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short-sleeved shirt, called my name. When I stood up, he waved me into his office.
    “You can sit right here,” he said, gesturing at a chair near his desk. Then he asked his first question. “What do the stars and stripes on the flag stand for?”
    “The fifty states and the thirteen colonies,” I said promptly.
    “What is the Bill of Rights?”
    “The basic rights accorded to all citizens.”
    “What is a progressive tax?”
    I froze. “A
what
!?” I looked at him blankly. “That’s not one of the questions. I don’t remember seeing that—”
    “Only kidding,” he said. “You passed. I don’t need to ask you any more questions.”
    My father was called next, and he passed too. Within days we were summoned to the federal courthouse, where we were sworn in. Now that I was a citizen, I could never be thrown out of the country, and I could get an American passport, and I could vote. I could even run for some elected offices if I wanted to.
    It was during this period that I became one of the founding members of the Portuguese-American Congress (PAC). I saw that the Portuguese community in Newark got the short end of the stick—a prison in our backyard, an attempt to turn half of our park into a baseball field, an incinerator in our neighborhood—because as a group we didn’t vote in large numbers. I understood that the only way we Portuguese could make ourselves felt was through voting, so PAC had as its central mission getting the community registered to vote. Of course you had to be a citizen in order to vote, and so, where necessary, PAC helped people get their citizenship.
    In 1984, like many Portuguese families who’ve been here for a while, we moved out of Newark—to nearby Elizabeth—where I would live with my parents until I married Jim in October 2000.
    By this time I had graduated from East Side High School, where I’d done well, finishing in the top 20 in a class of 460. I had applied to several colleges, including New York University, and I was accepted by all of them, but I wanted to go where many of my friends were going, which was to the Newark campus of Rutgers University. Most of my other friends were going to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, nearby.
    College was a smorgasbord, and I loved a lot of what I was sampling: architecture, even though I couldn’t draw; anything having to do with law;
The Great Gatsby;
psychology; Karl Marx, even though I thought he was a bit far out; Margaret Mead. In the end, I became a political science major with a psychology minor. I also pushed—unsuccessfully, but I pushed—to get a Portuguese Studies major going, so our faces would be represented in the required curriculum along with other ethnic faces. I was active enough that the biweekly Portuguese-American newspaper
Luso Americano
seemed to mention my name regularly. I primarily stayed involved in Newark, although I also became politically active in Elizabeth, where I now lived.
    Somehow, by the time I was twenty-two, I came to the attention of Elizabeth’s mayor, Tom Dunn, who asked me if I was willing to be appointed to the Elizabeth Planning Board, whose mandate was to approve residential and commercial building projects, landscaping, and so on. I said yes. I was the only board member who wasn’t male or over seventy.
    The day I walked into city hall to attend my first meeting, there was Ray Lesniak, later Jim’s mentor, standing at the door. I knew him by reputation. Everybody did. He was Elizabeth’s state senator, but he was also known as the go-to guy. Now he’s become a national power broker—a strong fund-raiser for people such as Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, both of whom made pilgrimages to his house to attend his fund-raisers on their behalf and to pay their respects. He was a local lawyer who was then about forty, a man who ate, drank, and slept politics. No other life, so far as anyone knew. No wife, no children, and a succession of much-younger gorgeous blond companions.