What does citizenship mean to you?
There’s the legal definition of what constitutes a citizen: someone who was born in this country or someone who becomes a citizen later in life. Then there’s the thing it represents: belonging, civic duty, nationality.
Fernanda Santos became an American citizen after she married one, and that question of what differentiates her from so many other undocumented people she’s written about in her years as a journalist has nagged her.
So, she dove into the question of who is a citizen in a new piece for Guernica Magazine. In it, she profiles Abril Gallardo, who is undocumented and lives here in Phoenix and organizes for the group Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA.
Santos told The Show that people like Abril transcend the neat divide between citizen and non-citizen. They were brought here illegally as children, which means they don’t have legal status, but they’ve turned their situation into a source of power.
