that was designed to beat us every time. I took what little comfort I could from telling myself that I wasn’t going to give any more power to the systems that had gripped us by our throats for most of our lives.
At one point I felt the same way about the border, that it was just an artificial line drawn over a landscape that in turn was indifferent about its presence. That because we conceived it, that because it began as an idea, it was doomed to be returned by the landscape as nothing more than an idea if not for our constant upkeep—Ashes to ashes . . . The ecclesiastical meaninglessness of it all etc., etc., etc.
But the reality was that people lived there on the border. They made their lives and memories from such artifice, which meant it was hardly an artifice at all.
I could no longer pretend that they were just numbers scribbled down on a piece of paper. I always knew they weren’t. They were as real as my hand, as real as my teeth; their consequences had a weight and shape to them. If I sharpened the edges of my green card when it came in the mail, I could cut myself open.
How little I deserved any of it, I thought, as I dipped a chip into the bright red salsa inside the little pig. The salsa looked too bright, a color not natural in peppers, as if they’d added food coloring. But surprisingly it tasted good. Welcome to America. Be grateful.
*
How many others deserved my green card more than me? I had waited so long for the day of my interview, but after it was over, I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t want to face my family with the news. Why couldn’t I be happy for myself for once? What about me inherently negated joy at every point in my life? My joy was always elusive. It crumbled in my hands as soon as I held it. My problem was that I thought joy was something that was supposed to be given to me, or at least something that I was supposed to find, instead of making it myself.
That was my immigrant condition. I didn’t know how to stand in one place without moving. I was suspect of any good that ever came my way and always turned it away. Nothing good ever happened for no reason.
“It isn’t fair,” I said to Rubi.
“What isn’t fair?” she said as she looked up from her menu.
“How am I going to look at my mom?”
“What do you mean? She’s going to be happy. You should call her.”
I dipped another chip into the little pig. I didn’t realize that I hadn’t eaten all day, and before long, I finished all the chips and bright fluorescent salsa. What would I say to my mother? I was ashamed that I had been given something she had wanted for longer than I was alive. It felt like I had stolen it from her, it felt like I had stolen it from so many other people who deserved it more than me. If only it was like a seed and I could plant it and grow more. I would take my mother’s picture, bury it, and out would sprout her own card. I would hand out the secret like religious pamphlets at street corners.
I left the table to call Amá.
Amá sounded eager to talk on the phone. What mother wouldn’t want this for her son?
“Everything went well, Amá. They said I passed.”
“Thank God, mijo. Thank God. What else did they say?
“Nothing really, they just asked Rubi a lot of questions, but it went well.”
Toward the end, her voice was cracking as if I had disturbed her prayer, as if she had never stopped praying, even though she must have known it was over by then, and was only waiting for my signal to cut her tie with God.
*
I had an international calling card in my wallet to call my dad back in Mexico because I knew he would want to know too. I always carried one just in case. Two dollars gave me fifteen minutes. I dialed the ten numbers on the card, then the ten numbers from the PIN that I scratched off like a lotto ticket, then the international code for Mexico (0–11–52), and finally the actual ten-digit number I needed to reach. It was a small miracle when the call finally went through, and even more of a miracle if the line didn’t cut off while it rang, and more so if Apá actually answered.
“Hi Apá, I had my interview today, did you remember?”
“Yes, of course I remembered, how did it go?”
“Everything went well, I think.”
“That’s great, mijo. I’m happy for you.”
We didn’t talk for long. After a few awkward silences and asking how things were over there, and him asking how things were over here, and both of us saying the same thing to each other, I hung up. Leaving was always easy; hanging up took less than a second, and just like that, I was back in the restaurant, dipping more chips into the little pig, which they replaced with another one with green salsa.
Maybe if it took just as long to hang up, having to repeat the same process of dialing but in reverse, perhaps I would stay and talk for longer, maybe then I would be a different son.
“What did your dad say?” asked Rubi.
“Not much, just that he was happy.”
I didn’t want to sound excited over the phone because I didn’t want to come across as if I was rubbing salt on an already infected wound. So instead I decided to keep it short and cold, which was not a difficult thing to do with my father, but it hurt to do so with Amá.
*
I wasn’t sure if Amá and Apá would have passed if they took the same test. I didn’t know if Amá ever really loved Apá, even in the beginning. Maybe they had a secret language of affection between the two of them that was hidden from everyone else. Perhaps leaving was his best way of caring for us and showing his love for us. I had never seen them be affectionate toward each other—never seen them kiss, no sly side-winks, no cute nicknames, nor had I even seen them hug each other for long. The closest I could remember seeing them was when they would get together for a picture, and even then Apá would always look mad, gripping Amá’s shoulder tightly and letting go as soon as the picture was taken.
I, on the other hand, was always tragically, hopelessly in love with too many people growing up. I wasn’t sure if I only liked girls, I didn’t know what to call what I felt. I knew what love was, but I didn’t know how to direct it. Maybe Amá and Apá didn’t yet know they loved each other, even after so many years, just like I thought I knew what love was but didn’t know how to love yet. When I was a child, when Apá was still present, I wanted some kind of confirmation that love was possible outside of the movies I watched and the Harlequin books I was too young to be reading. I watched Amá and Apá love each other in their mysterious ways, but I wanted to see proof of more. Maybe love had nothing to do with it.
*
After finishing our meal and all the salsa we could eat, we took the back roads home. Every few seconds, I looked down to check how fast I was going. It was a habit I picked up after years of driving without a license and which was heightened after the county jail, Yuba County, began cooperating with ICE by handing over inmates they suspected to be undocumented. A third of the inmate population in the county jail were ICE detainees awaiting trial. A simple traffic stop had suddenly turned into potential grounds for a deportation. The cautious habit never went away.
Sometimes I would spend more time obsessing over how fast I was going than paying attention to the road ahead. On a few occasions I almost crashed while going exactly somewhere between sixty-five and sixty-nine miles per hour on the freeway. That was a good range. I liked that range because it didn’t look suspicious. That range told a story: it sent the message that I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry but that I had nothing to hide. It didn’t draw any suspicion toward me. Anything less would have been too slow and made it seem like I especially didn’t want to be pulled over. Going exactly sixty-five was too obvious, it was obsessive. Anything above seventy was too fast and started to get dangerous. Any cop on a bad day could technically call that speeding.
So I drove home trying to go in that sweet range. It made it difficult to concentrate on anything else, especially to follow conversations. Rubi scolded me for not paying attention to her, but I screamed and pointed at the speedometer and exclaimed that I was trying to concentrate. I apologized, and we stayed mostly quiet all the way home.
*
How many of these antics would soon loosen their grip on me as I became more comfortable, as I gradually eased into my position as a person with papers? A ticket could now be just a ticket, I didn’t have to think of it as a deportation, but somehow it wasn’t as easy as that. I knew the voice would still be in my head, telling me ICE could return for me at any minute, and the cameras would always be on, giving me the feeling that I was always being watched. The feeling of surveillance, I feared, would never go away.
What behaviors would be lost, and which ones would I keep? Would the fear nestled in every joint of my body finally be massaged away, so I could let go of the tension that I had been holding for so many years?
I had modified my behavior for so much of my life that I knew I would have to work hard to undo some of those habits, like staring down at how fast I was going, like staying quiet even when I should be screaming. Some of those behaviors could take years to undo, and others might have been irreversible. Being undocumented said nothing about me or my identity, but it did inform a lot of my behavior. There were things about me that became automatic, that over the years I came to do without thinking. I would have to pull myself back and adjust. I had to recalibrate—to enter the world as someone who was there, someone who was present. I finally had the liberty to do things as minor as saying my name out loud, and still at times I kept silent.
Maybe I wasn’t as present as I thought; maybe my interviewer was right when she said “Welcome to America.”
Laugh now. Laugh hard. Spit out your food.
For years, to rid myself of anxiety, I got into the habit of asking myself questions in the second person in my journal. And I always answered as if having an actual conversation with myself. It was good to articulate and vocalize what was bothering me because it would fester if it just spun in circles in my head. I had been doing this long before my immigration interview. It was also a way to trick myself into saying something I might otherwise have not.
“Marcelo, are you tired?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you tired?”
“I don’t know, I just am, okay.”
“Okay. Is there something bothering you, Marcelo?”
“Kind of . . .”
“Can you tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so, shoot.”
“The other day, you were there, remember, I said something out loud in class that I regret saying.”
I wrote to myself day after day. I interviewed myself as if I was someone famous.
“So, tell me, who are you excited about these days?”
“Oh, you know, the usual suspects.”
“I don’t!”
“Well . . .”
“You don’t say!”
It was a form of confession, and although I am not a Catholic, I believed in confession, in repeating the same prayer to dislodge whatever it was that was trapped inside me. I never went to church, but I wanted to confess to my friends all of the terrible things I had done to see if anyone would still love me.
But I was a coward. Instead, I interviewed myself and made fake Twitter accounts to anonymously declare what I was too afraid to tell anyone. It was a form of talking to myself, like a confession box. No one was listening, but that wasn’t the point. My Twitter handle got followed by bots and shirt companies. They didn’t care what I did. They just wanted to sell me things made in countries I had never been to by people in sweatshops who looked like me. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find anyone I could tell everything about me.
Once, I tweeted to my actual account “I’m a terrible person,” but people thought it was a joke. They replied with emoji faces that kissed or winked. I deleted the tweet and posted the same thing to my fake accounts and got ads for coupons, which I ended up using.
I never told anyone about these conversations, but one day, when I was teaching undergrads, out of some wild obsession to confess in front of people, to prove some point I can no longer remember, I told my students about my self-interviews, and they didn’t believe me until I took out my laptop, connected it to the projector, and showed them. “Oh,” one of them said, and the rest stayed quiet for the remainder of the class. We never mentioned it again.
I was just tired of keeping things inside for so long that I wasn’t sure if I could keep them in me any longer. But still, there was no one I could trust enough to give all of myself completely. There were still things I couldn’t say even to Rubi. Would there ever be, in my lifetime, a point in which I could say absolutely everything about myself with complete abandon, without fear of judgment or repercussions? I was always afraid I would say too much, but part of me drank with other people because I knew that was the only way to say anything significant about me.
*
I kept asking myself more questions in my journals day after day as I waited for my green card to arrive in the mail. “You look nervous, why are you nervous”? I waited by the mailbox every day for weeks, just in case it might arrive early. I didn’t have much time because summer would be over soon, and I would have to fly back to Michigan for the start of the semester. On the day it was scheduled to arrive, there was construction on the road near my mother’s mailbox, so the mail carrier decided not to deliver mail that day. It was as simple as that—there were a few cones on a Friday from a utility truck, and the mail carrier decided not to bother with maneuvering around them. The card was sent back to a main office in Texas and destroyed. It was their policy; maybe they didn’t want any good cards floating around out there and risk being forged. They would have to make a new one, and I would have to fill out more forms explaining why.
After screaming at a post office employee who quickly told me I had to leave, or they would call the police, I sat in my car for what seemed like hours. I would have never screamed at a federal employee before. That was something new. I started the engine and drove away, going faster and faster down the road. I didn’t care about going sixty-seven. I wanted to run a red light, to blow a stop sign, to swerve through the lanes as if something was chasing me. Maybe something was chasing me, but I didn’t care if it found me anymore. Maybe the card should have gone to someone else indeed. Someone with kids to feed, someone whose parents were dying back home, and with it they could finally go see them. Her toothbrush is red, I love her now.
I revved the engine faster.
Waiting for my second green card to arrive, I had more of an urge to expose all of my secrets even if no one was asking, even if no one was around to listen: “I still wet the bed occasionally when it is cold, I don’t always brush my teeth, I am jealous of so many people who have their first book published before me.” It was a long summer. It almost made sense to be that sad. If I were my father, I would have sold my sadness for two dollars. I thought about my new friends back in grad school and wanted to paint their portraits from my memory of the day I told them I was undocumented. I wished that I had been raised Catholic so that I at least could go to church and do the real thing; confession. What I wanted most was to tell somebody, anybody, anything.
I wrote more interviews in my journals and covered certain words up with Barbie stickers that I bought at a Dollar General. It occurred to me, sitting in my car in the parking lot of that same Dollar General, in search of cheap balloons for a party which I did not care about, that I was allowed to be sad, the bad kind of sad, not the hot kind, or the glamorous kind, but the kind that makes people want to call for help or turn away. I picked out the brightest balloons, paid, and mouthed the words “happy birthday to you” in a dark room lit by everyone’s phone cameras.
I entered all of my emails from five years into a cloud engine and the most used word was “okay.” I spent many nights obsessing over the placement of the furniture. If I could, I would have given away my boredom, I would have given away my obligations, my desires. I would have given away the night I danced, and danced, and danced at a child’s birthday party, drunk and by myself, pretending I was happy.
*
My time in California was up. I had to return to the Midwest, back to school for the fall, and the card would take months to resend. Still, my mother waited by the mailbox just as I did, just as if the card was for her. Every day she shuffled hurriedly with her slippers scraping the cement to see what had come. When it finally came, she asked if she could open it. “Yes, Amá, of course,” I said over the phone. They shipped it to me, and I tracked it carefully on my bright computer screen, anxiously waiting for the next update—L.A., Phoenix, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit.
They wrapped it inside the pages of George Orwell’s 1984—it was one of the only books left in my room back home, the only one I didn’t bother bringing with me to grad school. I held the package tightly beneath my arm as I walked down the street. No one knew why I was smiling, but they did what good strangers would do, they smiled back. Maybe there were no cameras. I wasted so much of my life for nothing.