Thank you for your interest in becoming a citizen of the United States of America. Your decision to apply for U.S. citizenship is a very meaningful demonstration of your commitment to this country and we applaud your efforts.
They wanted a nation ruled by laws, not men.
AMERICAN GOVERNMENT
A. Principles of American Democracy
1. What is the supreme law of the land?
I first learned to write with India ink in square, slim notebooks of lined paper. These housed my first strings of letters, meticulous repeated and trapped between two dark borders. When we moved, I got a new notebook in school, bright yellow with funny cartoon children holding enormous pencils and sailing on roller skates across the cover. Each page had lined paper, but it also had an empty box for drawings. The first thing I drew was the view I remembered from the airplane: wild, loopy pillows of pink and blue clouds. A few pages after that came a picture of myself wearing red, white, and blue and holding a microphone. Underneath, in awkward, ugly print, I scribbled: "We sang at the 4th of July. My favurit song is Yor a Grand Old Flag. I likk that song." I was six, and I had never written in pencil. It was exciting, but the most exciting part was watching a graphite smudge get slowly devoured by the rounded tongue of a Pink Pearl, then immediately writing over the watery blur underneath. Nobody cared about the mess.
B. System of Government
32. Who is the Commander in Chief of the military?
March 19th, 2003. we had a quiz in freedom class today. i woke up early to study the wrong chapter in my freedom book, so of course i failed the fuck out of that motherfucker. pardon my freedom.
les vacances sont finies.
Map of the United States including state capitals.
I've lived in California, Washington, Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, and Boston. Utah is an alien landscape of hollowed-out stone, backlit by the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen. Texas sports a giant blue fishbowl for a sky. In Florida, there are glow-in-the-dark jellyfish floating in the ocean. Except Minneapolis/St. Paul, I've never been to the Midwest, but I imagine it as scattered pockets of clean, well-lit strip malls populated by the terminally blond. Two places I'd like to see are Phoenix and Baltimore.
AMERICAN HISTORY
60. What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?
I didn't know that I was white until high school. Until then, I always checked the "other" box on surveys and standardized tests. On the school bus, the girls all fought each other to play with my hair. They'd braid it, let it go, and laugh when the braids instantly unraveled into a mess of frizzy cornsilk. In Mississippi, a teacher asked me to join her dance team, "for color balance." When we danced to "Bombs Over Baghdad," I got real cornrows for the second time in my life (the first was in Mexico), and the girls all laughed again. "Why are white girls so tender-headed?"
B. The 1800s
71. What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?
Sign on a float during the Krewe de Vieux parade, Mardi Gras 2006: Buy us back, Chirac.
C. Recent American History and Other Important Historical Information
81. Who did the United States fight in World War II?
From ages 8 to 11, I spent at least an hour a day at the home of the sixty-year-old Jewish man who lived across the street. He taught me how to play dreidel and invest in the stock market. His Anglo-Protestant wife taught me to make Jello eggs on Easter and cooked me pancakes on Sunday mornings. In middle school, after I'd moved to a different part of town and stopped seeing them so much, we were learning about the Holocaust. When I came home and reverently told my father that the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened in all of history, he got upset and wrote a letter to the school, suggesting that they devote at least some class-time to the other holocausts: Ukraine, Armenia, Yugoslavia. I was so embarrassed that I never delivered it.
INTEGRATED CIVICS
By learning this information, you will develop a deeper understanding of the United States and its geographic boundaries, principles, and freedoms.
A. Geography
88. Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.
My senior year of high school, two classmates and I took an unchaperoned graduation trip to New Orleans. At Cafe du Monde, we met three boys from Texas who told us they were 21 but couldn't have been a day over 16. The one in the cowboy hat, who the other girls thought was the cutest but I didn't, took a special liking to me. He told me, in confidence, earnest blue eyes watering slightly, that I had the perfect body to be a stripper. We walked through the Quarter and stopped by the Mississippi River, where on one side of the bank, a team of amateur biologists was measuring the water toxicity, and on the other side, a naked fleshy homeless woman was taking a swim. "I bet you won't," I whispered, and the boy in the cowboy hat promptly stripped, goaded by hoots of encouragement from his friends. Wearing only his hat and white cotton jockeys, he jumped in. One of the amateur biologists crinkled her nose and informed us that there are at least fifty known carcinogens in that water. I may have smiled.
ENGLISH TEST
To help you prepare, USCIS released a reading vocabulary list found below.
Father of Our Country
right
Flag Day
How
lives/lived
pay
want
a
we
largest
American Indians
colors
dollar bill
free
fifty/50
red
taxes
white
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