SMALL ACTS, BIG REBELLION

People say they won’t vote in November because there aren’t enough choices; U.S. democracy is a hoax. In response, I think of people in my country, Nicaragua, who waged war against their government to end a dictatorship and be able to hold elections, I also think of what I gave up so I could vote here, casting my ballot for the first time this year.

I became a U.S. citizen on Jan. 5, 2000, at 9:31 a.m.--the first L.A. naturalization ceremony of the century. Famous first words? I slam-dunked my voter registration card into a mailbox and cursed, “Now I can vote the INS out of existence!” I had asked that my name be shortened on the naturalization certificate, but the INS had printed it in full: Karla Marina Del Socorro Perez Villalta. Amen. Longer than a rosary. It added to my anger at a system that had made me renounce my country. But it had to be done so I could vote.

Since my 17th birthday my mother had been trying to talk me into citizenship, but I rebelled at adopting a country when I didn’t feel a part of it. I was the last of my family to take the oath. My grandfather pleaded with me, but I imagined that he did it out of an exile’s bitterness. He had managed a ranch for the slain dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family had ruled Nicaragua from 1937 until the Sandinistas seized control, defeating Somoza’s National Guard on July 19, 1979, the night of el triunfo--the triumph. My grandparents came to the U.S. a few weeks after Somoza’s fall. But I, then 6 years old, and my mother stayed behind for several more months with my father, four brothers and my older sister in the war zones of Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. My father and brothers came years later but, never happy, returned to Nicaragua. My sister never even considered coming.

As the years went by, Abuelo was poetic about America’s greatness. But I was unmoved, missing my homeland. My grandfather was a hopeless Somocista, predicting throughout the 1980s, “The Sandinistas will fall by the end of the decade.” They fell in 1990.

A college journalism advisor was another thorn. She’d return from journalist round tables and warn me to become a citizen to protect myself from anti-immigrant legislation. “Stay away from reporters,” I’d mutter in response. Then came propositions 187, 227 and one relevant to people of college age like me--209. I couldn’t vote against them because I was not a citizen.

Still, I upheld my loyalties to Nicaragua. “You’re holding on to a child’s memory of Nicaragua,” my advisor said. Memories were all I had. We had survived the civil war because of my father’s friends. His university students had become Sandinistas and kept his car from being set on fire during protests. Other friends found us refuge, extra food rations and, often at the last moment, helped us escape the National Guard’s “cleaning operations”--in which they randomly killed boys and men. I drank water out of Sandinista soldiers’ canteens, wore their bandannas, yelled with them and held their hands as they led me to my parents once when I was lost. At the political rallies, they put me, now thoroughly caught up in the cause, in the front lines.

Two of those soldiers, Carlitos and Calavera, died fighting. On the night of el triunfo, we heard a thundering as we lay on the floor, dodging machine-gun fire. My 13-year-old brother kept repeating, “It’s the tanks, we’re all going to die, we’re all going to die . . . .” I lay still and waited. They were Sandinista tanks, followed by hundreds of neighbors in an impromptu parade, using pots and spoons as noisemakers to celebrate. My mother later found me on the street, dressed in Sandinista colors--black shorts, a red shirt and a black beret--clanging pots and shouting slogans. Despite my age, I knew this was an all-important change. It was literally a new dawn, because the sun was rising.

In the U.S., I wanted to remain Nicaraguan but felt the uncomfortable tug of biculturalism. Part of me assimilated into the dominant culture and learned its rituals and slang. The other part found solace in the Nicaraguan shops of L.A.’s Pico-Union district.

Twenty years have passed, and I haven’t returned. I saw death there and experienced sounds I still hear in nightmares. Then, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch severed my nationalistic umbilical cord. My romantic loyalties and secret fantasies of becoming Nicaragua’s president were gone with the wind that so disrespectfully changed the landscape. Nicaragua became the dysfunctional relative I loved but would avoid.

I was as ready as I could be for citizenship but still the rebel. I passed the government history test but delayed my application for two years. “A lot of good it did me to bring you to this country,” my mother would say. “You turned out to be a Communist anyway.”

Then the INS announced plans to increase the fee for citizenship applications. I saw it as another Jim Crow tactic to keep immigrants disenfranchised. I decided to beat the deadline. At a citizenship workshop, a volunteer asked me the McCarthyistic questions on the forms: “Have you joined any organization, including the Communist Party, or become associated or connected therewith in any way? Have you practiced polygamy; received income from illegal gambling, been a prostitute, procured anyone for prostitution or been involved in any other unlawful commercialized vice; encouraged or helped any alien to enter the United States illegally; illicitly trafficked in drugs or marijuana; given any false testimony to obtain immigration benefits; or been a habitual drunkard?”

As I thought about the U.S. presidents who’d fail this question, the volunteer said something about arms in Spanish. “Will you bear arms?” he said again, louder.

“No,” I said. “I’m a pacifist.”

“I see,” he said. “If you could please follow me upstairs, you may speak with one of our attorneys.”

“An attorney?” I said, wrinkling my nose at the hassle. “Oh, never mind. It’s only killing.”

With that, I signed away my allegiance to Nicaragua, and my eyes stung. I cried in my car.

Next the INS was to take my fingerprints. In protest, I sat in the waiting area reading “Sandino, the Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot 1921-1934”--on the works of Augusto C. Sandino, who opposed U.S. military occupation and gave the Sandinista movement its name. I held the book high in front of my face, like a picket sign.

Two nights before the naturalization ceremony, I woke my boyfriend Jimmy at 4 a.m. to ask, “Am I selling out?”

“No, you’re cashing in,” he said. “Think of it as getting a library card.” A library card had helped me learn of the U.S. financing of the counterrevolutionary war against the Sandinistas. This further destroyed Nicaragua’s infrastructure, and risked the lives of three of my four brothers when the Sandinista National Liberation Front drafted them. A library card had brought me to volumes on the U.S. human rights violations, knowledge that made me want to vote badly.

“But I’ll never be the same,” I said, arriving at my real fear. “I don’t want to be an American. I’m Nicaraguan, it’s who I am.”

“Think of it this way,” Jimmy went on. “You’ll join the dispossessed Chicanos and be a citizen of a country you don’t really like but want to change. Think of it as a Platinum Green Card.”

If anyone had told me I could be a Nicaraguan Chicana with the Neiman Marcus of green cards, I would have become a citizen long ago. At the ceremony, we 3,605 applicants huddled and yearned to breathe free only because we were late for our jobs. Some wore suits, some wore expensive watches, most spoke perfect English. We exchanged stories about how long we had lived in the U.S., where we were from, why we had waited so long to apply, how nervous we were.

The judge leading the ceremony calmed my impulse to run when he said, “Those of us who are born here could never appreciate what you appreciate.” He encouraged us to be an example to Americans through courtesy, hard work and action, then his voice broke. My immigrant life flashed before me: How I had marveled at Donny Osmond, automated doors, vending machines, beef jerky, girls in makeup at 13, Californians barefoot on hot sidewalks though they owned shoes. Becoming a U.S. citizen was the most important and rebellious thing I had done.

Documentaries I had seen about injustice and protests filled my mind. I felt thankful for and linked to those who had fought for my rights through women’s suffrage, the black and Chicano civil rights movements. I promised myself I would get a copy of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” to do this citizen thing right.

As we left, attendants gave us packets with the Constitution and voter registration cards. We had been asked to bear arms but were being given something much more powerful than guns. It washed over me: I could vote. I was licensed to navigate a political machine I had wanted to get my hands on for years. Historian Howard Zinn wrote, “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

When I vote in November, it isn’t so a new president or Congress can change what’s wrong with this country. That’s not what voting is about. It’s the prize--one of the few things I couldn’t do as a legal resident, though I protested, and wrote letters and opinions. It’s a small act.

I’ve begun to grieve for the country I left, and I’ve begun to let go. It’s not where I live, and it is no longer mine. But I retain the lesson of the revolution: Sometimes you need to rebel, even if it’s only in little ways. And you’ll still find me at shops in Pico-Union when assimilation gets me down.