Somewhere in the archives of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is a document claiming that my wife and I met on Tinder in the summer of 2015. Among the papers of the hundreds of thousands of people who get welcomed to or deported from the United States each year, it may or may not be written that her dating profile read “100% Latina,” while mine said something corny like “Travel Like You Mean It,” with the requisite skiing and hiking photos.
Our file, if it still exists, probably details what kind of toothpaste we use and which side of the bed we each sleep on. It might include a watered-down story of our first date, when she expected me to pick her up at her house while I waited impatiently for her at the restaurant.
I learned on that first date that Carolina was from Chile, where a decade earlier I had spent years as a student and then teacher, and that she was living with her cousin in Colorado’s Vail Valley, where I lived, too. I also learned that she had arrived on a tourist visa but had overstayed that visa to remain in a place she found irresistibly beautiful.
By then it was late 2015 and the presidential campaign was already in full swing, brimming with heated talk about immigrants and their future in America. Carolina was, in the parlance of the day, “illegal.”
Regardless, we fell in love.
The first time I proposed, more than a year after our first date, we were sitting on leather chairs in the office of an immigration lawyer we had just met. A few nights before, Donald Trump had won the election. My wife cried. I may have cried a little. The fear we felt was strong — visions of ICE raids, separation, barbed wire, forced bus trips to places that she wasn’t even from. I am the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, with all the spiritual baggage of Nazi Germany. The echoes of that unbearable persecution weighed on me heavily.
The lawyer told us that our only path forward, legally speaking, was to marry. Looking back, my wife might say it was less of a formal proposal — no knee and ring and such — and more that I high-fived her and declared, “Looks like we’re getting married!”
The second time I proposed, more officially, I was kneeling on concrete at Denver’s Union Station as she prepared to board a bus back to our home in the mountains. My father had cancer, and I had taken some months away from my teaching job to be there for him as he died.
Carolina had been coming down on weekends to visit, and this time, as she left, I decided to give her the ring we had bought together. As I knelt on the cold concrete of the station platform, ready to profess my love, I saw a pile of vomit just two feet from my knee and jolted up.
She said yes.
Between the rush of the departure and the vomit on the floor, the romantic moment evaporated. I gave her a quick kiss and said, “Just get on the bus.”
We were married in my parents’ living room in Boulder on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration. This was not an accident. You might remember his “American carnage” speech, and we were worried about what would come next.
Because of my father’s illness, our wedding was a family-only affair, with my parents, my brothers, my wife’s cousin and her husband. My father threw up halfway through the ceremony. We did not talk about politics. We did not turn on the TV or see the Women’s March, although we learned about it later.
We filed our immigration paperwork that Monday.
In our first immigration interview, we stated all the embarrassing facts of our relationship under oath, mining our personal depths to prove our love. Yes, we met on Tinder. Yes, we stayed in a cheap Super 8 motel (it was dog-friendly) when we road-tripped to Las Vegas, choosing to spend our money on buffets and roller coasters. Yes, she sleeps on the right side of the bed.
The interviewer took notes. Detailed notes.
We used an interpreter for her part of the interview, not because she couldn’t speak English, but because she was so nervous that she feared she would say something wrong and be denied (or deported — that was our mind-set then). Instead, it was her interpreter who messed up, indicating through a series of miscommunications that she had willingly participated in a social-security scam. We were told she would have to come back the next day. Nerves. Sweat. Fear.
Somewhere in the records of our federal government is confirmation that my wife has never been nor attempted to be a terrorist, a communist, a human trafficker or a prostitute. She has never attempted to overthrow a government. She has never dealt in narcotics.
The government knows that she has brown hair and brown eyes, though I don’t think they know just how beautiful those eyes are. They know she is 5-foot-3, but they don’t know, and never asked, just how perfectly her body molds into mine, question-marked and curlicued in the shared bed of our home.
For the first few years after she received her green card, we were still too nervous to travel out of the country. Officially, travel decisions were at the discretion of the customs officials, and the uncertainty made us anxious. Would the interpreter’s flub show up on an agent’s screen as he stared down Carolina’s foreign passport? Would he judge her according to her past transgressions and determine that she had slipped too easily into the system?
Also in our record, should it still exist, is a series of notarized affidavits from our friends stating that they knew we would marry as soon as they saw us together, that my wife treated my father as her own as he took his last breaths with the two of us at his side. As witnesses to our relationship, our friends knew that love is love across languages and borders, that what we share is real beyond the documents that define us.
But by law, documents do matter. My wife recently became an American citizen. More than eight years after a phone-app swipe led me into the heart of American immigration affairs and sank me into a fear that I thought my ancestors had left behind, she became an American.
We left our two daughters — products of Tinder, of aligning politics, of an overstayed visa — with my mother before our drive to Denver. Carolina was nervous about the civics test and had studied for weeks. By the time she took it and passed it, she knew the information far better than I did. (“There are how many amendments?” I had to ask.)
In the end, the final interview took less than 10 minutes, and she was sworn in on the spot. I imagine that having two children could not have hurt our application chances. It would have shown an extraordinary level of commitment if all we were trying to do was scam the system.
While reciting the vow — her promise of fidelity to this nation and its Constitution — she was so nervous that she kept flubbing the words in the most adorable ways. “I hereby declare, on oath” became “I hurried to cry on oath.” “Of whom or which” came out as “Off worm or which.”
She has registered to vote. We have already added stamps to her new passport. Our daughters have them, too. They have brown eyes, like their mother. My wife calls me “gringo” when she’s angry at me, in the most endearing way. Everything is in place.
I do not have solutions to the challenges of immigration. I recognize that there are problems. People have tried to scam the system, arranging fake marriages with the same set of paperwork as ours. I understand that the vitriol continues, the bluster, the rhetoric, the layer of tension and violence that simmers beneath the surface, threatening to boil over.
All I know is, tucked away somewhere in a manila folder in the bowels of a nondescript building in Denver (or maybe shredded and dropped into the recycling bin by now), in an act documented and defined by legality and etched into the history of this great nation, it says that I am in love.
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