In putting together a collection of things as a gift to my new daughter-in-law, I ran across two speeches I've given recently that seem - given the latest issues regarding law and order and immigration - worth revisiting.
[My Naturalization Ceremony Speech]
I am honored and humbled to be here
but I can only guess why I am here
Your stories are probably much more interesting than mine
I’m a Criminal lawyer. The constitutional law I practice is prophylactic not honorific
Yet here I am here today: mid point between your yesterday and your tomorrow.
Today, you become like me -
but unlike me you had to work to get here.
Like you, I have an emotional attachment to another country.
And, as opposed to most of the people in this country that take it for granted, I can appreciate that citizenship means opportunity and that a US passport is a metaphor; it allows movement in more ways than one.
In 1898, my grandfather, Mario Mendez-Colon, an eighteen year old native son of the central mountainous region that was the wellspring of the island’s revolt against Spain, would witness the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States. He was now part of the spoils of war.
There is no indication that my grandfather was in the least bit political or centered on anything but the survival of his family.
But his spirit was unquestionably instilled in his offspring.
Ten years later he would marry.
They would eventually have thirteen children.
Three would die of diseases borne of poverty,
Ten of them would survive;
some of them would become part of the vast Puerto Rican migration to New York,
all would remain doggedly proud of their heritage.
Theirs was a pride borne of an amalgam of years of personal identification melded with political struggle, economic privation coupled with cultural identity.
By 1910, my grandparents, along with their two infant children, were living in Utuado’s barrio Angeles.
A coffee farmer eking out an existence, Mario and his little family were somewhat better off their peers.
But a decade later, their situation had worsened. They now had eight kids and he worked as a laborer.
[period encompasses WWI, Depression, and WWII all of which impacted an already poor country]
In another ten years, the family would grow even more so, now to include eleven kids and with no one but Mario working, now growing fruit and in the midst of a depression from which Puerto Ricans fared even worse.
By 1935, everyone in the family was pitching in; Mario, a tobacco farmworker.
My grandmother and her oldest daughter worked at home taking in sewing. My twenty five year old uncle worked as a store clerk and the three sons were laborers on a tobacco farm.
The older children would soon leave. Of the four that remained at home, the two remaining worked in a textile workshop as hand-sewing items that in a 10 hour day might bring $1.50.
Their world would collapse fully in 1942 with the death of my grandmother but it was the watershed moment that would mark the beginning of their odyssey.
In 1944, preceding by only a few months the Allied invasion of Normandy, Celina, one of Mario’s younger daughters, along with her four-month-old infant, boarded a seaplane at Isla Grande Puerto Rico and headed to NY. She would be the tip of the spear.
Two years later, Vina, his oldest, along with her husband and their teenage daughter, would also leave San Juan for the Big Apple
She was followed by Irma, the youngest daughter; she with a baby forty days old, me.
They were followed soon thereafter by the wives of two of Mario’s sons who had flown ahead to establish a beachhead. The Mendez siege of New York City had begun.
They ultimately merged with others they encountered here and - fellow travelers in a hostile world - forged a tightly-knit tribe.
I did not fully appreciate any of this until my recent excursion into Ancestry.com.
My family spent almost every weekend with each other and yet these people who were now fully established business owners, professionals - who had wonderful homes where they amply provided for their broods - never truly shared with us their stories - how they worked stringing beads, doing piecemeal sewing jobs, being janitors, migrant agricultural workers, plasterers, cooks, bus boys. Doing what it took. Never looking back.
In putting this together I kept thinking that it was your stories that we should be listening to.
I have had 38 fully productive years as a lawyer - from the trivial and mundane to mega cases. Written two books about some of my cases.
But two cases that fill me most with pride are the two adoptions that I’ve done. I’m in awe of someone selflessly committing to that level of responsibility, of upping their skin in the game.
that’s what this kind of feels like to me. Except that it’s a two-way adoption.
I know you appreciate the enormity of what today means to you.
But please do appreciate what you mean to this country.
What made my family strong is that they worked together to get where they wanted to go.
We are now part of the same family.
We sometimes fight and disagree but in that vortex we become stronger.
(Passport) You can add more metaphors
more pixels make the picture vibrant,
strength to the fabric,
In short, we are stronger in our diversity, now more so, thanks to you
So, on behalf of the Southern District United States, I thank you for coming here and helping us fulfill the promise that this country has always held.
Words cannot express how humbled and appreciative I am to be able to address you today.
I wish you a fruitful tomorrow.
