I’ve never considered “immigrant” my calling card, even though it’s one I’ve always carried.

I arrived here first as a 3-year-old boy in the mid-1970s, settling with my family in Northern California, in a small town with trees so thick that their branches mingled high over the roads. My mother introduced us around the neighborhood not just as a new family, but as a Peruvian family (she signed cards, “from your Peruvian friends”). It mattered to her that people knew, whether to convey her pride or pre-empt their questions. Even when you’re trying to fit in, you can’t help standing out.

She connected with other women in the area from Spanish-speaking countries, forming a group they called the Lovely Latin Ladies. The food, music, laughter and nostalgia infusing those Triple L gatherings remain among my most vivid childhood memories. It’s taken me this long to realize that in Spanish the verb for “longing” and the noun for “stranger” — “extraño” — are the same word.

I am older today than the lovely ladies were then. After some back and forth between Lima and California in my childhood, I’ve made my home in the United States for decades now — going to college and graduate school, passing the citizenship test, marrying a native-born American, even seeing our children born in the nation’s capital. I’m an immigrant, but over the years the label has moved lower on my drop-down menu.

Is immigration something you do or something you are? Is it a step on the way to becoming something else or does the passage itself forever define you?

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The longer I’m here, the more it’s become a memory, an evocation of a long ago that I share with my children, much as we might construct a family tree.

In recent years, though, the distance has narrowed between memory and identity, between immigration as a once upon a time versus a here and now. In our politics, the presence of immigrants is again a contested campaign issue. But even that word — “issue” — is too convenient, a buffer between policy and humanity. It’s one thing to ponder and debate issues, as I do in my work. It’s another to be one.

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