The America I Was Allowed Into begins with a promise I believed in for years: that if I followed the rules, worked hard, waited patiently, and did everything that was required of me, I would eventually arrive at a place where I could fully belong.

What I imagined as a legal path became years of paperwork, permits, interviews, and uncertainty. During that time, my life was also unfolding far from the place where my family and my people continued living, aging, and dying. While I waited, that place changed, and I changed away from it. I never imagined that doing everything correctly would also come with the cost of not being there. I learned to measure my words and to correct myself before others could.

After sixteen years, I was finally naturalized as a U.S. citizen. I expected that moment to feel like an arrival. Instead, citizenship revealed another reality. Fulfilling every legal requirement did not erase the distance between how I perceived myself and how I continued to be read. I am still processing that reality.

There was also a question that stayed with me:

“If it hurts so much, why don’t you go back?”

I was busy surviving.

That is where my research begins. I work from my own experience, without trying to speak for others. I use repetition, altered documents, bodily forms, fragments, and materials that show use and transformation. I am interested in taking what belongs to paperwork, archives, and official records and bringing it into the body, because that is where it ultimately ended up living.

This body of work is not about immigration in general, nor is it about crossing a border once. It is about the cost of having done everything necessary to remain legal, and about the reality I found at the end of that process. After spending so many years pursuing the idea of becoming American, I now understand more clearly than ever that I did not simply become American; I became aware of the kind of American I was allowed to be, and of the America I was allowed to enter.