Citizenship

I've been pursuing my Dominican citizenship since July of last year, as it is a prerequisite to applying for Luis's US visa. In order to apply from the Dominican Republic, I have to show legal residency or citizenship here. Otherwise, I would have to move to the states and follow the paperwork process there (apart from Luis), which takes between 2-3 years. For us, it wasn't an option to be separated for so long, so we were left with pursuing things from the DR side. Getting residency is normally the first step before citizenship, but by Dominican law, I have a right (as a foreign woman married to a Dominican man) to pursue citizenship directly. This is what we opted to do and on January 15th, 2009, I was sworn in as a Dominican citizen. It was a very simple ceremony with approximately 60 people of original American, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean descent. A man gave a short speech about what it means to be Dominican and how we are now responsible to follow all the laws here. Then he read a statement to which we all simultaneously raised our right hands and said, "Yes. For God and for our country." Everyone started to clap and that was it...I became a Dominican in those few seconds. They gave me a lovely flag lapel pin, which I wear proudly on my backpack (ironically, a backpack is a dead giveaway here of being a tourist). Mia, of course, was the hit of the day, and she wowed everyone in the judicial offices with her personality and charm. We have discovered that Mia can get us just about anything that we want, so she accompanies us on many of our paperwork journies. Below is a lovely pic of our family taken after the swearing in. Notice our President's picture in the background (Leonel Fernandez). Many people have asked if I had to give up my US citizenship in order to do this. No, I did not. Because I married into another country, I am able to retain my US citizenship in conjunction with my Dominican citizenship. This is what is known as "dual citizenship."