Patriot’s Day (Or, The Day I Became An American)
Today, April 19, is Patriot’s Day. Officially, it marks the battles of Lexington and Concord which kicked off the American Revolutionary War almost 250 years ago. Personally, it marks five years since I moved to Massachusetts, where that battle was fought and that revolution began. And today, April 19, 2021, is the day I became a part of that more perfect union those original patriots fought to establish. Today, I became an American.
That’s where the poetry ends.
The story behind my journey to citizenship is, sadly, entirely unoriginal. The reality of many who get in line, like we are told to, is that our wait can be decades long. 19 years, 9 months, and 9 days, in my case. In that time, America recognized me as a child dependent, an international student, a temporary worker, and very briefly a permanent resident. With each of those titles came new opportunities and new obstacles. In that time, I excelled from elementary school through graduate school, married the woman of my dreams, bought my own little corner of this land, and now daily contribute to the technology of its future. I succeeded because of America, but also in spite of it.
For all the awe sparked by reciting the pledge of allegiance at school, or singing the national anthem at football games, or watching fireworks light the beach in July, coming to terms with the reality of America was sobering. Behind the Constitution, there’s a Three-fifths Compromise. Behind the Thirteenth Amendment, there’s a penal labor exemption and the reality of mass incarceration. Behind the call of the New Colossus to the tired, poor, and huddled masses, are the silenced stories of exploited African slaves, Chinese railroad workers, Mexican day laborers, and more. America is what it is today because of the poetry of its ideals, but also the grimness of its reality.
I have been an immigrant for more than two-thirds of my life. For too much of that time, I believed that my life would be fundamentally better if I could just be an American. That acceptance and success were just some documents away. The events of the past few years have cleansed me of that notion. To too many, my legal status matters less than my shade of skin or my net worth. After constant rhetoric painting people like me as invaders, shrieking at us to “go home,” I now revel in the ability to defiantly say “no.”
It has been an honor to be a citizen of India, the world’s largest democracy. It will be a privilege to now join the world’s oldest. Ironically, having spent so long shedding my Indian self to be more American, I’m looking forward to exploring my Indian heritage and correcting that imbalance. I will make room for my story, my culture, and my people here because America and I both deserve that.
I think I will be proud to be American. Not because of blind allegiance or naive idealism. But because we have a history of change at the hands of imperfect people striving to build a more perfect union. Model citizens like George Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. are magnified in the US Civics Test. Even with their shortcomings, America is better for them. The country we inhabit is not the country any of them had to. The needle moves, slowly and at the cost of too many who deserved better, but it moves. Forward.
America is, for better or worse, the America of the immigrant and of the nationalist. But it is no less one’s than the other’s. This land is my land. Today, it belongs to me as much as I to it.
Originally published at https://write.arunkurian.com on April 19, 2021.
