Accidents of birth

I don’t often talk about being an immigrant, at least not in any way that could be construed as serious.¹ I rarely write about myself because my personal life, frankly, is none of your business. Here is what you need to know: I wasn’t born in the United States, and sometimes I feel like that simple fact has altered the trajectory of my life. I wasn’t born in the United States and sometimes I feel like that means nothing at all, because I am for better or worse an American. I went to a series of under-funded public schools in Florida, which I believe to be the most American of all fifty states. I have student loan debt and unearned confidence. I love going to the mall.²

These things would be true about me even if I weren’t in possession of a US passport. These things are true about me because of where I grew up and who I grew up around. My childhood unfolded first. Citizenship came later, and it changed everything, though that’s easy to forget.

When I was fourteen years old I spent most of my free time walking around my neighborhood with my friends Allie and Jenna. My parents were stricter than theirs and I was always getting grounded for reasons that seemed trivial at the time. There were cultural differences between us and I was resentful, but I nonetheless remember that year as one of freedom and self-discovery. Authority, parental or otherwise, was something to be resisted. I knew no punishment I faced would be severe, even if I felt like my world was ending every time my parents confiscated my phone.³

Right now in this country there is a fourteen-year-old girl who, like me, is named Gaby and who, like me, was born in Colombia. As far as I know that’s where the similarities between us end, because where I spent that blurry year between childhood and adolescence testing the bounds of my independence, this other Gaby is in a federal detention center. She has been there for three weeks as of mid-January. Some of her friends have been there for more than half a year.

Maria Antonia, another Colombian girl, ended up at Dilley after going to Disney World. She says she was interrogated for two hours without her mom. “now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside,” she writes. She has been there for 113 days. She is nine years old. Because she and her mother were detained after their vacation, she writes, she feels like “being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

There is a measles outbreak in Dilley. The families locked inside say they’ve been denied the most basic essentials: edible food, potable water. Imagine risking everything to give your child a better life and ending up in a place like that. Imagine being a child in a place like that.

a letter Gaby M. M. wrote to reporters at ProPublica

When I was nine I would ride my bike in circles around the lake behind my parents’ house with my two best friends. We’d pick jasmine flowers off the bushes and our fingers would get sticky with their sap. Every day felt like summertime, and during the actual summers we were nearly feral. When I was fourteen I felt stifled by my boring suburban life and my boorish suburban peers. When I was fourteen I knew there was a bigger world out there waiting for me and I was desperate to experience it. I felt this way despite my relative freedom, because this is the way almost all fourteen year old girls feel even in the best circumstances. I cannot imagine how it would have felt to be confined to a series of small rooms, to be watched over by guards every minute of every day, for days or weeks or months.

My parents and I naturalized when I was fifteen. I skipped school that day and wore a heinous yellow bubble dress from Forever 21. At the ceremony they showed us a slideshow or maybe a video of all these majestic American landscapes and when it got to Mount Rushmore I turned to my dad and said, “Did you know that’s sacred Lakota land? This country is disgusting” and he told me to please be quiet because this was a really important moment for us and for everyone else in the room and I was ruining it. We were both right, which is usually how these things go. Then we said the pledge of allegiance or maybe sang the national anthem, I don’t remember. They gave us little flags to wave. And then we were Americans.

Everything changed because of paperwork. My life would have been different if not for the paperwork. There are children locked up right now because of slight differences in paperwork. There’s a logic to it, albeit a flawed one. There are legal distinctions. But ultimately it’s just a matter of paperwork.

When I was in Minneapolis I kept my US passport in a crossbody bag that I wore like a shield. I wasn’t necessarily afraid of getting arrested or deported or anything else, and I was following the news closely enough to know that if the government wants to kill you they’ll just do it regardless of who you are or where you were born. But that little booklet made me feel secure. It is the most consequential document I have. I only know this because there was a time before I had it, and because other people’s lives are made worse for not having it, and even still it’s easy to forget.

1. I blame all typos and copy errors on being ESL, and my favorite and most annoying bit is “if immigrants don’t assimilate then why do I have ___” (an REI membership, a liberal arts degree, vocal fry, etc)

2. this is actually one of my more Colombian traits; Colombians love the mall

3. sometimes they would take away my eyeliner instead which was similarly earth-shattering except my friends would let me borrow their eyeliner when we got to school. None of us were worried about styes but we probably should’ve been