I still could not reconcile whether I was a tourist or not. However hard I tried, everything about me said that I wasn’t raised in Mexico. I might have been born there, but I certainly didn’t fit the part. My shoes, my clothes, even how I held my body, told a different story. I tried to look bored. I tried to hide the fact that I couldn’t stop my heart from beating as fast as it did. I was still unsure whether they would let me stay with Amá or separate us once we went into the compound, and that made my heart race faster.
The line, after what felt like hours, finally began to move a little ahead, but then suddenly it halted again. They were letting in one group of people at time. Amá grabbed one of the suitcases and nudged me forward. Rubi was struggling with her luggage, and I could tell it was beginning to annoy her. The sun was starting to feel uncomfortably hot. “I’m tired of rolling these suitcases,” she said. We took off our jackets and used them for shade above our heads. They opened the door for the next group of people, and we scooted a little ahead.
I knew Amá didn’t want to tell me everything she knew, just as I wasn’t telling her everything I knew. Every time I got a phone call, I walked away from her and looked back to make sure she wasn’t listening.
The line moved a little more, and I could finally see the gates of the compound—the most trafficked border checkpoint in the western hemisphere. This was the case even before the caravans, before the humanitarian crisis and the new president’s policy of separating children from their parents. Soon the streets would be lined with migrants waiting months to enter with little to no food or resources; to simply be seen and hear their numbers called. Soon many of the privileges associated with asylum cases we hoped Amá would be granted would be repealed.
I could see the line of cars stretching across, ten lanes thick. It looked like a college campus. How normal everything looked in there; how manicured the hedges.
7.
A guard waved us into the compound, which was clean and tidy. You couldn’t see into the windows, but they could see out. Everything we did was being watched on a TV screen somewhere in a dark room; perhaps someone was jotting down notes with a small pencil on a notepad about how I lifted my bag, my phone. A guard came up to us and yelled into my face because I was using my phone. I read his name tag—Rodriguez. I hung up with my lawyer and walked inside, Amá and Rubi ahead of me.
It wasn’t until we were inside that I realized we didn’t really have a plan. We were just going to surrender ourselves and say, “My mother is seeking asylum because she fears for her life.” It was odd to think of it as a surrender, as if she was, after so many years, finally coming out of hiding—“Here we are, take us.”
The line moved ahead, and suddenly it felt like it was moving too fast, like it wouldn’t give us enough time to think. In my head, I knew what I would say, but it wasn’t until then that I mouthed the words beneath my breath. Once they became breath, air, and vibration, they seemed strange, different in my head, not how I wanted them to sound at all.
The line moved even faster as we got closer to the guard’s window, which looked like a TSA queue. I really only needed to say one word, and the machinery of that agreement written up half a century ago in Europe would go into effect.
Asylum.
*
It was like waiting at the supermarket once we got to the very end, with one line breaking off into a few. At last it was our turn, and an agent waved us over to him. He had his rote routine and went straight into it, but we weren’t part of that routine. We hadn’t come to be part of the show; we couldn’t just show him Amá’s papers because there weren’t any. I didn’t know how to begin speaking: “Okay, so here’s the thing,” or “There’s this thing that happened, sir,” or “What I’m trying to tell you . . .” How do you walk up to a person and tell him you are running for your life? Wouldn’t it make sense to just start from the beginning? But when exactly did all of this start?
“So then what are you doing here?” he barked after I said Amá didn’t have “the proper documents,” as if he couldn’t fathom our presence before him, as if we should have been out there instead, trying to cross through the mountain or desert like everyone else. Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. I told him each detail of events. Amá’s eyes began to water, and he looked at us for a long time with clinical precision.
In my head, our conversation had gone very differently. I didn’t say half of what I was supposed to say. Maybe he was taken aback by our boldness, our gall at having walked right up to him with no plan in sight and asking to enter, to be paroled in on a humanitarian basis. He ran each of our passports, asked us to place our fingers on a small screen to scan our fingerprints, and looked at his computer for a long time, his glasses nearly falling off the tip of his nose as he studied the screen.
I didn’t want them to separate us; I would do anything to stay with Amá. I couldn’t afford to lose her again.
“Follow me” he said, and walked out of his booth.
“C’mon!” he urged, because we hadn’t started moving. We were locked in place, frozen with fear. We didn’t know what would happen next. It was too late now to turn around and walk back; our intent to enter had been made. We weren’t in the mountains, where we could see the U.S. ahead in the distance, where all you had to be certain of was that the sun was on your right in the morning and on your left in the evening. We were inside a building with no windows, and there were rooms where you could perhaps spend weeks and never know if it was night or day.
“Follow me,” he said again, and gestured toward a sitting area, where we took our seats. “Wait here.” And then he went back to his booth to help the next person in line, back to his routine, his everyday business, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. We’d wasted our energy on him; he was a nobody with no real power to decide our case, which was now officially in the system, making its way, slowly, to an immigration judge five years in the future.
*
Down a corridor, I could see the automatic double doors swinging open as people left the building. That was it, the U.S., right there, just a few dozen feet away, but it might as well have been as far away as the moon. We sat quietly in our small chairs inside what looked like a corral, surrounded by a waist-high wall. A few other people were inside already, looking down, avoiding eye contact with each other. I saw people filing by on their way out of the double doors, which let in a slight breeze each time they opened. It was right there.
It was chaotic in there, but no one seemed lost. Everyone knew where they were going except us and the others detained; lost yet locked in place. Another guard came up to us and said Rubi and I had to leave. We couldn’t stay with Amá. I pleaded with him. I tried to say anything I could, but nothing seemed to register with him. My voice got louder as a growing frustration welled within me. There was nothing else I could say to make him understand, to convince him.
I quickly took out a pen and scribbled my number on her arm, and a few other important numbers she might need. The pen wasn’t working well, so I dug it deep into her arm, and she winced a little from the prick. I told her to memorize the numbers in case the ink washed off, or in case they made her wash it off.
Amá sat between us and the guard. Looking ahead, her hands on her lap, resolute.
“You have to leave now,” the guard said, “or else.”
Or else what? I thought. It was ironic that he was forcing us to enter the U.S. He was forcing us to do the only thing we wished my mother could do, and what I myself hadn’t been able to do for over two decades. I looked at Amá and told her everything would be okay. I repeated my phone number again. She shook her head, tears running down her face.
“Now,” the agent said one last time, in a tone he hadn’t used before. We picked up our things and walked away from Amá again. Again she sat there with her hands in her lap, staring away from me.
“I won’t leave, I’ll be right on the other side waiting, Amá,” I said to her as I left.
We
headed in the direction of the double doors. I looked back to make sure she was there, to make sure all of this was real. She was, and it was. She was on her own.
My leaving looked nothing like hers.
[Fifth Movement as Simulacra, 2005]
I sat at the dinner table with a razor in my hand. It was one of the thin straight razors my father used to shave with. Even though I was already in high school, I still couldn’t grow a mustache or beard, but his razors were still around. It wasn’t that long since he’d been deported. On the paper on the table, my name was printed in every font I thought was at least close to the real thing; every ligature, type style, and size. It was my first lesson in typesetting, my first lesson in form, in composition by field.
I needed to make my own social security card to show an employer for a new job. I also needed a “mica,” a green card. Up until then, I’d been young enough that any job I took I could be paid under the table, but not anymore; I would have to be put on the books. I needed my name printed on that good cloth paper, the kind of paper with the small filaments of colored cotton like you see on money. But a real social security card was worth more than money. It was worth more than gold.
*
Courier New was the typeface that looked almost right. And yet, as I squinted at it beneath the desk lamp, no matter how I tried to align my name and glue it on, there was something different about the original. The ligatures between the graphemes felt like a secret code that couldn’t be replicated or cracked. I cut around each letter of my name with a razor, going around each serif, each foot, and each joint with precision. I had to do it by myself. It was something we all had to learn at one point or another, like learning to drive or tying your shoes: the big loop over the little loop, under and over. I couldn’t get my license, either, but this felt more important, made me feel like more of an adult. I could do things my friends couldn’t.
At a certain point, cutting closer and closer to the ink, along the edges of the letters, I couldn’t tell what was my name and what wasn’t. It drew away from me and back again. It felt like I was playing tag between what was familiar and what was not.
Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo, Marcelo.
I’d taken for granted the consistency of machines, how they could place things in symmetrical longitudes and latitudes, how easy it was for them to form a straight line.
*
My mother watched me do things she wished I didn’t have to do. I had to do them alone.
*
No one really left my town after high school, so the idea of going into a Walgreens to get a passport photo made me feel famous. I wanted to tell the photo clerk I was going to Europe, or Buenos Aires, or that I had a stint in Marrakesh. I wanted to say the word Marrakesh very slowly. But I wasn’t getting a passport; I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t tell her that. The camera clicked, and a single flash popped out like a wet firework. Stevie Wonder was crooning through the speakers above me.
*
I wondered what it took for something to be believable. To pass. At the tip of my razor was a question: Was it good enough, was I good enough? I always wanted to be the real thing, to move through the streets completely as myself. I wasn’t using anyone else’s name, but the fact that the card wasn’t real made it feel like it wasn’t my name printed there. Each name printed in small variations of Courier New carried its own weight, as if it were a congregation of Marcelos on the page, and we had all jumped into this body at one point or another.
I kept cutting parts of me that I thought would never come back, as if they were ever mine to begin with. I messed up on one name, cut across an a, and started again on another. I had plenty to choose from. I thought of all of those lost years pretending I was someone who I was not. Perhaps this was just the same. I was always aware of each of the twenty-four letters that made up the entirety of my name. It always took too long to say out loud, and I had to say it slowly to people. Even spelling it out was difficult for some; everyone always spelled it the Italian way, with two l’s. Sometimes I never corrected them, to avoid any tense moments.
It wasn’t so far-fetched or paranoid to believe that everything I did gave me away as undocumented. I policed my body to the point that I could do nothing without consulting the voice in my head first—“Is this a good idea? Have you said too much?” It was exhausting just to live like that.
Everything I did was first filtered, scrutinized, and assessed before it left my body. If I said “please,” it was a kind of “please” that was precise, that meant exactly what I wanted it to mean. If I was quiet, it was a deliberate silence. Laugh now, laugh hard, spit out your food. But I had no control over my name. Each time someone said my name, it said things back to them without me, before I could respond. And it was my job to put out all the small fires it sparked in people’s imaginations.
*
The border security apparatus is mobile and ready to be deployed anywhere in the country should it be needed.
*
I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. He stopped by my house and placed in my palm my freshly printed green card, tucked inside the smallest manila envelope I had ever seen. Whoever made it cut crudely around the edges of my skin and hair and made my head look blockish. The laminate was too thick, made thicker by the cutout of my face, glued onto the card from my Walgreens passport picture rather than digitally transferred. It was a joke. I laughed a little when I saw it and paid the other half I promised, and said “Thanks man, I owe you,” still chuckling. And he laughed, too, because he couldn’t deny how bad it was either.
The most glaring marker of inauthenticity was my thumbprint. It wasn’t really my thumbprint. I didn’t know who it belonged to. Maybe it wasn’t even a thumbprint, because there were hardly any ridges and grooves. It was just a large black smudge at the bottom right of the card. But it must have belonged to someone. I desperately wanted to know who.
Maybe it was a person who actually got their green card but stopped caring long ago about being found, and the prints were nearly wiped out because they were rubbed down to the bone from working, or from being copied over and over again.
*
I imagine the scene in the house where the mica was made—a kitchen table, much like my own. Someone is cooking in the kitchen, and the scent of poblano peppers roasting on the stove in the midafternoon of summer lingers in the throat. A child is doing her homework on the sofa. It is hot. A mother sits at the table, which is strewn with small pieces of paper, a laminating machine, and tiny envelopes. There is laughter coming from the TV, though no one is laughing in the room because the child is busy studying for a test, and the father is cleaning his work shoes, and the mother—the mother is steadying her good hand. There’s a calendar hanging next to her with her children’s soccer game schedule. She asks her kids to help because they have small hands, which don’t shake and are better at cutting out the silhouette of the people who have paid two hundred dollars for a green card.
The child obliges. Maybe she will use this as a basis for her art when she grows up. She will become a famous sculptor and entertain rich patrons by explaining the labor of forgery in late capitalism. Her brother is a little more resistant to the work because he is embarrassed, maybe ashamed. In any respect, this is a family business, just like their neighbors who sell Avon. They’re trying to be good people.
In a previous century, had they come from another country of fairer-skinned people, this family would have been called industrious, even entrepreneurs. They would be lauded for their creativity, and how they answered the demand of the market. In a previous century the children would have gone on to Ivy League business schools to start their own companies or carry on the tradition of the family.
The scene is peaceful. I imagine the courier who hands over the client’s raw materials having a charming conversation with the father or mother—about the weather, about their children’s school, about a PTA meeting where they were pro
mised a Spanish translator but got none.
Present are the tools of the trade: fine drafting blades, rulers, glue, and of course, someone’s sample green card as a guide, someone’s thumbprint. Perhaps the thumbprint belongs to the father, and he copies it over and over again until it is unrecognizable and can’t be traced back to him. He presses down on the ink pad, sending himself out for the world to see.
*
The card is a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s like a VCR tape that slows down a little each time it gets played, gets a little more distorted, a little less recognizable. The change is gradual, but even the faces on the screen are stretched. In this scenario, let’s play telephone: Start with the words on the green card, spread the word down the line, and giggle when the last person repeats their story to you like a confession. “I did nothing wrong, I was only trying to make an honest living.”
8.
Our luggage clamored against the tiled floor, but Rubi and I, holding Amá’s blanket, stopped right before the double doors opening into the U.S. Weeping must have been common there, because no one seemed too concerned that we were doubled over, with our hands on our knees. After a minute or so, the private security guard (clearly not an agent) posted at the door walked up to us and asked what was wrong. It was as if he was there by mistake, dropped from the sky like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Unlike the other guards, he seemed confused at our grief but also told us we couldn’t stay there, that we had to leave.
I’m leaving, my son, you don’t need me anymore.
We felt all of that chaos pushing us forward. We tried to lock our heels in the ground like stubborn mules, but it was no use; the push was greater than us, and we inched forward into the country of opportunity, the country of promise. I could no longer see Amá around the corner.
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