Under a blue sky at the intersection of four states, 19 people from 11 different countries became naturalized U.S. citizens Tuesday morning.
The special naturalization ceremony, held at the Four Corners Monument on the Navajo Nation, was part of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s annual celebration of Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.
This year Immigration Services will welcome roughly 36,000 new citizens during dozens of naturalization ceremonies from Sept. 17 to Sept. 23.
The 19 new U.S. citizens hail originally from Canada, Colombia, Denmark, El Salvador, Ghana, Mexico, Moldova, Peru, Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom, and currently reside in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona.
“This is the first time we’ve had people from four states able to naturalize in their own state at the same time,” said Mario Ortiz, district 18 director with Immigration Services.
Six of the 19 call Colorado home, including Gabriella Rico, of Durango. After taking the Oath of Citizenship, Rico said she left her native Mexico three years ago for a life in the U.S. with her husband and twin babies.
“I’m so excited and so happy. I’m so proud of me,” she said.
Telluride resident and Peru native Ursula Cristol was also one of the six from Colorado. She said that after 15 years in the U.S., she was thrilled by her new citizen status, which allows her certain benefits such as a U.S. passport and the opportunity to vote.
“It’s very exciting and very emotional. ...We took the kids out of school today and plan to hike around on this beautiful land to celebrate,” she said.
The keynote speaker for the ceremony was Dr. Yohannes Woldemariam, associate professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango.
Woldemariam, a naturalized U.S. citizen himself, reflected on his journey from growing up in Ethiopia, becoming a Sudanese refugee and eventually settling in the U.S., where he’s since become a noted scholar and refuge migration expert.
At time where some 300,000 Syrian refuges have risked their lives to seek asylum in eastern Europe – some 2,500 refugees have died in 2015 so far – the ceremony and the long, diverse paths the 19 new citizens took to eventually call America home had a heightened degree of significance, Woldemariam noted.
“If you’ve been keeping up with the news, thousands refuges are migrating just to be able to survive. For a chance at freedom. That in itself is what I reflect on today,” he said.
“I landed in Kennedy airport coming to the U.S. I didn’t even have much money to make a phone call. I struggled, worked hard, earned my civil engineering degree and political science PhD..I honestly don’t think there are many places in the world where you can do that.”
