By Victor Greto
PHILADELPHIA — It does feel different.
Shortly after the ceremony Thursday morning at the National Constitution Center, where 75 immigrants from 39 countries swore fealty to the United States, Marika Malfitano’s pale blue eyes dazzled.
“It was a moving ceremony,” said the long-time Wilmington resident. “I really feel now I’m part of the country, proud to be an American.”
The same could be said for Rocco Duran of Newark and Ruth McNeill of Ocean View, all of whom officially became American citizens after living in the U.S. for decades as “resident aliens.”
Statistically, these three Delaware residents are rare.
Sixty percent of all immigrants to the United States naturalize soon after the first five years. Another 15 percent more do it within 10 years.
But for many different reasons, Malfitano, Duran and McNeill waited for decades for the right to vote, to be called for jury duty, and to get an American passport and present themselves to the world as Americans.
“It’s exciting,” Duran said after the ceremony as he was kissed by his wife Eda. “What I’m going to do now is register to vote and get a passport, so I can travel unencumbered.”
That’s another word for free.
Rocco Duran
He has the small, thick hands of an Italian laborer.
Right now, they’re deftly holding a knife and fork and cutting a grilled piece of pork in the sunny cafeteria of Astrazeneca in Newark.
Rocco Rafael Duran, 50, senior director of quality assurance at the pharmaceutical company, moved from Colombia to the United States more than four decades ago with his mother and brother.
The family joined Rafael, Duran’s father, who came to New York City a year earlier and found work at Nabisco. Eventually, his fatherbecame a computer programmer, long before computers meant anything more to most people than bulky machines spitting out printouts.
Duran’s Colombian heritage is mixed — his father married the daughter of an Italian immigrant to the South American country.
“When I was growing up,” Duran says, “coming to this country was a dream come true. We believed the streets were literally paved with gold.”
They weren’t, and aren’t; but those indifferent streets were, and are, filled with opportunity.
They were certainly filled with more opportunities than his coastal hometown of Barranquilla, near Cartagena, Duran says. Although they never went hungry there, they knew they were not moving up, either.
His family lived in Manhattan in a room of an apartment rented to them by a Colombian family.
“All four of us slept in the one room,” Duran says. “The lady of the house would cook and we would pay them.”
At 9, he knew no English, but a bilingual student his age in a New York City public school — “I still remember her name,” he says. “Gloria” — stuck with him day by day, translating and going over the alien words. In nine months, he spoke English well.
His father earned progressively more, and Duran was able to attend Bishop Dubois High School on 130th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
Soon, his father earned enough to buy a house across the Hudson in Bergenfield, N.J., and he finished his high school years there.
But in the early 1970s, toward the tail end of the Vietnam War, he signed up for a four-year stint with the Air Force, where he became a pharmacy technician.
“As someone who came from a Third World country,” Duran says, “I felt a sense of duty to serve.”
He also wanted to gain experience traveling the world. And he found his vocation.
When he was discharged, he attended Rutgers College of Pharmacy in New Jersey, where he met his future wife, Eda, a Puerto Rican immigrant.
They married in 1982 and have three children, Ashley, 20, Tiffany, 17, and Rocco, 12.
It may seem strange that a Hispanic-Italian man and Puerto Rican woman have two daughters with Anglo names, he says.
“She liked those names,” Duran says of his wife, who named the children after characters on the TV show “Dynasty,” “and I said OK. But I’m sure my parents didn’t care for it.”
But young Rocco is named after both his father and his great-grandfather, a Sicilian.
The date of young Rocco’s birth, Sept. 11, eight years before the crumbling of the World Trade Center towers, points to why Duran is now getting his citizenship after all these years.
“The only thing I couldn’t do up to 9-11 was vote or hold public office,” Duran says of his permanent legal resident status.
But after the towers fell, he says, “There was talk of taking benefits away. It became difficult to travel without a passport.”
And in his role at Astrazeneca — ensuring the quality of the pills and medications the company produces — Duran will be traveling soon to Italy and Switzerland on business. As soon as he became a citizen of the United States Thursday, he applied for his passport.
Duran says he is proud of his Colombian heritage, as much as he is proud to be a U.S. citizen. “This is a great country,” he says, “but we live in a global community.”
Recently, Duran noticed his son wearing a Colombia T-shirt, a Puerto Rican baseball jersey and a baseball hat printed with “USA.”
“That’s us,” he says.
Ruth McNeill
When Ruth McNeill officially became an American Thursday, her 60-year-old heart still ached for Germany, but it swelled just as much for the United States, where she’s lived half her life.
“I didn’t come for political reasons or money,” says McNeill, a real estate agent in Ocean View, of her coming to America 30 years ago. “I fell in love with a man.”
That man, William McNeill, was a soldier stationed in Germany in the late 1960s.
She already had a full and interesting — if career-stilted — life before the Irish-American won her heart.
She was born Ruth Wagner and reared in Ottobeuren, 45 minutes from the Austrian-Swiss border in the Alps. She was born the year her father, who had been drafted into the German Army, surrendered and took five days to walk back home.
The family owned a bottling company that produced Coca-Cola, but she was inspired by her grandfather, a pewter smith and banker, and wanted to be an architect.
Although she apprenticed to be one, the family discouraged her.
“They told me I was a girl, you had to go into the office,” she says.
So she endured a three-year apprenticeship with an “industrial merchant” to learn office work.
Her parents spent the little money they had on her older brother Horst, who became a scientist. Her younger brother, Guenter, later apprenticed as a chef.
Although she met her husband in the late 1960s, they did not marry until 1975.
For a very good reason.
“I wanted to make sure I married the right person, that he had a job,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that we were compatible.”
She visited the States, met the parents, and saw that he had a good job with the Philadelphia Electric Co.
It took her nearly half a year to do the paperwork for both countries, she says.
It was a bit of a shock for a European open with her own and others’ sexuality to suddenly move into a small town outside Philadelphia in the mid-1970s.
“This was kind of baffling to me,” she says, “that you didn’t talk about sex or talk about preventing pregnancy, and everyone pretending they’re not drinking but the liquor stores were full, and kids had no place to go, and pregnancy was high.”
Conversely, after decades of Americanization, today the “regimentation” in Germany rubs her the wrong way, from street cleanings every Saturday to the country’s strict recycling laws.
Even dressing up.
“I pity them sometimes because we walk around in blue jeans, and they get dressed up just to go shopping,” she says.
Although she says her Americanization is complete, “Deep down in my heart I’m still German. To hand over my passport and citizenship gives me heartache.”
But, like many immigrants who choose to be citizens, 9-11 nudged her over the edge of indecision.
“9-11 came and I saw the devastation, and it made me realize I lived most of my life here and am a part of it and I want to be a part of it,” she says.
But it still took her a couple more years to begin the process. She was busy, yes. But Germany’s lure remained.
“You know everyone when you grow up and live 30 years in a little town and you walk a lot,” she says. “When I go over there, it’s warm and comfortable. But after two weeks I want to go back to the States. This is my home.”
There are other reasons, too, to finally become a citizen of her adopted country, besides taxes and the right to vote.
“My husband cannot threaten to have me deported anymore if I don’t behave,” she jokes.
Marika Angelica Malfitano
She was born in Bermuda to Austrian parents and named after a Hungarian ballet dancer.
She married a progeny of Italian immigrants, has been an Austrian citizen all of her life, speaks fluent German and loves returning to her father’s hometown, Rauris, in the Alps.
Austria is even where her future husband proposed to her, much to the surprise of her father.
But she’s lived in Wilmington and attended private schools here throughout her life.
“Weird, I know,” says Marika Angelica Malfitano, 41.
When she took her oath of citizenship Thursday, Malfitano’s blond hair, sea-blue eyes and pale skin contrasted sharply with an Asian woman who sat to her right, and a Hispanic man to her left.
But it confirmed what she has become over more than three decades.
“I love going back to Europe, but their way of life over there is so slow,” she says. “I’ve become too Americanized. I thrive on the go-go-go.”
In her case, much of her go-go-go entails taking care of her two children, Devon, 11, and Clee, 10, and working at two part-time jobs. She does office work for a friend who owns her own business, and helps an interior decorator with her clients.
She started the citizenship process two years ago.
Part of the reason for the delay was she had to figure out how many times she had been in and out of the country since she moved to Wilmington with her parents in 1970.
“That was quite a lot of times for me,” she says.
But the prime inspiration for finally becoming a citizen was her husband, Scott Michael Malfitano, a former personal assistant to Delaware governor Pete DuPont, and who also worked on DuPont’s unsuccessful presidential campaign.
“I’ve never voted, and my husband, being a political person, thought that was important,” she says. “I’ve been putting it off.”
Weird, because she says she’s not going to ever live in Austria. And even her parents became U.S. citizens back in 1991.
So why?
“I just felt like I have never needed to,” she says.
Sometimes, being American is about assuming all the rights that go with citizenship without realizing you don’t have them until it’s too late.
“I’m getting older, too,” Malfitano says.
She’s worried about the tax implications and her children’s well being if either her or her husband should die.
Regardless, the act of naturalization is a confirmation of a reality that she has known since she was a child.
“I got my roots here now,” she says. “So it’s about time.”