quiltedopenlettertounclesam-blog

[quiltedopenlettertounclesam-blog]

Yes, Uncle Sam, love does exist.

One evening last December, my husband and a friend quizzed each other on U.S. citizenship questions. I sat in the living room with them, listening as I worked on my husband’s Christmas quilt. They were studying for the final step of the U.S. citizenship application process, where 10 questions out of a pool of 100 are administered orally by an immigration official.

Questions range from as easy as #28 (“What is the name of the President of the United States now?”) to as difficult as navigating the subtleties between the rights and responsibilities of citizens versus residents as bestowed by the Constitution (#49 “What is one responsibility that is only for United States citizens?” and #51 “What are two rights of everyone living in the United States?”).

Over a decade ago, I passed my high school A.P. U.S. History exam. Immediately thereafter I replaced most of the memorized facts with post-high-school-worries and summertime shenanigans. Bearing witness to the study session unfolding in my living room was an excellent refresher course in U.S. history and, much like my husband, I began internalizing the 100 items the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) deem most important for new citizens to know. We hold our new citizens to high standards.

Occasionally, self-quizzes pop into my online periphery, touting citizenship questions and daring me, “Could you pass?” I’ve seen cringe-worthy videos of random victims fumbling through incorrect answers to the same questions naturalized citizens are required to answer correctly.  Most of the questions I knew vaguely, but the USCIS only accepts a highly specific set of answers.

Off the top of your head, and without help from Alexa or Google:

- Do you know the answer to Question #70? (“Who was President during World War I”)

- How about Question #23? (“Name your U.S. Representative”)

- Can you differentiate between a responsibility granted by the Constitution for U.S. Citizens (Question #49, mentioned previously) and a right of everyone living in the United States, citizen or not (Question #51, see above)?

- Couldn’t we ALL benefit from a cozy living room refresher course?

Let’s back up: My husband and I have spent the last half-decade wading through the U.S. immigration system together, petitioning for visas, requesting permissions, demonstrating evidence, and spending large chunks of our savings on the aforementioned. What began with a petition for an interview at a U.S. embassy in South America turned into a whirlwind visa approval with strict time limits on his entry to the U.S. and just 90 days to legally marry on U.S. soil, morphing into formal requests for permissions to work and travel, then a temporary conditional residency, resulting in our filing for permanent residency and, most recently, applying to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Phew.

I recognize that my socio-economic and race privileges, paired with good will and support from family and friends, made any of the above possible. This has been an exhausting and humbling and privacy-invading process for us, and I’m disturbed to think how exponentially more difficult it would have been under different circumstances: if I were not white; if my family could not have helped us prove financial solvency; if ours wasn’t a heterosexual relationship.

Almost every step of our immigration process mandated we show evidence of our continued genuine relationship, and we not only sent the required formal documents (marriage certificates, joint leases, bank accounts, and tax returns), but we also attempted to show the humanity of our relationship, that which black-&-white documents simply cannot convey, in hopes that humans on the receiving end of our application would see us as real people.

We included the receipt for our wedding rings, bought as soon as we learned we were granted an embassy interview and marking the exact moment we allowed ourselves to believe our dream might become reality; we included ticket stubs from flights taken together throughout his native country and the ominous one-way ticket from his country to mine; we included photos of our impromptu marriage ceremony in a U.S. county government office, when our 9-year-old niece boldly stepped into the role of Maid of Honor with a beautiful reading – in two languages, no less! – as follows:  

Today I am marrying my best friend, The one I laugh with, The one I live for, The one I dream with, And the one I love.

(These very words are now stitched into my husband’s Christmas quilt)

We were stuck for almost 18 months at the “permanent residency” step of our immigration process due to unprecedented backlogs in the USCIS system. It was during this time the defining phrase “a nation of immigrants” conspicuously disappeared from the USCIS mission statement.

A nation of immigrants: I am as proud of my husband’s South American heritage as I am of my own immigrant ancestry. I am just two generations removed from the brave Jampolsky family that anglicized their Eastern-European surname to the American-sounding “Jay.” Question #67 of the civics exam states: “The Federalist Papers supported the passage of the U.S. Constitution. Name one of the writers.” One of the accepted answers is John Jay, a founding father of the USA.

While my family shares John Jay’s name today, our “Jay” comes from immigrant tailors taking a purposeful measure to avoid implicit bias when 20th-century New Yorkers purchased their garments. My family’s original surname is etched on the wall at Ellis Island, meaning the Statue of Liberty was our beacon of hope, as it was for so many others. For more on Lady Liberty, see citizenship Question #95.

A few weeks before citizenship questions ricocheted around our living room, we received an “RFE” from the USCIS regarding my husband’s residency petition: the dreaded Request For Evidence. After sending bank letters, joint health insurance policies, utility bills, photos from our first years of marriage, and affidavits from family members, we now had a hard deadline to provide even more proof of our relationship, and failure to comply risked deportation. Was there still room to doubt the existence of our love?

We pulled out all the stops. We slogged through every single document containing our two names, and we spent over $100 at the copy store making a veritable tower of papers. We are products of our tech- and texting-savvy generation, and it dawned on us we had no idea how to send via snail-mail a stack of documents too thick for paperclips, staples, or envelopes.

We ultimately tied the giant bundle together with ribbon leftover from tethering our garden vines, and after placing everything in an over-sized box we filled the extra space with plastic bags blown up like balloons. Our previous attempts to prove our humanity with photos and anecdotes obviously hadn’t worked, as shown by this Request For Evidence, but perhaps this MacGyvered packing method would do the trick?

After a few anxious weeks, my husband’s permanent residency was approved. In rapid turnaround, he soon applied for U.S. citizenship – I’ll save the conversation surrounding one’s willingness to pledge loyalty to the U.S. in today’s xenophobic environment for another time. We are back to playing the waiting game, but at least this time we have a solid method of distraction by way of studying for the citizenship exam.

Let’s shift gears to this Christmas quilt: When you’ve just spent upwards of a thousand dollars on applications, copy fees, and postage (and when a thousand dollars is still a considerable sum of money), what helps pass the time while your husband works evenings, without increasing the credit card balance? A quilt. What will be unequivocally better than any gift found on Amazon? A quilt. What can I give to the person who opened my eyes to the beauty of a new culture, who walks with me through international bureaucracy barriers, and who continues to be the best thing to happen to me each day? This quilt.

I grew up accompanying my mother to Quilt Guild meetings and falling asleep under a patchwork made by her and her friends. I marveled at the Gee’s Bend quilts and devoured children’s books about the Underground Railroad, with illustrations depicting specific quilt blocks that signaled safe houses. I showed up at college with an extra-long quilt for my dorm room’s Twin XL mattress, and I myself have made T-shirt quilts for friends when beloved tees from high school athletic teams and drama clubs became too threadbare to continue wearing and washing.

Quilt symbolism fascinates me, so I carefully chose representative blocks for this foray into heirloom quilt making: the “Log Cabin” block, with its square hearth in the middle wrapped in outward radiating strips, for the homes we’ve made on two continents; my mother’s favorite “Flying Geese” flock around the centerpiece, for although geese migrate long distances, they always find their way home; “Storm at Sea” for my husband’s love of the ocean and recognition that life’s storms are better weathered together.

Quilting purists will notice my Storm at Sea block contains one too many diamond-and-triangle rows, the result of a novice attempt to make things fit after flipping the square centerpiece on its corner – let’s chalk that up to the Amish quilting tradition of purposefully including an imperfection in each piece, or in my case, a fair few imperfections.

I was, perhaps, a little overzealous trying to hand-quilt the entire piece before Christmas, which is why basting stitches are still visible (though I might argue the basting stitches reflect our life together as a work in progress). Leaves and curling tendrils will eventually replace the basting stitches, embodying the fruit vines my husband so carefully tends, and ruefully reminding us of the string used to bundle our Request for Evidence papers.

Quilts need stitches every few inches to anchor their layers, and I needed something to anchor me in the tumultuous close of 2018. Hand quilting is meditative: making uniform, even stitches means rocking the needle up and down, over and over again. Placing the needle perpendicular to the fabric, find the tip of the needle from underneath and use the thimble you filched from your mother’s sewing room decades ago to push the needle through, then begin the process anew. I recommend playing an audio book and losing yourself in someone else’s world and in a rhythm of stitches.

I was like the millennial Betsy Ross stitching into the night, trying to finish before the holiday, and my husband the modern-day immigrant Francis Scott Key, finding his own quilted Star-Spangled Banner* on Christmas morning after having survived the bombardment of plagues that the year 2018 hurled at our family.

*For anyone keeping score, “the Star-Spangled Banner” is the correct response to Question #98: “What is the name of the National Anthem?”

The living room study session paused: “What the *bleep* does ‘Spangled’ mean?”

Follow-up observation: “Spangled” is not an English vocabulary word I’d had occasion to translate into Spanish, nor is it easy to do so. Despite not having a direct translation, I got the point across with “estrellada,” and “cubierto de estrellas.”

At one point, I showed process shots of the quilt to a friend (also an immigrant and someone who has selflessly adopted me and my husband on numerous holidays). While swiping through photos she mused, “Making quilts is something typically American, isn’t it?”

A little context: I spent the better part of six years living in South America, struggling all the while to put my finger on the U.S. equivalent of the traditional dishes, the typical costumes and dances, and the ingrained cultural customs I witnessed. Everyone in my new country inherently knew they must greet each person individually when entering a room, and everyone expected that pork belly and freeze-dried potatoes be served at weddings (usually well after midnight), just like everyone assumed fast-food hamburgers were wholly representative of the U.S.  Sigh.

Thanks to my immigrant friend’s nonchalant observation, I discovered that quilting was the very evidence I sought: a cultural link, a generational continuum, a method of telling stories and connecting families. Quilting is an American tradition. Quilting is MY American tradition.

Returning to the pre-Christmas study session, quilt on my lap, Question #55: “What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy?” Easy answers include voting and running for office. Farther down the list of USCIS-approved ways we can participate in our democracy is “write to a newspaper.” At the raised eyebrows I saw appear over my quilt, I explained Letters to the Editor and Op-Eds.

“So … Anyone can write?”  “Yes.”

“… And does anyone actually write?” “Well …”

Apparently, not all answers to the USCIS questions have contemporary resonance (seeing as writing to a newspaper certainly pre-dates 160-character limits), and it seems not all South American countries encourage writing to newspapers, thus the question I just fielded. Once I’d gotten past the shock that writing to a newspaper is now a somewhat archaic concept, I used the classic example of “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” to show that anyone can indeed write to a newspaper. It was Christmastime, after all.

To jog your memory, in 1897 a young girl named Virginia wrote to the New York Sun doubting if Santa Claus was real, and the editor’s response is a timeless explanation that “often the most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”  You’ll notice there was no implication that at age seven, “It’s marginal, right?”

When all is said and done, it’s important to note my husband and I are grateful. Although I aim to remind the USCIS that this will always be a nation of immigrants, its systems have allowed me and my husband to live, be free, and pursue our happiness on U.S. soil.

So, in the Christmas spirit (albeit belatedly), with help from Virginia and the editor at the New York Sun, and with renewed inspiration to contribute to my democracy as Question #55 of the citizenship exam suggests, I conclude with this:

 Yes, Uncle Sam, love does exist.

Our relationship exists “as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” and this gives our “life its highest beauty and joy.”

And yes, Uncle Sam, we are a nation of immigrants.

As neither of these two statements has been clear from the stacks upon stacks of papers and documents and signatures and petitions and forms and photos we dutifully provided, I invite you to come lay under my husband’s Christmas quilt, painstakingly stitched with generations-old traditions and infused with an entire nation’s dreams. For without these dreams, “there would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

I invite you to wrap yourself, as our future children will, in the warmth of this labor of love, and to dream with us our American dream.