Excerpt from Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I held my passport and my mica, my green card, in my hand as we stepped forward. I could feel the ridges on the card, and I thumbed them gently. That's all that they needed to see—a piece of plastic with my name on it. I thought the card and the passport should at least weigh more, that they shouldn't be as light as they were. They were too important to be that light.

I handed my card to the officer, who was talking about a football game and looking over to the other officer; he hardly noticed that I was there. He only looked at me when he held the card up against my face to compare the two and waved me forward.

"I'm telling you, that catch would have won the game," he said, returning to where he'd left off in his conversation, looking over to his friend again, who in turn was looking at the scanning machine as my bags passed through the conveyor belt. We were an aside in a football commentary, a mere interruption.

"No, it wouldn't have, they would have needed a two-point conversion," said the other agent, avoiding me altogether.

They handed me back my card, and I walked through the metal detector as they continued their conversation. It couldn't have taken more than three minutes from the time I gave him my card to when I picked up my luggage on the other side of the machine. Rubi went even faster because she handed them her U.S. passport, and they were less cautious about citizens. Just like that, we were done. We did in three minutes what my father had waited ten years to do but couldn't.

Excerpted from Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Copyright © 2020 by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.