For as long as I can remember, my father has carried with him a resident alien card. The last time I held it in my hands, it was a bright red ID that would look strikingly different to you from any of the documents that you’re accustomed to having in your wallet if you were born on the North side of the Rio Grande River.

Although my father never rejected outright the idea of being an American, I had a certain youthful impatience with the fact that he, unlike many of his peers, had this option but chose not to take it. I also had a desire to shift our identities on to similar footing at a time when I was only beginning to discover who I was.

The conversation around the dinner table rolled out in the same way each time the topic came up. My father was a Mexican national. He and that land were inexorably linked in a way that I could not yet understand. A piece of paper alone providing one type of participation over another would not have the right kind of thing to do with how he thought about his national identity.

He was right, of course.

After growing up as a farm worker from the age of six, my dad came to the United States as a teenager in 1969 after discovering that his mother’s father had been born in the United States. He worked for various construction and utility companies and found seasonal work in California picking crops and driving combines and processing machines. He would then use the money he earned here to build up, from a small plot, a large agricultural operation of his own in Mexico. He was eventually one of the first farmers in his community to purchase outright a combine for harvesting.

The technique kept us always very close to the international border. It instilled in me what some might call a very American spirit of self-directed enterprise that is a fundamental part of me to this day.

Applicants wait in line for their reserved seat to a naturalization ceremony in Brownsville, Texas on July 2, 2014. They are an hour away from becoming US citizens.

When I was twelve years old and during one of my family’s usual cross-border excursions, we headed North over the international bridge. Sitting in the heat and exhaust of the vehicle queue and waiting for customs agents to process the traveling caravan with flashlights, interrogation, and drug dogs, I looked over to what was a common sight—dozens of little children’s arms reaching up through the bridge side grates from below with open hands hoping for a stray bit of change from the American tourism pouring through on foot.

But this time I saw something different that I recognized immediately. I saw the face of a friend. He was another boy who I had played on the Mexican streets with not too long before I was whisked away to attend elementary school in Texas a few years prior.

Volunteers at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas lead a group of refugee families to a transport that will deliver them to the city bus station where they can reunite with relatives. A recent influx in immigration has brought hundreds of families to the United States that the usual channels have been unable to deal with.

It had been a time since I had seen this friend, and so in that instant I became aware of the huge contrast between him and myself that was only then beginning to be drawn out but already very apparent. Why were we then so different? The opportunity that my father’s resident status had afforded him and us was an imaginary line. The absurdity, the terrifying power of it, and the guilt of a lucky twist of fate flooded my mind and have nested there ever since.

To me, all conversations about immigration have to some degree been colored by that moment. Why is it, exactly, people are not allowed to travel freely across the continent?

You will be absolutely amazed at how automatically you’ll unearth dozens of reasons from your brain for the need to suppress this basic human freedom. And then be equally amazed at how easily those reasons fall apart under the slightest gesture of critical thought. Further still, you will begin to seek out and maybe find some of the very complex structures that make up our current political reality.

Inside a naturalization ceremony, organizers usher in hundreds of soon-to-be citizens and families. Photography was not allowed during the proceedings.

Two days before Independence Day 2014, my father awoke at dawn. He showered and dressed, and stood in his living room in front of a large wooden crucifix gifted to us by the priest of a small church in Mexico when my brothers and I were still kids. Holding a rosary, he recited a Catholic prayer with eyes closed. It was the morning of his naturalization ceremony.

Over a year ago, and for the first time that I’d ever seen, my father openly expressed his desire to acquire full citizenship in a way that showed genuine pride for the country that he had been a part of for so long. I was intrigued by the change of heart and by the time he would spend studying American civics over the next few months much more diligently than was necessary for the citizenship test he was expected to take.

I didn't have to ask why he changed his mind, and I didn't have to ask why he waited so long either.

Right now there are a handful of churches across the South Texas Rio Grande Valley that are housing what they can of the immense influx of refugee immigrants currently crossing our border that we've failed to figure out how to truly help—masses of people displaced by poverty and violence that industrialized economies beyond their control have rained upon them.

People in our own community are volunteering their time daily and donating food and clothing to provide relief. The wave has spilled beyond the containment of the border region into the national public awareness with a fresh urgency—for a time.

A mother and daughter rest inside a relief tent at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas before more refugees are brought in. Family units that include children are reunited with relatives in the United States after processing.

People here talk in coffee shops about the crisis, and about how one of our city mayors, Jim Darling, proclaimed on national television that there is no crisis. They ask why amnesty isn't coming. Others say they’re proud of my dad for having “done it the right way” and that reinforcing border security could prevent more people from “putting themselves in danger”.

I wish I had more to say during these conversations—that I was good enough with words to express all the grayness that’s been soaked into me about the issue by growing up between two countries. Not for large spans of time in each, but a few days here and a few days there—cultural whirlwind.

Hundreds of refugee families and unaccompanied children are expected to flow through the international border and volunteer-run centers like this one where they are offered showers, hot meals, and basic medical attention.

The monolith divide that hangs more in the air all around us than directly over the water and soil of that international border has been largely washed away in me by years of that spin cycle. But the fact remains that being multicultural and being American are far from mutually exclusive. You reach a point in your life when you finally see that they are one and the same.

As much as we may have heard this idea—that this is a country of immigrants—how it’s true and the implications of that are not immediately obvious. It’s also not always an easy experience for a person born and raised under a different flag.

Even for many of us born in the United States, citizenship is not a status—it has been and continues to be a journey. All this makes the American experience very special indeed, and we stand on the edge of our proud piece of land as much citizens of the world as anything else.

An event organizer at a naturalization ceremony hands out mini American flags to soon-to-be citizens. The judge would later get them to wave in unison during some playful banter. Photography was not allowed during the proceedings.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need for my dad and I to be similar in regards to citizenship. (In my late teens, me and my brothers took on dual citizenship when we became citizens of Mexico.)

So I was surprised to feel the gap that had been drawn by relatively divergent cultural experiences between us close a bit when I heard the speaker at the ceremony finally say the words to the group of 300 pledging allegiance that day and to their families in the audience, many of us in tears.

“You are now U.S. citizens.”