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Filipino man becomes US citizen at 102 | A 102-year-old man from Philippines, who came to California as a teenager in 1928 to pick lettuce and cabbage, became an American citizen during a naturalization ceremony on Wednesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“I’m happy,” Philippines-born immigrant Joaquin Arciago Guzman said in Tagalog
after Wednesday’s ceremony, where about 7,300 joined him in taking the citizenship
oath. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, nationwide, only
27 people older than 100 have become US citizens in at least the past 50 years.
“It’s extremely rare to see anyone over 100,” the New York Daily News quoted Nancy
Alby, the agency’s field office director for Los Angeles County, as saying. “We
get a handful in their 90s and 80s. It’s more common to see people in their 70s,”
she said. The oldest person ever to become a US citizen was Manik Bokchalian of
the San Fernando Valley community of Van Nuys. She was 117 when she took the oath
in 1997. At the downtown ceremony, Guzman’s niece and caregiver helped him out
of a wheelchair to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance and sing ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner.’ Guzman put his hand over his heart, next to a small American flag in
his suit pocket, the Los Angeles Daily News reported. “It’s hard to believe that
he first came to the U.S. in 1928 and didn’t become a citizen until he was 102
years old,” niece Julie Guzman said in Tagalog. “I’m happy for him. There are
no words,” she said. Guzman’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth Guzman regretted that
Guzman’s wife, Paz, did not live to see the ceremony. She was 89 when she died
in 2007. Guzman, who now lives in North Hollywood, was 18 when he left the Philippines
to harvest lettuce and cabbage in the fertile Salinas Valley fields south of San
Francisco . He returned to the Philippines after more than a decade of toiling
in the fields and he fell for Paz Irene Gatchalian, the daughter of a mayor. They
were married on New Year’s Day in 1940. Guzman returned to the United States before
the birth of the first of their six children, and he supported his family by farming
property he bought with his earnings. Guzman brought his wife and two of their
adult children to the United States in 1984. They all became American citizens,
but Guzman waited to submit an application for reasons that aren’t clear.
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