Citizen Gain : Thousands of Documented Immigrants Are Applying for Full Legal Status

Gabriel Lopez’s first trips to California were brief and strictly mercenary. He was one of the thousands of braceros who harvested seasonal crops in the 1950s and sent money to support their families back in Mexico.

Even in 1961, when an Oxnard-based company helped him get a green card and gave him a full-time job picking chili peppers, Lopez was certain he’d return to his home state of Jalisco, where his roots and his loyalty were firmly grounded.

Now, after living more than half his life in Sylmar, raising a family there and rarely returning to Mexico, the 59-year-old Lopez is applying for U.S. citizenship. He is among the thousands of legal immigrants, many of them elderly, longtime residents, who are belatedly swearing their allegiance to the Stars and Stripes.

Growing anti-immigrant fervor, the passage of Proposition 187 and the threatened loss of his Social Security checks to a cost-cutting Congress finally compelled Lopez, a disabled park-maintenance worker, to take a step he had long shunned as unnecessary.

“After Prop. 187 there was no alternative, I had to become an American citizen,” said Lopez, who filed his citizenship application in March. “I see I am losing a lot of the rights I could have, like Medicaid and the vote, because I am not an American.”

Later in May, immigration officials expect to swear in as many as 8,500 people at two naturalization ceremonies Downtown and in Riverside, nearly double the number of previous years. Applications for citizenship have risen more than 200% in the last year, according to the “U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s local office.

Immigrants have flocked to the United States for decades while promising themselves to eventually return to their native countries. But years slip by, children are born, houses are bought, and the immigrants grow older and accustomed to life in the States.

For some, retaining the citizenship of their birth becomes a way of preserving ethnic identity. Others are so assimilated in every other way that they simply neglect to make it official.

Lopez’s attachment to his homeland once stopped him from becoming a citizen. He felt he would be denouncing his Mexican heritage by doing so, and agonized for years about making the decision.

In the 1970s, he had his fingerprints taken for the process, but never went back for the exam that includes 20 written questions on U.S. history and the nation’s political system, as well as an interview. In the meantime, several of his brothers, nieces and nephews immigrated from Mexico and became citizens.

Lopez, who has a weak heart and suffered two strokes that left him with limited use of his left side, said his medical needs also played into his decision to become naturalized. After working and paying taxes here for 34 years, he looks forward to drawing Social Security and being eligible for Medicare, just as any retiree would.

Conversely, pragmatism kept Olga (Paquita) Acosta from giving up her Honduran citizenship for 40 years and it was a certain sentimentality about her adopted country as well as her grown children here that finally propelled her, at age 68, to obtain U.S. citizenship.

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Acosta had always wanted to retire to her native Honduras, where she still owns property. Only the country’s volatile politics and the potential danger to Acosta and her husband deterred her. Now, widowed for several years and living with her eldest daughter in Gardena, she says she has no desire to leave.

“I love and respect this country. It is the country of my three children,” the retired factory worker said. “But I don’t like the way they change the laws now against us (immigrants).”

Acosta took the citizenship exam in February and passed. She is waiting to hear when she will be sworn in.

Citizenship allows one the right to vote, serve on juries and hold certain government jobs. It also would ensure the right to Social Security, Medicare and welfare, should Congress deny those benefits to non-citizens. Many, however, see political empowerment as reason enough to become naturalized.

Antonieta Vargas, a resident of the Pico-Union district, was so angered bythe Proposition 187 movement that she abandoned plans to retire in her native Chihuahua, Mexico, and became a citizen after 42 years here so she could vote against the anti-immigration measure.

Legal immigrants are also “realizing that their status as permanent residents no longer makes them immune from discriminatory treatment,” said Vargas, whose son, Arturo Vargas, is executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials in Boyle Heights, which runs citizenship programs.

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Maria Sanchez, who came from San Luis, Mexico, at age 16 and has raised seven children in San Fernando, said the passage of Proposition 187 jolted her into taking the initiative one crisp January afternoon. A man she met after a class at Mission College was talking to her in Spanish, and when Sanchez asked if he was Mexican he said he was American and called Sanchez a mojada (wetback).

“That night I just cried and the next day I decided I was going to be an American citizen,” said Sanchez, a petite, 47-year-old woman with an infectious giggle and bright brown eyes.

Every day for two weeks last month, Sanchez arrived promptly at the bungalow classrooms at Mission College’s San Fernando branch to grab the second seat in the first row before her 8 a.m. citizenship class.

During class, Sanchez scribbled notes in an already crammed spiral notebook that she pored over for two or three hours a night in her “study”--a garage cluttered with laundry, a sewing machine, bookcases and seven votive candles she lights daily for her dead husband.

Sanchez’s family has lived comfortably in her modest three-bedroom home in San Fernando, where she and her husband settled in 1969. There was never a thought about being a citizen, she said. Her children and husband were all born in the United States, she had been a legal resident since her arrival, and she never had a problem finding work.

But now things are different. Sanchez worries that she’ll lose her husband’s pension check from his Pacoima employer if she doesn’t become a citizen. Worse, she said, she fears the government making radical changes that could send her back to Mexico on a whim, as happened to Mexicans during the Depression.

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George Lopez isn’t worried about being deported, and he’s quick to point out that he doesn’t receive government aid and is not concerned with losing benefits. What the 20-year Sylmar resident wants is the chance to vote.

“I want to count and I want to vote for someone who’s going to make decisions that I think are best for me and my community,” said Lopez, 36, who is enrolled in a citizenship class with his wife, Leticia, 35. The Lopezes, both from Zacatecas, Mexico, met in North Hollywood and married in 1982.

They received amnesty in 1988 to become legal residents, then had to wait five years before they could apply for citizenship. Meanwhile, they were preoccupied with their jobs--she is a seamstress, he a general mechanic--and raising their two children, Daniela, 10 and Roberto, 7.

The couple said that increasingly hostile rhetoric coupled with measures such as Proposition 187 made it clear they could delay no longer.

“We’re not doing this for the benefits, we’re doing it for us. We want to be part of the system,” Lopez said.

“I’m sick and tired of people telling me ‘You’re a wetback, go back to Mexico,’ ” he said. “The next time someone says that to me I can stop them: ‘Oh, no sir, I’m sorry,’ I will say, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen.’ ”