Undocumented, Undeterred

Seated in the back of his parents’ van, Enrique Ramírez ’16 felt a surge of panic as the blinding red and blue lights of a police car blared behind them. Enrique and his parents had just moved his older sister into her dorm at the University of Texas at Austin. Driving back to Houston, his father had unknowingly crept over the speed limit. The family escaped with only a speeding ticket, and the officer moved on. As the police car drove away, Enrique sighed with relief. He, his parents, and his siblings are all undocumented immigrants to America. Had the officer inquired further, their routine traffic violation might have led to deportation.

Natives of the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosí, Enrique’s parents decided to move to the States in 1996, driven primarily by a grave devaluation of the peso in the early-1990s and the resultant rise in their debts. In his attempts to recoup some of their losses, Enrique’s father moved to Houston, Texas to work alongside his brothers in the petroleum industry. But having discovered the better quality of education that existed in America, he stayed, bringing his wife and children over on visas that quickly expired.

British, Irish, Immigrant, and Gay

On a stifling late-June morning, Ruth Watterson sat frustrated in front of her television, its sole channel playing on repeat the footage of Patriots player Aaron Hernandez’s arrest for first-degree murder. She took out her laptop, opened up Internet tabs for multiple news sites, and “refreshed, refreshed, refreshed.” After her umpteenth click of the reload button, a new item finally appeared at the top of the page: the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Windsor to strike down part of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Upon reading through the article, Ruth let out a literal sigh of relief before calling Kristin, her partner of four years, to share the news.

For Ruth, the decision was monumental. A few months ago, on Valentine’s Day, she had proposed to Kristin. The Court’s verdict opened a door to American citizenship, one that had been firmly closed before: she and her fiancée could now start a family in the States.

An International American

Upon his arrival at Harvard, Michael C. George ’14 faced a peculiar dilemma. A participant in the Freshman International Program, he was given a name tag on which to write his country of origin. For Michael—born in Hawaii, raised in the Philippines, educated in Malaysia, and currently resident in Mexico—filling out his FIP name tag was an exercise in confronting his own unusually complex origin story and his place at Harvard as an international American.

Michael’s parents met while pursuing graduate degrees at the University of Hawaii. His father was born in the Indian state of Kerala, a southern region with a strong Christian community (“hence why my name is Michael George—maybe it doesn’t advertise my ethnicity well”). His mother is from the northern town of Agoo in the Philippines, though she is also of East Asian ethnic descent. Michael recounts that his difference in appearance from his mother was often a source of confusion for people while he was growing up. In the Philippines, he remembers, passersby would sometimes look inquisitively at his mother and him: the lighter-skinned woman speaking Tagalog (with a regional accent), walking with a native English-speaking, darker-skinned child through the stalls of the local wet market.

The White Cross

Polka music drifts across linoleum tiles, soft murmurs lingering in the air with the scent of incense from the church above. Fluorescent bulbs cast pools of white light onto paper-clothed tables, mylar balloons standing guard over platters of lilac-frosted cupcakes. Seated in the middle of the room—surrounded by doting cousins, nieces, nephews, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—Rose, my grandmother, glows in the attention from her family. Today is our much-beloved matriarch’s ninetieth birthday, a celebration of her biographic debut in 1924: the year that saw the death of Vladimir Lenin, the deposition of the last caliph of the Ottoman Empire, and the imprisonment of Adolf Hitler for the Beer Hall Putsch.

Driving through the valley of Johnstown, Pennsylvania that morning, my parents, sister, and I pass by the remnants of a once prosperous city, dotted now with run-down steel mills and shuttered store fronts. Upon arriving at my grandmother’s Ukrainian church, its three gilt onion domes sitting on the edge of a charcoal sky, we descend to the basement banquet hall, where our extended family has already begun their revelry. Making our way through the crowd, my mother introduces me to countless third and fourth cousins, men and women whom I have never met before, yet whose eyes, noses, and brows bear a marked resemblance to my own.

Setting Off

The email arrived on a typically chill late-November morning. I was sitting on my bed, toothbrush in hand and paste pooling at the corners of my mouth, when it appeared at the top of my inbox: “University of Cambridge—Conditional Offer of Admission.” I threw my toothbrush onto the nightstand and scrolled through the message, still slightly bewildered, though thrilled, by the news.