Author Is a ‘Woman Without a Country’ : Margaret Randall Relinquished U.S. Citizenship 18 Years Ago and Is Now Suing to Regain It

It was very much the Beat Era, and Margaret Randall, as she looks back now, was very much a child of her generation.

Beatniks, it will be remembered, were those avant-garde humans, those proudly unself-conscious noncomformists, who preceded hippies. Hippies made a point of disdaining law and conventional order. Beatniks merely ignored such trivialities.

Papers, for example. Official documents, pieces of paper with large, imposing-sounding words, convoluted pronouncements with many heretofores and henceforths .

Papers. “We just didn’t think much about papers,” Randall said. Beatniks operated with a “strange naivete,” she said, “a kind of rejection of things backed by papers.”

It was in that same oblivious-to-anything-official spirit that Randall, then 31, said she relinquished her American citizenship and became a citizen of Mexico. Now, 18 years later, Randall is seeking to reclaim, if not her actual U.S. citizenship, then at least the right to remain in this country permanently.

The government feels Randall should be denied those privileges, and has, in fact, ordered Randall deported. “She has failed to show that she is clearly and beyond a reasonable doubt entitled to the benefits for which she has applied,” A. H. Guigni, the assistant district director of immigration and naturalization in El Paso, where Randall’s petition for permanent residency was considered, wrote in rejecting Randall’s request. In taking that position, Guigni was exercising what is known as discretionary authority. Said Guigni: Randall’s “activities for the last 20 years” and her 40 books “go far beyond mere dissent, disagreement with or criticism of the United States or its policies.”

Opposed to Administration

To which Randall replies: “I know that many of the opinions expressed in my books are diametrically opposed to the opinions of the Reagan Administration. I was under the impression that one could hold differing opinions in this country.”

Now married to an American poet, Floyce Alexander, Randall is living in New Mexico and teaching women’s and American studies at the University of New Mexico. She adds: “I think there are a lot of things involved. I think they are punishing me for giving up my citizenship--and I think it is because I am a feminist. I can’t help but think that, that they hate us.”

“The reason she has a problem is that she voluntarily relinquished her citizenship,” Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Duke Austin said from his office in Washington. “The thing people have a hard time understanding is that nobody took her citizenship away from her. She gave it up.”

And “once you give that citizenship up,” Austin said, “it’s not something you can regain willy-nilly.”

Filed Suit

Still, some of Randall’s students and colleagues have joined with the PEN American Center as well as writers Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Alice Walker, Grace Paley, William Styron and Kurt Vonnegut, in filing a suit in Randall’s behalf against Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and INS official Guigni and Commissioner Allen C. Nelson. The plaintiffs contend their constitutional right to associate with and exchange information with Randall has been violated by the INS’ refusal to grant Randall permanent residency in the United States.

Brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights here, the suit further suggests the denial of Randall’s permanent residency request is “part of a larger policy and practice, by which the defendants have improperly used their authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to shape and limit political debate within the United States.”

“For Margaret,” center attorney David Cole said, “the INS action is punishment, but I see it as a sort of blind ideological action.”

A native New Yorker, Randall moved with her family to the Southwest in 1946 when she was 10. At 21, Randall, then “very much a beatnik,” was ready to strike out on her own. She headed to New York, determined to be a writer.

Like virtually all such aspiring scribes, Randall worked odd jobs--in the garment district, as a waitress and so forth. On her own time, Randall was “doing poetry.” About that time, “I began to take myself seriously as a writer.”

In 1960, the unmarried Randall gave birth to a son, Gregory. “It was very difficult,” Randall remembered. “There was no support system, no day care.”

Randall began thinking there must be an easier way. For some reason, she decided Mexico was the answer. “I felt somehow Mexico would be an easier place. I thought it took less to live there,” she said. “It was probably a romantic idea, but it was partly the truth.” Randall packed up 10-month-old Gregory and headed south of the border.

Soon thereafter, romance crept into Randall’s ideal. Quite shortly after she arrived in Mexico, Randall met, fell in love with and married Sergio Mondragon, a Mexican poet.

Together they founded a bilingual literary quarterly, El Corno Emplumado, or The Plumed Horn. In its eight years of publication, “it became quite an institution,” Randall said.

Strong Primal Need

By 1966, Randall not only had two more children, but also a husband who was “very interested in mysticism.” Mondragon, his ex-wife said, “began to meditate more than he was working.”

In response, Randall “felt this strong primal need that I guess a mother feels to keep her family together, and to keep her children fed.” But Randall said she ran into trouble finding work. Friends and prospective employers advised her, she said, that it would be easier to find jobs if she were a Mexican citizen.

So Randall engaged a Mexican lawyer and became a Mexican citizen. Although that action involved a trip to the American Embassy and a sworn statement to the effect that she was voluntarily surrendering her American citizenship, it was, she fiercely asserts now, “absolutely not an act of renouncing my American citizenship.” Far from a political action, “it was economically motivated,” Randall said.

While attorney Cole points out that courts and, for that matter, even the INS, “don’t recognize any distinction between relinquishing and renouncing” one’s citizenship, Randall’s detractors insist her action fell under the latter description, not the former. In Washington, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) has sided with the INS in its denial of Randall’s residency application.

“Renunciation of citizenship is a severe act,” the senator wrote in a letter regarding the Randall matter to University of New Mexico president Tom J. Farer. “It emphasizes a political renunication of the rights and duties associated with citizenship in the United States.”

“A renunciation of citizenship is a political act,” a Domenici aide elaborated. “It’s more severe than just normally relinquishing American citizenship.”

Nonetheless, Randall insists the action was entirely apolitical. “Politically,” she said, “it was an ignorant decision. I didn’t ponder the consequences.”

Besides, attorney Cole points out, “This is a woman who has written 40 books, many of them very political. She never mentions her citizenship issue. My sense is that if Margaret Randall had relinquished her citizenship as a political act, she would have written about it.”

A year and a half after she became a Mexican citizen, Randall realized she had made a mistake. Through “administrative recourse,” Randall endeavored to reclaim her American citizenship.

“I was turned down,” she said. “They don’t tell you why.” Randall did not push it. “I didn’t feel at that point that I could try any harder.”

Randall and Mondragon separated in 1968, just about the time that Randall “became very interested” in the women’s movement in the United States. The following year, Randall did “a small book” in Mexico about that movement in the United States. Intrigued with women’s growing drive for power, autonomy and equal rights, Randall said she found herself “very interested in seeing what a socialist revolution would mean for women.” In 1969, Randall headed for Cuba.

“In Cuba,” she said, “the first thing I did was to get a job in a publishing house.” In short order she presented the idea of doing a book about women in Cuba. It was accepted, “and for the next two years, I traveled around the country, doing interviews with women.”

Published in English

Later, Randall’s book was published in English under the title of “Cuban Women Now.” The book, she said, “has become something of a sort of classic.”

Domenici’s office, however, tells a somewhat different version. Domenici’s letter to Farer describes Randall as having “fled to Cuba in 1969.” Specifically, Domenici’s aide alleges that “she was involved with the revolutionary movement that culminated in the riots of Mexico City that surrounded the Olympics in 1968.”

“By all accounts,” the spokesman said, “the Mexican government was not too pleased with Ms. Randall’s actions.”

But Randall responds that this account of her activities is highly revisionist. True, she said, “I supported the students in 1968, as almost any justice- or fair-minded person in Mexico City did,” but, she insists, “I was not involved in the movement in any kind of leadership capacity.

“My sympathies were there,” Randall said, “but I was involved in supporting it (only) in word.”

As to her departure from Mexico, Randall stresses: “I left Mexico absolutely voluntarily.”

Randall went on to do other books about Cuba. One book concerned a farmer who wrote peasant theater in verse form, “one of the few books I have done about men,” Randall said. Another book dealt again with the lives of Cuban women.

Indeed, Randall’s next 10 years saw her involved in “many, many projects involving feminist issues”--for example, studies of women in Peru, Chile, Venezuela and Vietnam. As a result of this work, she said, many people regard her as the “pioneer student of women in the world.”

But Domenici, for one, charges that Randall’s activities have extended beyond the feminist sphere. “Ms. Randall made a career of writing and speaking against this country and four of its Presidents of both parties,” Domenici wrote. The senator writes that he is “particularly bothered” by reports that during a trip to North Vietnam, Randall accepted and wore a ring made from the wreckage of a downed American plane.

Randall makes no secret about having worn the ring, a gift, she said, from a North Vietnamese peasant woman who had lost her entire family. “Hundreds of thousands” of such rings were worn by Americans as a symbol of opposition to the war in Vietnam, Randall said.

After Cuba, at the invitation of “my old friend, Ernesto Cardinal, a priest and one of Latin America’s finest political leaders,” Randall moved to Nicaragua in 1979. When the Sandinistas came to power, Cardinal became Nicaragua’s minister of culture. An early project he suggested was for Randall to write a book about women in Nicaragua.

After an extended visit to Nicaragua in 1979, Randall moved there in 1980. One book she did there concerned single Nicaraguan women, another focused on the women of Nicaragua in general and a third was a series of conversations with Nicaraguan writers.

But increasingly, Randall said, she found herself itching to return to the United States. Often during those years Randall would enter this country on a visitor’s visa, making speaking tours, reading her poetry and visiting her parents. In January, 1984, when Randall entered the United States, “I was sure I wanted to stay.”

Randall’s family was euphoric, she said. “My father is 80 years old. He immediately built me a little house on the corner of their lot.”

Just at that time, “I had also begun to have a relationship with a man I had known for 18 years.” Randall and Floyce Alexander were married early the following year.

In March, 1984, Randall had applied for permanent residency--the proverbial green card--on the assumption that she could apply for citizenship after three years of residency. Normally, Randall said, the residency application takes from 60 to 90 days. “Seventeen months after I applied for residency, they denied it.” The INS gave Randall 28 days to leave the country.

Guigni’s seven-page denial cited provisions of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a bill that permits the exclusion of persons from the United States on the basis of political views. But while stating that Randall would be eligible for exclusion under those terms in the McCarran-Walter Act, the INS chose not to exclude her for that reason. Instead, the INS discretionary decision dwelt on Randall’s writings. “Her books advocate the doctrines of communism and support the communist governments of Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua from 1966 to 1981,” the INS declared. “There are constant references to the United States as ‘the enemy’ in her books.”

In addition, the ruling referred to praise Randall offered for a speech by Cuban president Fidel Castro. “Fidel was right-on as always,” Randall wrote. “We felt the passion, and it released, to some extent, the anger in us all.”

Randall’s appeal and the CCR lawsuit take the position that it is unconstitutional “to exclude someone from this country simply because that person’s views are not consistent with the views of the administration.”

Challenging the Action

Further, said Cole, the Center for Constitutional Rights attorney, “we’re challenging the district director’s action on the ground that the First Amendment does not permit local, administrative officials to look into someone’s writing and decide whether she can stay in the country.

At the INS, spokesman Duke Austin offered this admonishment: “Remember this, had Margaret Randall not given up her citizenship, she could go about the United States saying anything she would like. But at this time she is not a citizen of the United States.”

Cole, however, rejoins that “the Supreme Court says the First Amendment protects all persons living in this country. It doesn’t make a distinction between citizens and aliens.”

While not actually demanding that the INS grant citizenship to Randall, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N. M.) did write a letter to the INS stating that “it appears that the INS has decided to exclude Margaret Randall solely on the basis of her beliefs. If this is the case, the INS decision is not in keeping with the fundamental notions of freedom on which this nation rests.”

As for her alleged controversial political leanings, Randall laughs wryly and points out: “The only party I have been a member of is the Democratic Party. I voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960.”

Randall’s appeal to the INS is scheduled for March 17. As for the lawsuit, David Cole expects it to be heard sometime in April. In the meantime, Randall said she is teaching and continuing to write. Her next book, a 450-page collection of essays in photos and print, is called “Albuquerque: Coming Home to the U.S.A.” It will be published in April.