Proudly They Hail Power That Comes With Citizenship

The woman who runs the local nail salon became a citizen last year. Her customers shrieked their congratulations and inundated the Mexican-born manicurist with apple pies and flags.

She, on the other hand, talked about the event the way you’d talk about renewing a driver’s license or updating a will. Oh, she was proud and respectful but she had, after all, been in this country since 1955.

She had gone to school, married, raised a child and built her business--the bustling Arci’s Nail Depot in Whittier--in this abundant land. Her most vivid memory of the formalities was when she examined her papers and found that some government worker had recorded her for all time as having been born in--she couldn’t stop laughing--Iran.

No, nothing had changed, with one exception. Now she could vote. She’d joined the Republican Party, she said, and couldn’t wait for November, when she plans to give ‘em hell at the polls.

Immigrants fall into two camps, our politicians tell us: They’re either huddled masses grateful for a chance at the American dream or they’re grabby “aliens” making for the public trough. Lately, they have been the scapegoats of a great deal of GOP rhetoric; as the summer wears on, the Democrats will no doubt project their own stereotyped vision.

But immigrants, in a wave unprecedented in U.S.

history, are becoming naturalized Americans. And a funny thing tends to happen on that road: They become awfully, stubbornly, wonderfully hard to pigeonhole. Just spend a morning with a convention hall full of them as I did when another friend took the oath this week.

*

The woman who minds our children, a Guatemalan immigrant, had decided to take the plunge. She had been in this country for 17 years, and until this year had planned only to work hard, put her son and daughter through school and then retire to a little house she’d built in the Guatemalan countryside.

But two things happened: An earthquake knocked down her retirement house and Californians passed Proposition 187. She began to wonder what kind of future her very American kids would have with an immigrant mom.

So she signed up for citizenship classes. She studied U.S. history. Her red and yellow workbook, with its Declaration of Independence and schematic of “how bills become laws” took up residence in her purse. She memorized constitutional amendments and state capitals. When she went to her INS interview, her head was so crammed, she said, that she could remember the names of every president this country had ever had except the one they asked about--George Washington.

Finally came Wednesday, her swearing-in, in the fashion that has come to dominate the naturalization process this year. One million immigrants will become citizens in 1996, a third of them in Southern California. The group amassed in the downtown L.A. Civic Center before U.S. District Judge Lourdes Baird was part of a record 60,000 new Americans scheduled to take the oath this month alone.

The room was the size of a football field. They were swearing them in in batches of 5,000 at a time. On paper, they looked like the United Nations. But in the flesh, they could have been any crowd, anywhere in L.A. They looked like a convention of civil servants, in nice dresses and pressed brown slacks.

In the back of the room stood a divorced Glendale housewife who had been born in Baghdad and who had lived in this country for 19 years. As soon as this ceremony was over, she said, she was going to Las Vegas to play the slots.

She was becoming a citizen because her life was here now. She realized that the last time she visited Iraq. The authorities detained her at the border and threatened to hold her American-born son.

“I had to pay, like, 300 dinar to get him out of the country,” she said, her lip curling in fury at the memory.

Up front, a political activist from Koreatown was rounding up the press to introduce a 97-year-old great-grandmother who was taking the oath that day. The old woman sat amusedly in a wheelchair with a flag and a bouquet of red roses in her lap.

The activist mentioned children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren here--and a son in North Korea who hadn’t been heard from in wrenching years. Clearly, this was an epic moment. But when asked how she would celebrate, the woman just deadpanned in Korean, “I guess we’ll have a good lunch.”

Then I caught a glimpse of our baby-sitter, stunning in a pale peach suit and high heels. Her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders, and she was smiling nervously and clutching her papers and a little American flag. She gave me a hug, and then scurried to her seat as a man stepped up to the podium and commanded, “All rise.”

“May it please the judge,” he intoned. “The government is presenting 5,000 applicants for United States citizenship.”

On the government-issue podium, the judge’s eyes welled with tears. Baird, born in Ecuador, congratulated the crowd on “the final realization of your efforts and your hopes.”

Then, standing before a flag the size of a picture window, the judge instructed them to raise their right hands and pledge to “renounce and abjure all obligations and fidelities to any prince, potentate or sovereignty” and to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Their faces were somber at what was the civic equivalent of a simultaneous mass marriage and divorce. But when the oath had been taken, they raised their arms and waved 5,000 tiny flags in the air, a star-spangled sea of bashful pride.

There were a couple more speeches, a short video, a bureaucratic announcement or two. The woman who usually sang the national anthem hadn’t shown up, so they corralled the sister of a judge’s secretary who was the soloist in an Altadena church choir.

The crowd was restless, but there are moments that even the foibles of bureaucracy cannot spoil.

So when Mattie Butler of the Fountain of Life Church of God in Christ nervously smoothed her skirt and, unaccompanied, belted, “Ooooohh . . . say . . . can . . . you . . . see,” it was as if an angel’s voice had filled the cavernous room, as if everyone were hearing that song for the first time.

*

A day later, I asked the baby-sitter how it felt to be a citizen. I’d expected a perfunctory reply. Instead, for the first time, she told the story of her odyssey to the United States: How, at 19, she left her child with relatives to join her husband in the north. How she arrived after many weeks, only to find her marriage in ruins.

She told of her traveling companions, a pregnant Salvadoran war refugee and a Bible-thumping deaf mute who, to her annoyance and amusement, kept pulling out a little note pad and scribbling in Spanish, “God will provide.” She described what it feels like to thank heaven that you only weigh 85 pounds, because that means you’ll get to be on top when the “coyote” stacks you like cordwood with 20 people in the back of a van.

She recalled the day she tried to take a bus to downtown Los Angeles in hopes of finding a job, only to lose her nerve at the first glimpse of skyscrapers and freeways. She had never felt as helpless as she had in those days, and she had vowed never to feel so helpless again.

Her initial plan, she said, was just to earn enough money to get back to Guatemala and start a new life, but then one job led to another, she got a green card and before she knew it, her son was with her, and 17 years had passed. And with those years, she realized something: A person can make a sort of declaration of independence in their heart, and with that independence find strength. Self-sufficient, she could become a woman of means. Self-sufficient, she commanded her ex-husband’s respect.

“I never went on welfare. I pay my taxes. I don’t ask for nothing,” she proudly said.

Citizenship hadn’t exactly changed her life. It was just the next step on a journey that allowed her to rise up inside, until she was able to become part of something bigger than herself, a democracy of individuals, all equal in the eyes of the law.

“I have power now,” she said quietly. “Now I have my voice.”

And there was something else: As a citizen, she could vote.

This week, she became a Democrat. And she can’t wait for the next election, when, like the local manicurist--and countless inimitable new Americans--she plans to give ‘em hell at the polls.