"I fell in love with America long before I arrived.
Awed at the larger than life legends that I watched in what few cartoons and movies still broadcast in a country where the official party line was to hate everything American, I grew up just waiting to come here.
Here was the land of Pecos Bill, and of Paul Bunyan. Here men walked with a swagger, and a confidence that never manifested itself in my own homeland. Here walked John Wayne (I didn’t know him as The Duke then) and Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn, Bogart, Cagney…so many.
Here, the women were all beautiful and untamed.
They all looked like Olivia DeHavilland, Lauren Bacall, and Loretta Young…and Betty Davis’s eyes were mesmerizing, even to a ten-year old.
Texas was here, so was New York, and California; names that to a young boy sounded like Valhalla, El Dorado, or Atlantis; mystical, mythical, and magical.
Then I arrived, and I tell you that everything was true, my new country was everything everyone had said about her.
Yes, my new home wore her clichés magnificently, like a Mackie design on a body by Monroe.
When they said that this is the land of milk and honey, it’s because milk flows through her rivers, and honey drips from her every tree. And when they said that the streets were paved with gold, it’s because the stuff covers her highways, from sea to shining sea, and she sparkles in a world otherwise dull and dark.
Here, I came home to a shining city on a hill.
I am a fortunate man. A man who lost a loving mother, then found love, warmth, and comfort once again in the generous embrace of my adopted mother, Lady Liberty.
May God bless America forever."
by our own Luis Gonzalez
And may God bless you, Luis!