From Here: Remembering September 11 from Mexico
Dr. Mark A. Arcuri is an integrative coach, author, speaker, and psychology professional based in Querétaro, México, where he works wiht clients worldwide. He is the author of A Life Aligned and serves as Associate Dean and Program Director of the BS in Integrative Health program at Walden University. More at drmarkarcuri.com.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was living in New Mexico and preparing to see patients. I had the television on before my first appointment and remember the images from New York, along with the confusion of the people reporting what they were seeing. The news anchors were speculating, correcting themselves, trying to understand something none of us yet understood. I had grown up in New York, and my parents were still there, so I called them. My mother had turned off the television while getting ready for the day and initially had no idea what I meant when I asked what was happening. "What are you talking about? What do you mean, what is going on?" is what I remember her saying.
There was something strange about being thousands of miles away and telling my parents what was happening in the city where they lived. By the time my first patient arrived, the morning had changed completely, although I remember surprisingly little about the hours that followed. I cannot tell you what my patients and I talked about or whether we accomplished much of anything. I remember the mood more than the conversations, a somberness that settled over the day as the scale of what had happened became clearer. The telephone call is still one of the pieces that remains.
I had already been away from New York for several years by then, and I have now been gone for about three decades. For most of that time I lived in New Mexico, a place that became home without ever erasing where I came from. I still sound like a New Yorker. I still identify as one when someone asks where I am from, even though the arithmetic of my life now makes that answer more complicated than it once was. And today I am writing from Querétaro, México, where I have lived for two years after nearly a decade of visits, and where another word has entered the way I understand myself: immigrant.
I do not think I understood that word from the inside when I lived in the United States. I knew people who had immigrated, worked with people who had immigrated, and lived in a country where immigration was permanently part of the political conversation. My own right to be there remained invisible to me because it had never been in question. I did not carry a residency card. I never stood in an immigration office wondering whether I had brought the correct document or listened carefully for a question in another language while hoping I had understood it before answering.
When I moved to México, I thought I understood fairly well what I was doing. I was relocating, bringing much of my work with me, learning Spanish, establishing residency, and settling into a house in Querétaro. I had spent enough of my professional life thinking about transition that I should probably have known how incomplete that description was. A change can happen on a calendar long before a person has caught up with it. I crossed the border in one day. Becoming someone who actually lives here has taken much longer.
That difference has shown itself in ordinary ways. My professional life began changing in directions I had not anticipated. I started writing more, my work shifted, friendships developed here, and the city gradually stopped feeling like the place I had moved to and became the place I returned to. Even the house took time. I recently set the dining-room table for friends for the first time in nearly a year and realized afterward how long it had taken me to do something as ordinary as invite people fully into the life I had begun two years earlier.
I have probably learned the most through language. My Spanish is better than it was when I arrived, and I am still regularly reminded that I came from somewhere else. There are conversations in which I am a few seconds behind, procedures everyone around me seems to understand without explanation, and small exchanges in which another person has to make an accommodation for me.
Most are unremarkable moments. Taken together, they have made foreignness something I experience instead of something I observe.
TThat is the position from which I return to September 11 now. The attacks were followed by a period in which being foreign, or being perceived as foreign, carried consequences in the United States that I never experienced. Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh communities faced a sharp increase in hostility and hate crimes, while federal policy brought additional registration and scrutiny to certain foreign visitors. The FBI recorded 481 anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents in 2001, involving 554 victims. A year later, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System required certain nonimmigrant visitors to be fingerprinted, photographed, and registered with immigration authorities.
My life in México is far removed from those experiences. I came here voluntarily, with legal residency, continuing employment, and enough resources to make the move possible. I have been welcomed far more often than I have been made conscious of being foreign. I would not use my experience to explain the lives of people whose religion, nationality, appearance or immigration status exposed them to suspicion after September 11. Living here has simply changed the place from which I look at what happened.
I think back to the person I was in New Mexico that morning, watching the television before his first patient arrived. He was horrified by what was happening in New York, frightened for people he loved, and trying to understand events that were moving faster than anyone could explain them. He was also securely inside the American "we." Whatever else September 11 unsettled for him, his belonging to the country was never part of the uncertainty.
I understand that security differently now because I have spent the past two years learning what it feels like to enter a country as someone who was not born there. México has treated me kindly, and I remain aware of the generosity contained in being allowed to build a life in a place that was already home to everyone around me. I have been surprised by how much belonging can grow while the fact of being foreign remains. Perhaps the two do not cancel each other. At least in my experience so far, they seem capable of existing together.
That has become part of a larger change I did not foresee when I moved. I came to Querétaro expecting a different place and discovered that living in a different place would alter the way I looked back at the places that came before it. New York did not become less mine when I left. New Mexico did not disappear when México became home. Instead, each place seems to have changed the meaning of the others, and I have become interested in what can be seen only after we are no longer standing where we once stood.
Each September, I hear my mother's voice again in my memory, asking what I was talking about after she had turned off the television to begin an ordinary morning in New York. I remember the confusion on the screen before anyone understood what we were seeing, and the somber day of work that followed. I am remembering all of it now from Querétaro, carrying a residency card in my wallet and speaking a language that still gives me away within a few sentences. I am still trying to understand some of what happened that morning and some of what followed. I am simply looking at it from somewhere I never expected to be.