América del Norte by Nicolás Medina Mora

Author:Nicolás Medina Mora
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

Part V

Iowa City

January–April 2018

In which Your Correspondent returns to the Middle West, is asked to prove he can speak English, ponders the life and work of a seventeenth-century astrologer, remembers his grandfather, applies for a green card, fails to steer a student away from danger, considers a generous offer, makes a fateful mistake, and worries his time in America is coming to a close.

Para Cosme del Rosario Bell

After spending the winter break in Mexico City on my own (Lee had gone home to her parents in California), I returned to Iowa, where the snow was at its peak and the cold air vibrated with uncertainty. Over the previous months, the Trump administration had formed a task force to identify naturalized citizens eligible for deportation, announced it would no longer allow foreigners who enrolled in Medicaid to become permanent residents, and repeatedly refused to issue passports to citizens of perceived “Hispanic” descent. It’d also begun to imprison children in concentration camps, though that last news item was so insane it was easier to pretend the concentration camps were not concentration camps and the children were not children.

I had nothing to hide, but was I sure I had met the criteria to file my taxes as a nonresident alien?

Did I check that the lady from the Office of International Students and Scholars remembered to initial the document that authorized me to teach two different courses instead of two sections of the same class?

And what about that time in New York, when I dragged poor Carlos to that god-awful party in the yuppie wastelands of Greenpoint, where, unsatisfied with getting into a cocaine-fueled shouting match about whether it was racist to apply North American racial categories to people from the Dominican Republic, I proceeded to let the host borrow my phone to request a re-up from his dealer, a moonlighting bike messenger who called himself “the Cheesemonger,” and who months later found himself in the crosshairs of the district attorney for Kings County, who proceeded to drop surprisingly substantial charges on poor him and then use his testimony to secure indictments against a number of people associated with the call history on his cell phone, including a corporate lawyer, an art dealer, a burned-out rock star, miscellaneous finance bros, a college kid, and a coterie of elderly heiresses from the Upper East Side, the idea being to combat the unfounded accusations, heard in so-called “activist” circles and in certain corners of the yellow press, that the hardworking prosecutors of the proud borough of Brooklyn focused a disproportionate amount of their not-inconsiderable investigative resources on criminal cases against poor people of color, and sure, it’d been years, and none of the Greenpoint yuppies were ever arrested, and there was no reason to think even a rookie prosecutor would be foolish enough to build a case off a single text message, especially considering that the famous monger, that indolent, unprofessional motherfucker, hadn’t even bothered to reply, much less deliver the package in question, but who

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