‘90s FAMILY : Trading In Ties to the Past for a Citizen’s Voice

We were sitting around the dinner table, pushing great savory chunks of cochinita pibil onto our forks with corn tortillas, when Marlene remarked offhandedly that she was studying hard.

All those Presidents, she sighed in Spanish. How a bill becomes law. The names of our California senators.

Wow, that’s right, said my sister-in-law Angelica. When’s the big day, Mami ?

Nov. 9, she replied, her eyes glancing away from ours to take in the plush drapes, the expansive sofa, the Augustin Lara CD crooning about unrequited love on the fancy stereo--all the trappings of a middle-class American life.

My mother-in-law was about to become a United States citizen.

It’s funny, but I always pictured my gracious mother-in-law as more Mexican than American. She maintained an elegant, slightly reserved manner, even as she presided over lavish back-yard barbecues. She read Isabel Allende en espanol. She watched telenovelas beamed in from Miami.

When my husband and I traveled to the Yucatan on our honeymoon, I looked around the Spanish colonial streets and envisioned Marlene as a girl growing up in a faded pastel villa, a fan raised languorously to her face in the humid Merida heat, a cool drink at her elbow.

The truth is that my Yucatecan mother-in-law dropped out of school after sixth grade to help support her family, going to work in a shoe factory. When an employment agency ran an ad in the Merida paper seeking young women to come north to work as maids, Marlene seized the opportunity.

She was 22.

The agency provided her with documents and a plane ticket. Marlene landed in Houston, where she went to work for a family with two little girls, making $10 a week.

She was already bilingual, speaking Spanish and Mayan, like her mother, Agripina, before her. But the susurrated clicking sounds of the Mayan dialect didn’t help her in Texas. When she met another young Yucatecan woman named Lilia, they decided to try their fortune in Los Angeles.

Once here, she met a rambunctious northern Mexican named Rene who was always cracking jokes and telling stories but who also worked hard, more than 12 hours a day, to make ends meet. They married.

She was now 25, considered old by Mexican standards. But this was the New World. They settled in El Sereno and had David, who would become my husband, followed by three girls. Rene opened the first in a series of small restaurants and Marlene worked alongside him.

One of the best places they had was in MacArthur Park, in the halcyon days before it was destroyed by crack and crime. Then there was the restaurant on 3rd and Main streets in Downtown Los Angeles, back when an evening walk was not foolhardy for Marlene and the children. Whenever musicians and actors from Mexico came up to Los Angeles to perform at the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway, they would end up at Rene’s restaurant after the show.

Those were the good years. Scallop-edged photos show Rene and Marlene on the closely mowed lawn of their suburban home, he looking big and handsome in a T-shirt and Fernando Llamas mustache, she looking demure in a Jackie Kennedy flip. A young woman with steady eyes, overwhelmed by three toddlers.

Much later, they divorced and Rene moved less than a mile away so both parents could still share in raising the kids. In all those years, Marlene never became a citizen. She had other things to think about. Besides, she wasn’t ready to cut those ties to the Yucatan.

The family managed a pilgrimage south each year or so, once driving from Los Angeles in the summer, a hot and endless road trip that my husband remembers with some horror. At a restaurant in Texas, the waitress refused to give them menus, although she promptly served families in other booths. Hungry and chafing with humiliation, Marlene collected her family and they walked out.

Time passed. In her high-ceilinged, azure-blue apartment in Merida, Agripina passed away last year at 86, and with her went Marlene’s strongest blood tie to her homeland.

Maybe she realized you can’t go home again. That America had become home in the intervening 33 years. That her children had become Americans. That she enjoyed the comforts here more than she had cared to admit.

But there were other reasons. Things have gotten ugly in our Golden State the past year. The anti-illegal immigrant hysteria whipped up by Proposition 187 made her feel uneasy. She wanted the security of knowing that people wouldn’t accuse her of stealing their jobs or welfare benefits if they heard her speaking Spanish.

She wanted a stamped document that testified that she had the right to live here, she who had worked and paid taxes for three decades. Lastly, she wanted a say in government, even though her citizenship came a paltry 12 hours too late to vote “No” on Proposition 187.

“The only way for Latinos to ensure their rights is to become citizens,” she announced one night at dinner.

So collecting her green card, her proof of residency and her courage, Marlene took the plunge. Don’t think for a minute it wasn’t hard. Perhaps some native-born Americans can’t imagine that anyone would hesitate to become a U.S. citizen.

Maybe I thought so too until I talked to my mother, who emigrated from France after the horrors of World War II. I was shocked to learn that she hadn’t become a citizen until 1965, almost 20 years and three kids after landing on our shores.

Why?

She liked being French. She identified very strongly with France and didn’t want to give that up. Marlene said the same about Mexico. It was ineluctably wrapped up with who she was.

So it was with bittersweet poignancy that Marlene made her way to the Los Angeles Convention Center with 3,500 other immigrants, lining up before a federal judge and the INS to renounce their homelands forever.

Clutching a plastic American flag, Marlene recited the oath, pledged her allegiance to the United States and became a citizen. When the next election rolls around, you can bet that my mother-in-law will be the first in line at the polls.