Hola, and welcome. Me llamo Marisol. I'm 35. I was born in Tijuana, in a colonia up on a hill where at night you can see the lights of San Diego like somebody spilled a jewelry box. I've had my green card since 1989. I live in Chula Vista with my husband Ray and our daughter Vanessa, who is ten, and I work the front desk at a family clinic (phones, insurance forms, "the doctor is running about twenty minutes behind").

Every weekend I cross to Tijuana to see my mother, who has diabetes and a sore on her leg that will not heal. And this year, after ten years of saying "next year," I finally applied to become a citizen of the United States. Mexico changed the law last year so we don't stop being Mexicanas, and Mamá got sick, and I ran out of excuses.

This is where I write it all down. In English mostly, because that's what the computer likes, and in Spanish when English isn't enough.

Last night the moon came up over the hill behind Mamá's house so big and orange that the neighbor's kids came out into the street to look at it. Mamá sat on the porch in her plastic chair with her foot up on the bucket, the way the doctor says and the way she never does unless I'm standing there. We didn't talk for a long time. Then she said, "Es la misma luna allá." It's the same moon over there. Over there meaning Chula Vista. Meaning el otro lado, the other side. Meaning me.

I brought the forms. I picked them up on Wednesday on my lunch hour. Now that I'm a citizen I can petition for her. The mother of a citizen is a different line than before, a shorter one they say, although nothing about papers is ever short. She could live with us. She could see Dr. R. at my clinic. I could change her bandage myself every night instead of every Saturday. Vanessa could come home from school to her abuelita. I had it all figured out in my head for two weeks.

I put the envelope on the kitchen table next to the pan dulce. She looked at it and didn't open it.

"¿Y quién va a cuidar mis rosas?" And who is going to take care of my roses?

Mamá. They're roses.

But I know it's not the roses. It's the roses and the church on the corner where she has gone every morning for forty years, and Doña Licha next door, and the man with the corn cart who saves her the best elote. And it's Papá, who is buried ten minutes from her house, and who she visits every Sunday with a coffee can full of those same roses.

We left the envelope there. The line home was an hour and fifty minutes. Vanessa slept. Ray drove. I looked out the window at the same moon, a little smaller tonight, and I didn't know what I want, which is new for me. I always know what I want. Ask Ray.

The leg: a little better. The doctor says a little better. I'll take a little.

Listening to: Selena, because Vanessa controls the tape player.

I have to write about yesterday before I forget how it felt.

Sunday, coming home from Mamá's. Two hours in the line, like always. The same churro man, the same boys with squeegees, the same plaster Virgins lined up on the divider. Vanessa doing her spelling words in the back seat. I was driving because Ray's back hurts.

For ten years, when I pull up to the booth, I hand the inspector my mica, my green card, and he looks at it and looks at me and hands it back. For ten years I have held my breath in that booth even though I never did one thing wrong. Everybody holds their breath in that booth.

Yesterday the inspector said, "Citizenship?"

And I said, "U.S."

It came out small. Like a question. I don't have my passport yet, so he asked where I was born and I said Tijuana, and he asked for proof, and I gave him the certificate that Ray told me not to carry around and that I carry around anyway, in a plastic sleeve, in my purse. He looked at it a long time. Then he looked at me and said, "Congratulations. Welcome home."

Welcome home. That's what he said. Maybe he says it to everybody. I don't care.

I drove maybe a quarter mile and pulled over at the first place I could and put my head on the steering wheel and cried like a baby. Vanessa said "Mom? Mom?" and Ray reached over and turned off the car and didn't say anything, which is why I married him.

On Friday at the ceremony I didn't feel different. On Sunday in the booth I felt different. I don't know how to explain it better than that. For ten years I was allowed. Now I belong. And I was born a few miles from that booth, and my mother is on the other side of it with her foot up on a bucket, and I don't know what to do with all of it at once.

Mood: all of them.

Ya soy ciudadana. I'm a citizen.

I want to write down everything, so this one is long. Get a coffee.

The letter said to be there at 12:30 for a one o'clock ceremony. We were there at 11:45 because I'm me. There was already a line around the building. Hundreds and hundreds of us, in church clothes, holding our letters and our green cards. A Filipino grandmother in front of me with her whole family. A young man behind me from Somalia (I asked) in a suit that was too big for him; he kept pulling the sleeves down. Two sisters from Vietnam holding hands. A man from Guadalajara who said he had been waiting for this day since 1978 and was so nervous he forgot his reading glasses, so I read him his form.

Inside, you go to a table and you give back your green card. That was the first strange moment. Ten years in my wallet, and a lady in a cardigan takes it and puts it in a box with a hundred others and says "Next." I almost asked if I could keep it. I didn't.

Ray and Vanessa had to sit up in the balcony with the families. I could find them because Vanessa was waving her little flag like she was landing a plane.

A judge came out in her black robe. She told us that September 17 is Citizenship Day, because it's the day the Constitution was signed, in 1787, and that this is her favorite day of work all year. Then a lady read out the names of the countries, one by one, and when they said your country you stood up. When she got to the M's and said Mexico, half the room stood up at once, and people in the balcony yelled and whistled, and somebody's tía (somebody's auntie) yelled "¡Viva México!" at a citizenship ceremony, and even the judge laughed.

Then we raised our right hands and repeated the oath after her, a line at a time. There's a part where you "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure" all allegiance to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty. I didn't know the word abjure. I said it anyway. Last night I looked it up in Vanessa's dictionary. It means to swear off. To give something up, under oath.

I don't know how you give up the place where your mother is. My cousin Lupe says since Mexico changed the law we don't stop being Mexicanas, so it's okay. The paper says one thing. The heart says something else. I said the words. I meant them the way you mean your vows at a wedding: I meant the part I understood and I trusted the rest.

We said the Pledge. A young woman sang the national anthem and went all the way up for the high part and everybody clapped in the middle, which I don't think you're supposed to do. Then they called us up by rows for our certificates. Mine has my picture on it, the one where I look like I'm at the DMV.

Outside there were ladies at folding tables registering people to vote. I registered. Vanessa made me show her the paper twice.

After, we went and had carne asada, because what else.

And here's the truth. I thought I would feel different. I waited all afternoon to feel different. Mostly my feet hurt from the new shoes and I was hungry and I kept touching the certificate in my purse to make sure it was still there. Ray said, "How do you feel, Señora Americana?" and I said, "Like me." That's all.

I called Mamá last night from the kitchen. She cried. She said "¡Felicidades, mija!" and then she asked if I had eaten.

The TV in our waiting room is on the Spanish channel or the news, depending on who gets to the remote first. Today it was the hurricane all day. Floyd. It's enormous. On the satellite picture it looks like a white plate covering the whole ocean off Florida. Then they showed the highways in the Carolinas, every lane going the same way, cars not moving, people standing next to their cars in the heat. One of our patients, an older man waiting for his blood pressure check, said, "Parece la línea." It looks like the border line. The whole waiting room laughed. Then nobody laughed, because it isn't funny, all those families with their kids in the back seat and no idea if their house will be there when they get back.

I said a prayer for them on my lunch.

Tonight I ironed my dress for Friday. The navy blue one with the white collar. I ironed it twice. Ray says if I iron it again it'll be see-through.

Mamá won't come. She has her crossing card, but her leg can't stand two hours in the line, and she can't sit in a big hall all afternoon with her foot down. I know that. I told her it's fine, and it is fine. She'll light a candle for me at her church at one o'clock. She told me that like it was the same as being there. Maybe for her it is.

Two more days. I keep practicing the Pledge in the car like somebody might test me on it at the door.

Weather: sunny, like always. Here it's always somebody else's hurricane.

Weekend at Mamá's.

The leg is the same. That's what I told Ray on the phone, "the same," and he knows what that means by now. It's a sore on her shin (I won't write more than that, she'd be embarrassed) that started in June when she bumped it on the car door, and with the diabetes it just won't close. Her doctor in the colonia is a good man. He's been her doctor for twenty years. He changes the dressing on Saturdays and my brother Beto's wife Gaby does it on Wednesdays. I bring the supplies from this side, the good gauze and her test strips, and she sends me home with a bag from the farmacia for Ray's mother, because the same pills cost a third over there. That's our family's border economy. Everybody carrying kindness in both directions.

This Saturday the doctor used a word with me in the hallway. A word I know from work, from the charts I file. I didn't want to hear it in Spanish either. He said not now, maybe not ever, if she keeps her sugar down and her foot up and lets it heal. If. Si Dios quiere. God willing.

So I cooked. That's what I do when I'm scared. Caldo de pollo with no potatoes and lots of squash, the way the diabetes lady at our clinic says. Mamá said it tasted like hospital food. I said Mamá, it's your own recipe with fewer potatoes. She said, "Exacto."

Beto came by after his shift at the factory and fixed the latch on the gate, and then the three of us sat outside in the dark with the radio on low, like when Papá was alive.

Five days until the ceremony. Mamá made me say the Pledge of Allegiance to her. In English. She doesn't understand English. She said it sounded very nice.

The letter came!

Ray called me at work to read it to me over the phone because he couldn't wait, and he knew I couldn't either. Oath ceremony. Friday, September 17, 1999. Downtown. Bring this letter. Bring your green card.

Norma, my office manager, heard me yelling and came running around the corner because she thought a patient had fallen down. Then she hugged me. Then she told Dr. R., and he came out of an exam room with his stethoscope still around his neck and shook my hand. Then the whole waiting room clapped, and I have never been so embarrassed in my life, and it was wonderful.

Two weeks. I'm going to need new shoes.

Line report, for those of you who don't cross every weekend.

Two hours and forty minutes today. We got in the line at 3:15 and got to the booth at 5:55. I know because Vanessa timed it on her watch for a school thing. (Her teacher asked them to write about what they did this summer and Vanessa, God help me, is writing about the border wait.)

Things you can buy without getting out of your car in the San Ysidro line on a Sunday afternoon: churros, still warm. Chiclets from little girls younger than Vanessa, which breaks my heart every week, and every week I buy them. Cups of mango and cucumber with chile and lime. Newspapers from both sides. A plaster Virgin of Guadalupe as big as a fire hydrant. A plaster Tweety Bird, same size. Blankets. A crucifix made out of seashells. Windshield washing, whether you want it or not.

Ray sleeps. He can sleep anywhere. It's a gift from God and I hate him for it. Vanessa does her homework on top of the cooler. I listen to the radio and watch Mamá's hill in the side mirror, getting smaller.

People ask me why I don't just bring her over. People who never had a mother with a house. People who think a green card is a key that opens every door, when really it's a key that opens one door, for one person, and my door is not her door.

That could change after the oath. They say a citizen can ask for a parent. I haven't told her yet. I want the certificate in my hand first. I'm superstitious like that. Mamá made me this way.

Reading: the booklet of civics questions, again. I know all the answers now. I read it anyway, like a rosary.

I passed.

I'm writing it all down now that my hands are steady enough to type. Yesterday, 8:30 in the morning, the INS office downtown. I took the whole day off. Ray drove me and waited in the car because he didn't want to pay for parking, which is so Ray.

You sit in a waiting room with fifty other people and every one of you is holding the same manila envelope. Nobody talks. It's like a dentist's office where everybody is there for a root canal. They say your name wrong ("Mary Sole?") and you go into a little office with a man and a desk and a flag.

He was tall, with a mustache and reading glasses on a string, and he didn't smile once until the very end. First you swear to tell the truth. Then he goes through your whole application, question by question, all the things you already answered on paper. Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? No. Have you ever been a habitual drunkard? I promise you that is really a question. I said, "No, sir," and I had to bite the inside of my cheek not to laugh, because I was thinking about my Tío Chuy.

Then the civics. He asked me: What are the colors of our flag? Who was the first President? How many senators are there in Congress? Who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? (William Rehnquist. Thank you, Vanessa.) What is the Bill of Rights? Who said "Give me liberty or give me death"? That one I almost froze on and then it came to me, Patrick Henry, like it was sent by an angel. Then he read me a sentence and I wrote it on a paper: I want to be a citizen of the United States. I wrote it very neatly, like a schoolgirl.

Then he closed my file and stamped something and looked at me over his glasses and said, "Congratulations. You'll get a letter with the date of your oath ceremony." And he smiled. He has a nice smile. Somebody should tell him to use it more.

I walked out to the car and got in and Ray said, "Well?" and I couldn't talk. I just nodded and nodded. He yelled "¡Órale!" so loud the parking lot man turned around.

I called Mamá from the pay phone at the gas station. She said "Gracias a Dios" about fifteen times.

Vanessa has made me flash cards. Index cards and markers, the question on one side and the answer on the other, and she drills me after supper like a little sergeant with a ponytail.

"How many stars are on our flag?" Fifty.
"What do the stripes mean?" The thirteen original colonies.
"How many amendments are there to the Constitution?" Twenty-seven.
"Who elects the President?" The Electoral College.

At that one Ray, who was born in National City and has been an American citizen every single day of his life, looked up from the paper and said, "I thought the people did." Vanessa made him sit at the table and take the test too. He got fourteen out of twenty. I got twenty out of twenty. I will not let him forget this for a long, long time.

It's a funny thing, to be tested on something your ten-year-old just is, automatically, because she was born on this side of the line. She knows all the presidents in order from school. She also knows every word of the Pledge and she says it with her hand on her heart and her eyes closed. Last night I asked her what she thinks it means to be a citizen. She thought about it and said, "It means they can't make you leave."

Ten years old. I didn't know what to say. I said, "Go brush your teeth."

The interview is Thursday. My envelope is ready: the letter, the green card, my Mexican passport, our marriage certificate, the tax papers, two photos, and a rosary, which is not on the list.

Three hours and ten minutes in la línea yesterday coming home. A record for this summer, and not the good kind. Mamá's leg the same. My back hurts from the car seat. Too tired to write. More tomorrow, si Dios quiere.