Immigrant’s Struggle

“It was early September, still hot in Central Texas, with humid nights and yet without hope of thunderstorms that could break the heat and drought. Cecelie smoothed Emil’s hair one final time and then called to Ben Bauer, her favorite brother and their main gin hand, to nail the coffin shut, for Cecilie had cried the last tears over her beloved husband (and first cousin!), Emil. The funeral would be tomorrow morning, and she would sit with his already-odorous corpse one final night.”

So begins the short story I drafted decades ago, in memory of Cecelie Bauer Fiedler, my great-grandmother, whom I especially remember in this time when America seems determined to demonize our present-day immigrant community.

Emil Fiedler had come to Texas in 1881 with his sister Minna and his brother Karl. The three left their parents behind, running a dry goods shop in Dresden, Germany, joining here a large group of their mother’s siblings and parents who had already come to Texas in 1848. By 1885, Emil had married first cousin Cecelie, and the two of them farmed 150 or so acres south of the Mecklenberg community in Fayette County, also owning one of the more successful of the 40odd cotton gins in the county in the 1890s, with the help of hired hands and their growing family of seven children.

But tragedy struck one September day, 1895: Emil was loading the wagon for a trip to Round Top with Cecelie, their children (ages 6 months to 11 years), Ben, and Emil’s mother Christliebe (who had by then come to Texas herself and was living with them to help care for the children during ginning season). Without warning, Emil was dragged and then crushed under the wheels of the wagon as the team of horses suddenly bolted down the lane. He was beyond any help from the doctor who was called from town and died a couple of days later.

Cecelie, brother Ben, and mother-in-law/aunt Christliebe would continue to run the gin together for several more years, but Christliebe moved to Round Top to live with a nephew when Cecelie married another gin hand, A.J. Gest, a few years later. But Mr. Gest had never become a citizen, and that was a problem a few years later.

Although Cecelie herself had been born and raised in Round Top, and had considered herself an American and a Texan, the United States Congress passed the Expatriation Act of 1907, which meant that Cecelie, because of her marrying a non-citizen immigrant, lost her own natural-born American citizenship. Perhaps it was an irritation at first, since women had no rights to vote and few rights to property ownership in their own right (their husbands generally had control of property acquired after marriage), but then at the time of World War I, Cecelie was required to register as an alien at the local post office and to carry her alien registration booklet with her every time she left her home.

What an indignity that must have been, to have to produce a registration booklet to show to anyone who challenged your presence in your own country, to be subjected to public humiliation by the country where you were born, the place where you had worked hard to raise your family. Now Cecelie was barely more than a declared enemy, even though she had never set foot out of the country, and now never could, since no nation on earth would issue her a passport.

Now, in 2025, our president has again withdrawn birthright citizenship for a special category of persons. . . and what country will claim these infants born with no homeland?