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发帖数: 109 | 1 October 11, 2010|By Ed Lavandera, CNN Correspondent
Eulalia Garcia Maturey has outlived two husbands, her two children and
decades of bygone immigration laws. At 101, Maturey will become a U.S.
citizen on the 101st anniversary of her crossing into the United States from
Mexico.
The naturalization ceremony will take place Tuesday afternoon in a federal
courtroom in Brownsville, Texas, according to the Department of Homeland
Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Maturey described the feeling of becoming a citizen with one word: "Libre,"
Spanish for "free."
And then in a feisty Spanish voice that makes it hard to believe she's only
4-foot-7, she explained why becoming a citizen at this late stage of her
life is so important.
"I want to spend the rest of my days in this life living legally in the
United States," Maturey told CNN this week. "I was raised here, and I want
to die here."
Maturey also said she feels American in every way but knows that technically
she's not an American, at least not yet.
Eulalia Maturey's path to citizenship is a tale that captures the unusual
way of life on the Texas-Mexico border.
On October 12, 1909, Maturey was just a baby in her mother's arms crossing
the Rio Grande on a ferry boat from Matamoros, Mexico, into Brownsville,
Texas.
In those days, crossing the border was a simple routine. There were no
border patrol agents, and checkpoints focused on customs and trade issues,
according to Anthony Knopp, a history professor at the University of Texas
at Brownsville specializing in U.S.-Mexico border relations.
"We were on the fringe back in those days," said Knopp. "It wasn't hard to
cross the border. There was nobody looking to round people up and send them
back to Mexico."
Maturey and her single mother settled into a quiet life in Brownsville. Her
mother earned money washing clothes, but she never met her father. Maturey
dropped out of school after third grade.
"I didn't want to go anymore," Maturey said. So then she started helping her
mother sift through the growing piles of laundry that needed to be washed
and folded.
Maturey married her first husband at 16; he died five years later. Shortly
after, she married her second husband and had two children.
In 1940, Congress passed the World War II Alien Registration Act, which made
it a federal crime to advocate overthrowing the government. But the law
also required noncitizens already in the country to register with the
government. Maturey did so along with millions of others in the United
States.
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-11/living/101woman.citizen.document_1_texas-mexico-border-border-patrol-agents-border-relations?_s=PM:LIVING |
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