Citizenship is not a piece of paper. It’s not a passport stamp or some legal definition sitting in a government filing cabinet. Citizenship is a voice, loud, insistent, and never quite finished saying what it needs to say.
When I speak, the sound doesn’t just come from me. It echoes back across centuries, carried by people who crossed entire oceans to find a voice, and by others who never crossed anything except their own front yards before a political border crossed them. My citizenship sounds like a chorus of distinct, sometimes clashing origins: Poland in 1900, Mexico/Texas in the 1800s, England in the 1700s, and France in the 1600s. Somehow, all of them are speaking the same fractured, stubborn English, saying the same thing: We are here, and we matter.
On my dad’s side, citizenship reads like a record of relentless pursuit. In 1600, Arnauld David Bronaugh left Laroche, a quiet stone-built town in the Auvergne region of France, to gamble everything on the Virginia Colony, before the word “American” even meant anything. He didn’t immigrate into a nation. He helped build the scaffolding of one. His son, William, born in La Rochelle, France in 1624, continued that trajectory as part of the Huguenot diaspora, trading the familiarity of home for the dangerous promise of religious freedom. Their arrival predates Ellis Island, the Constitution, and the very concept of the United States. Their citizenship wasn’t granted by a bureaucracy. It was forged in the wilderness.
My dad’s ancestors kept that pattern going. The Sandidge family fled England’s rigid class system in the 1700s, where faith and social standing dictated the absolute terms of your existence. They traded the predictability of oppression for a violent, unfinished experiment. It’s hard, in our era of constant documentation, to grasp the silence of their struggle. There are no “Day in the Life of a Colonist” TikToks. No Instagram stories of ships tossing on a grey Atlantic with dramatic filters. Their sacrifice was never “content.” Not a single moment of it was performed for an audience. Yet their quiet persistence is the bedrock of the rights I get to exercise today.
Much closer to today, my great-great grandfather Zig Urbanowicz, a man from Kraków made the same desperate choice in 1902. He left partitioned Poland and arrived in Globeville with limited English and unlimited uncertainty. The “American Dream” did not meet him at the dock with a handshake. Barred from honest work by a Denver society that didn’t trust immigrants, he found the only open door was outside the law. He turned to bootlegging just to survive, trading years of his life in prison to secure a foothold in a country that wouldn’t hire him. It was a jagged, imperfect beginning. But he endured, because he understood something fundamental: the floorboards in Globeville might creak, but they would be his. The language might bruise his pride, but it was his to learn.
If my dad’s ancestors pursued America, my mom’s ancestors endured it.
On my mother’s side, in Starr County, Texas, my great-great grandmother Concepcion C. Mireles was born in 1899, before the nation had decided if she was permitted to belong. She lived through Jim Crow, segregation, and repatriation drives without ever moving, yet found herself navigating the shifting borders of the country. She didn’t chase the American Dream across an ocean. She survived it right where she stood, waking up every day on the same land, yet without moving an inch, finding herself subject to laws that shifted like sand dunes.
My great-great grandfather, Rafael Castillo in Brownsville, Texas learned that belonging required fluency in nuance: Catholic and American, Spanish and English, Mexican and Texan. His life wasn’t some cinematic immigration montage with confetti at the border. It was constant negotiation, proving his legitimacy in systems that frequently confused citizenship with accent.
For my mom’s side of the family, citizenship wasn’t something they chose, it was something that chose them. Their identities existed long before legal borders hardened into iron walls. They stood their ground; the flag in the air just changed, six times so far.
Their story isn’t immigration. It’s continuity. It’s a reminder that citizenship isn’t always about arrival, it’s often about survival.
All of these voices, together, make my citizenship feel more like an obligation than an entitlement. Today I scroll past posts where belonging looks like a performance, flags in the background, curated patriotism timed to trending audio, bios featuring eagles and aggressive slogans. Comment sections where citizenship is measured in decibels, not principles. But when I think about the Bronaughs and the Mireleses, the Urbanowiczs and the Castillos, citizenship feels less like an aesthetic and more like a heavy, precious inheritance.
In this country, it’s easy to treat rights like refillable sodas at a fast-food fountain: automatic, assumed, and free until the cup runs dry. But in my family, rights are heirlooms passed down with a warning label: Do not lose, break, or pawn. Freedom of speech isn’t recreational, it’s a debt I owe to the people who were silenced. Freedom of religion is the interest payment on the faith of generations who fled persecution. And the pursuit of happiness? That’s a road they paved with sweat and sacrifice, and the least I can do is not drive like an idiot.
My voice isn’t always polished. I mispronounce things. I argue too much in class. I question authority, not because I’m trying to be difficult, but because I genuinely believe authority has to earn obedience. My patriotism isn’t performative. I don’t prove it by the volume of my shouting. I prove it by the height of my expectations. I expect my country to live up to its own advertising. “Liberty and justice for all” should not come with an asterisk that says pending approval. Tradition matters, but a tradition that refuses to examine itself becomes rot.
I don’t get to curate a highlight reel of this country without acknowledging the parts that wouldn’t make the feed. And I don’t get to quote the Constitution like a motivational soundbite without recognizing who it excluded the moment it was written. The rights my ancestors fought for come bundled with a responsibility to extend and defend them for everyone. If I only care about my own freedoms, I’m shrinking everything they gave me.
Some people call that perspective naive. They scroll through national dysfunction like it’s doom entertainment, convinced that cynicism is a sign of intelligence. They believe the system is too broken to bother with. But if the system is broken, who exactly is supposed to fix it? Someone older? Someone louder? Someone with more followers? Citizenship means the repair shop is open, and the line starts right here.
Citizenship gives me a voice. It means speaking with all of these ancestors standing behind me, making sure the conversation doesn’t die. It means I speak not to drown others out, but to make sure more voices get heard. It means loving my country not because it’s perfect, but because it’s possible. It means that silence isn’t neutrality, it’s surrender.
Citizenship is not a destination. It’s a direction. And my voice, fractured, stubborn, and hopeful, is the compass I inherited to find the way.
