The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement by Orduna Jose

Author:Orduna, Jose [Orduna, Jose]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780807074022
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Inside the library, a young Indian or Pakistani boy, maybe seven years old, stands alone in a corner, pummeling a portable video game with his thumbs. A long single-file line snakes out of the main auditorium, and clusters of family members stand around avoiding eye contact. Chelsea leans toward me to whisper in my ear that the mood isn’t as jovial as she’d expected. The kid’s device is clinking and pinging, and he thrashes about from time to time. I wonder if he was born here or elsewhere, and, if it’s elsewhere, I wonder whether he has any memories of the place of his birth. I wonder how his parents explained this ceremony here today.

It seems significant that after living in Chicago for twenty years I’m being naturalized here, now, under the sign of Obama, the record-breaking deporter in chief, with Hoover, the president during the beginning of the Mexican Repatriation, in retrograde. The walls are covered in photographs showing Hoover’s accomplishments. What isn’t displayed on the wall, of course, is anything regarding the policy authorized by Hoover that led to the coercive, often violent removal of between four hundred thousand and two million Mexicans living in the United States. Many of whom were US citizens or legal residents whose families hadn’t moved in generations and who had only become “foreigners” after the United States invaded Mexico, took half of its landmass, and drew a new political boundary line. This period between 1929 and 1944 shares many similarities to the moment in which we live. And like Operation Wetback in the fifties straight through our current period, the categories of Mexican, immigrant, “illegal immigrant,” and “wetback” get ground together in the public consciousness. The xenophobia and racial terror that continues to this day certainly isn’t new, and neither is the collective amnesia regarding the economic, political, and military interventionism that has in large part driven migration to the United States.

Chelsea snaps a photo of me standing in front of glass doors etched with the presidential seal. The backlight turns me into a black, featureless silhouette in the center of a ring of stars. My body covers the eagle and the olive branch it clasps in its left talon, but the thirteen arrowheads peek from behind my right elbow and a halo of rays emanates from around my head. The single-file line starts moving so I get in the back, and an attendant comes out to tell everyone’s family members they can go into the auditorium and sit down. An older woman wearing a long green sari grabs the kid from the corner who is still pummeling his device. He lets out a grunt when she tugs him by the arm, but otherwise his attention is uninterrupted. She tries to sneak a kiss on his cheek, but he pulls away without turning his gaze from the game.

There’s a young black man standing in front of me. The back of his head is dotted with a few small white puffy scars. He turns to wave and smile at an older white couple looking excitedly at him.

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