1937.
That's the year my ancestors' immigration to the United States ended. My grandmother was born in France and came to this country to live with my grandfather, and while her English was never as good as her French, both were plenty good enough for anyone who talked to her in her years as a teacher and the head of the school she and her husband founded in the U.S.
And even with her, this was not a French family. Her father was born in Michigan, his in Prussia. The family as recently as five years ago had drawings of his father, Herman, as a member of the Owosso Board of Education, or perhaps as a city alderman.
Herman came to this country in 1858 from Pritzerbe in what is now Germany (the 1880 census has Herman claiming Prussian heritage because that's what it was then). The family his granddaughter married into, the Kilmers, came here in the early 18th century with no passports or anything, which is probably for the best given the difficulty of settling on how the hell to spell the name. (Here's the same Kilmer text in another format.) And still on that side of the family, the O'Bryans -- some of whom may be listed here -- came over on a boat from Ireland and on the way added one to their ranks in same boat off Newfoundland. (I don't know a lot more about the story, alas.)
On my mother's side, the details are a little more sketchy, but the immigration ends well before World War II. One ancestor came over long enough before the Kulmer/Kelmer/Kilmers did that there was time for three generations to get their Colonial act on in full view of the woman history has decided just wouldn't die. (The story as told to me also includes a part where the kindly Indian avails himself of Penelope's womanhood; I might have the wrong Penelope Stout, the writer might have thought better of including it in the late 19th century, etc. It's also between possible and probable that the assertion that Penelope Stout lived 110 years is kind of silly and that lives were conflated to make one seem just that spectacular.) This guy and his family came along in time to fight in the Revolutionary War (so I guess if I really wanted to, I could use that lineage to join the Sons of the Revolutionary War, just as I could piggyback onto Herman Frieseke for Sons of the Union).
Then there's this lovely fellow, whose parents were married on Sept. 11. Have some more while I'm here.
Huh. Stucki. I thought it was Stuckey. My mother says it was Stücke. Didn't remember it was Swiss. Asked my mother (who's listed on that Goodner page -- bonus points if you figure out which one she is) about all that, and once she got over the surprise of me calling and all, we had a fun little chat, and now she's going to go hunting for her genealogy, which is all carefully written in pencil on many dozens of sheets of paper. (I hope nobody's gone crazy with an eraser since last I saw those papers; it really is remarkably comprehensive research -- on both sides of the family. I used to have it memorized three generations back for the branches for which we knew that much.)
For others on the tree, such as the Quillers, Wilkinsons, Royers, Prices and Lockes, I have no immigration year or even decade, but I do know some were established families in, say, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, back in the 1850s, back when we were still doing the regular Census and the slave Census. (Have a torture device while you're here; maybe it seems off topic, but the point of this diary is humanity, not brevity.)
So I have been here for a while, between the native blood I have on both sides and the French, Welsh, Scot, English, German, Swiss, Prussian, Irish and whatever other European blood that went converging and begetting between 1600whatever and 1981.
And because those countries are not Hispanic or otherwise places where the people are brown, this new immigration law in Arizona spares my old-blooded yet nonetheless immigrant self. The odds that the wife and I will be in Arizona soon or ever are so poor that they don't have the money to be dirt farmers -- but if we were to go, we'd incur no trouble from the local anti-immigrant element despite my family's long and cataloged history of showing up without being asked or being shipped by boat for manual labor outside all day.
I was born in California and have been within this country's borders for all but two months of my life, but I come from people who were proud of where they came from and kept a record of it, so today I know that I am such a goddamn mutt that one of the countries my ancestors came from no longer exists.
I am an American from all the hell over the place, and most of those places aren't this one.
The wife and I moved to Texas a few years back because this is where I found work.
Moved close to 2,000 miles for work. We packed up everything we had (except our winter coats) and up and moved to where the jobs were.
That's what immigrants do. They move their lives for work.
And where we moved, most everyone is Hispanic or Latino or whatever they wish to be called (their names, mostly). In the office when I started writing this, we had a Ramirez, a Sanchez, a Rodriguez and a Gonzalez.
And me. I'm the sore thumb. My name is about as white as you get without sticking a III or -ington on the end of it.
And the sore thumb is the only one not at risk of being pulled over for driving while Hispanic because I do not look like the people I work with -- 95 percent Hispanic/Latino -- which means that if a bunch of us from work should decide to drive to Arizona for whatever reason ("Hey, let's see if they'll pull y'all over for being Hispanic in America!"), the border newcomer would be just fine, and the folks who were born and raised on this side of the border would be quite apprehensive -- even given all the blood they have from the folks who were here before Europe decided to treat this continent as an blank slate.
And so it would be with white people who visited Arizona anew from, say, anywhere. They, there in their first day in Arizona (and possibly America), would instantly have more citizenship credibility than some folks who have been in Arizona since before Senator Ashurst was that screaming kid in the wagon.
So when I talked to my (thoroughly Latino) boss about this bill, I was thinking not, "Oh, how the Democrats are going to gain from this so amazingly," but of the incredible indignity of it.
And the indignity of it, not the politics of it, is what strikes me first. (The indignity of it is not exactly a new thing regarding how we treat people who don't look like me, but I digress. You're used to it.)
The indignity of it is that if your phenotype means you look like a Mexican, you are already suspect in some people's eyes.
If those people are police officers, they can ask to see your papers -- require that you prove your innocence in a land where, before that bill was passed, you were at least theoretically innocent until proven guilty.
If those people are citizens and they think you might be here illegally and they see police officers minding their own business because no crime is obviously being committed, they can sue the police department because hey, you never proved you didn't get to this country by swimming across the river yesterday morning!
(A friend of mine compared this situation to that of the Fugitive Slave Act, and if you switch Mexican with slave, damned if you don't have a pretty similar raw deal.)
The people who are all up in arms about how there are so many illegals or aliens or [otherness-aggrandizing word]s in this country have by and large forgotten that, hello, somewhere back however long ago in the annals of American dirt farmers and day laborers and other holders of shitty jobs so the kids could go to high school and their kids could go to college and their kids could think derisively about the newest generation of the unwashed, their great-grandparents were busily having their non-English last names butchered, their cultures treated as an affront to America (whose culture is whatever the people in that area have made it to be) and their dreams of a better life beaten by corrupt officials or street thugs who knew nobody who was anybody would give a shit if some Wop or Kraut got home late from work because he was busy being broken in by the local third-generation American whose parents owned the business the Kraut worked at and who was thus a better person than he.
(Imagine having to diagram THAT sentence in school. I may well assign a sanitized version as extra credit one day.)
So while my family tree today contains generals and editors and doctors and award-winning artists of pen or paint, yesterday it contained bricklayers and a man who had to dig his house out of the ground and a boy who was the man of the house at 7 and fatherless at 9 and any number of men and women whose classroom schooling ended so early, if it even began, that Dizzy Dean looked by comparison like Richard Feynmann.
I am here because of the most elite of those and especially because of the least.
I am here because someone back in the day was born without the help of a doctor, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You are an American.
I am here because someone was exiled from a country for believing in or worshiping God in the wrong way and then sent here to work, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You are an American.
I am here because my grandfather's parents poured every last sinew of strength into getting their son a college education, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You are an American.
I am here because the father's bricks were not enough for the son, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You're an American.
I am here because the man who can shoot must defend his country against the other man who can shoot, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You're an American.
I am here because sometimes your best teacher is your mother, not the woman at the school, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You're an American.
I am here because for every unmarked and unknown grave bearing an ancestor's bones in a forest or a field, a riverbed or a swamp, somewhere in this country, there's a face or a name or a story in my heart, and if that's why you're here, congratulations! You're an American.
I am here because I am an American, and the immigrant who came before me was an American.
And if that's why you're here, congratulations!
You are an American.