The boundaries between my Mexican and American identity

This essay will be published during this week’s event at Zócalo and the Universidad de Guadalajara, “Are the U.S. and Mexico Becoming One Country?” Register here to join the program in person at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes or live online at 11am PDT on Saturday, September 21.

My favorite pecan pie recipe comes from a Methodist cookbook sold at a church not far from the Virginia farm where my grandmother grew up. The pie’s perfectly gooey consistency comes from an obscene amount of Karo corn syrup; the slightly salty crust accentuates the toasty flavor of the baked pecans. I make it every year for Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday that I celebrate despite not living in the U.S. and not being American.

I was born in Mexico in the 1990s and grew up with the seductive promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This groundbreaking trade deal was heralded as a beacon of regional unity and economic progress. But for us kids, it symbolized more immediate pleasures: the chance to indulge in a Hershey’s chocolate bar or buy the clothes Joey Potter wore Dawsons Creekwhich we now also watched on TV. The promise of belonging to a shared, integrated region defined our childhood, and with it our identity.

I went to a private bilingual school, one of many that catered to Mexico’s growing middle class and prided itself on shaping us into the most American versions of ourselves. Instead of a soccer team, we had basketball; we read coming-of-age novels like Holes and took SAT prep courses in case we wanted to apply to an American university. But even among my classmates, I felt different. I saw myself not only as bicultural, but also as binational.

My grandmother was an American nurse. In the 1940s, she met a visiting doctor from Sinaloa, Mexico in the elevator of the Virginia hospital where she worked. As he held the doors open, he told himself that he would marry her someday. He eventually did. They had five children. The last of them, my father, was born in the Mexican state of Sonora, but qualified for American citizenship through his mother.

The author (left) with her father and older sister during a trip to Oaxaca, circa 1997.

My father was born long before the 1998 law that allowed Mexicans to hold dual citizenship, so he grew up in Mexico with a U.S. passport and eventually a Mexican work permit. In the late 1980s, his work permit expired and he was deported from Mexico. He walked across the Laredo Bridge into Texas with official notice of his deportation from his native country. He took a bus to Chicago, where he slept on a bench at O’Hare Airport until enough hours had passed to legally cross back into Mexico, where my mother and 1-year-old sister were waiting for him.

A few years later, I was born in Mexico City. I didn’t grow up with an American passport, but I did grow up with this story. It was proof of what I felt deep inside: I was both Mexican and American.

For as long as I can remember, my father has tried to pass on his American citizenship to my sister and me. He understands the financial and professional privileges of a blue passport. But because he has never lived in the United States (other than the winters and summers he spent on the family farm in Virginia), he has always hit a dead end. Still, I have always believed that it was only a matter of time before I would get my American citizenship. If my grandmother was American and my father American, why shouldn’t I be?

Although citizenship is still locked behind all kinds of bureaucratic layers and circumstances, I continue to cultivate biculturalism for myself.

When I moved to New York for graduate school on a temporary student visa, I was determined not to let bureaucracy get in the way of my heritage. So I filled out a “petition for alien relative,” a form that allowed my father to petition for permanent residence in the U.S. via a green card. After a few years, I could then apply for citizenship. A few weeks later, I got a response from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: the petition had been accepted, meaning I was eligible for residency.

There was one caveat. I had to contact the Department of State, which processes applications for U.S. family members to remain and ultimately issues the actual green card. Since my case did not qualify for expedited processing, it had to wait until it was due. Last time I checked, the Department of State began processing applications filed in 1994.

The author (left) and her mother celebrate Thanksgiving in California, 2010.

As I looked at the waiting list, knowing that I would have no documentation validating my binational identity for decades to come, something inside me clicked. The NAFTA promise that had us middle-class Mexicans thinking we would be citizens of a culturally intertwined North America felt like a lie. In Mexico, I was half-gringa. In the U.S., I was only Mexican, and not always welcome as such.

I was reminded of this constantly when I lived in the United States, but always in milder ways than foreigners who don’t present as white (which I do). “Sorry, no Spanish here,” replied one woman on the other end of the phone when I called a government agency and asked—in my accented English—for an interview. On Bumble dates, men asked me about my visa expiration date; I dated a man for a few weeks who eventually decided he couldn’t see me anymore because I didn’t have the paperwork to guarantee long-term residency in the country. Second aunts posted Confederate flags with BUILD THE WALL captions on Facebook. I was unwanted. I didn’t belong. I wasn’t who I thought I was.

Four years after moving to New York, I consulted an immigration attorney who suggested a much easier path to a green card. It turned out that I qualified for an O-1, also known as the Exceptional Talent Visa. All I had to do was file the paperwork and wait three months. After a few years on the O-1, I could apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. I should have been excited, but something didn’t feel right.

I knew that my privileged education had opened a path to immigration that many people desperately seek. I realized that being able to choose where I would build my life was an incredibly rare opportunity. But I also realized that living in the U.S., in any way, was not what I was really looking for. What I longed for was a document that acknowledged my deep-rooted connection to my grandmother’s home. I had been desperate for something to validate my identity—papers I could point to that said, “You are from here, and also from there.” But documents alone could not give me that. I went back to Mexico.

Back in Mexico City I rented an apartment far from where I grew up and started buying my produce from local market instead of Costco, where my family usually shops. My poultry and meat came from a cold cuts around the block. In some ways, I felt more Mexican than ever; in other ways, I felt like a digital nomad transplanted from the U.S. to my home country.

Time passed. As my lingering doubts about moving back to the US faded, life surprised me. I met the man who would become my partner, the pandemic came and went, and we got married. I am now pregnant with our first child. As we were considering options for having our baby, my husband suggested we look into giving birth in the US. That would be our way of giving our baby dual citizenship, which would open up employment and educational opportunities. We talked to friends who had done that and looked for doctors. But I decided against it.

Over the past few years I have found a certain ease in my unique Mexican identity while balancing the two cultures I love. I enjoy warm tlacoyos before breakfast while listening to The dailybake peach pie on rainy afternoons in Mexico City and navigate nonimmigrant lines at American airports with detachment. While citizenship remains mired in layers of bureaucracy and circumstance, biculturalism is something I continue to cultivate for myself. And this rich, complex mix of cultures is something I can pass on to my child, just as my father did to me.