Coming to America in the spring of 1987, just 18 years old and knowing only enough English to understand the difference between fastball and curve, Eddie Perez’s path to citizenship began as an unmarked and baffling roundabout.
Around noon, Perez remembered, he landed in West Palm Beach, Fla., on his flight from Venezuela. Someone from the Braves, the team that signed him back home in Ciudad Ojedo, was supposed to pick him up, he thought. He took a seat in the airport and waited. And waited. Close to midnight, he gave up. A helpful police officer finally got him to the team hotel.
On his first morning in professional baseball, he went to the lobby for breakfast.
“Have you already had breakfast?” a staffer asked. All Perez understood was the word “breakfast.”
“Yes, yes,” he answered hungrily. He was sent off, returning to his room where he awaited a meal that he thought was coming but never arrived.
The next morning, Perez thought he had it figured out. He would answer no this time. Only the question changed: “Do you want breakfast?”
“No, no,” he said. Again, he was sent away hungry. Poor guy might have slowly starved had a teammate not showed him the way to the buffet on Day 3.
Upon such almost comic beginnings was built a lasting relationship between a Venezuelan catcher and the country to the north he now calls his own.
It was around the last Fourth of July that the former Braves player and current bullpen coach was finishing off the process of becoming a United States citizen. He had passed his citizenship test — having studied off an instructional CD on the drive back from spring training and with the help of his two very Americanized children — and was soon to take his oath.
This Fourth of July, he found himself in a full-page New York Times ad celebrating the contributions of immigrants who plunged fully into the American experience. Thirty-eight people were chosen by the Carnegie Corp. — as in Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie — as part of its decade-long program, “Great Immigrants: The Pride of America.”
They ranged from the sultry star of “Modern Family” Sofia Vergara (Colombia) to Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Thomas Sudhof (Germany) to NASA’s director of solar system exploration Firouz Naderi (Iran) to the bullpen coach for the Braves.
They represent “immigrants for all different fields who have helped make America what it is,” said Carnegie Corp. President Vartan Gregorian.
It is the goal of Gregorian’s group to encourage some of those millions of legal permanent residents to become naturalized citizens, as well as to serve as a reminder of the contributions of the immigrant.
Carnegie Corp. holds up the selected few “as sources of inspiration,” Gregorian said. There is no cash prize, nor big awards ceremony, just a very well-placed pat on the back for a few of those who made the effort to become citizens.
Getting over the disappointment of not getting to meet Vergara, Perez was nonetheless honored.
“My mom (back in South America) asked, ‘Does that mean you’re not Venezuelan anymore?’ I said no, it’s something very good,” Perez said.
Perez did not leave his home all those years ago out of desperation. His family had good jobs in the oil business — this was before Hugo Chavez took power, nationalized the industry and discarded many of the established workers, including Perez’s family.
This was his choice: stay home, go to college, become an engineer, take a good oil job. Or strike out on his own in a foreign country and face the long odds of making a career of baseball.
“Everyone (back in his birth country) was saying why you go over there, why you wash your own clothes, and make your own food and do all that when you have everything here? Well, I liked baseball. My dad (who died in 2002) loved baseball; he wanted me to be a baseball player. And look at it now,” Perez said.
Perez labored for eight years in the minors, absorbing the language and the culture in such places as Burlington, Iowa; Durham, N.C.; and Richmond, Va. To teach himself English, he’d always try to room with an American player. He bought the local paper, turning to the account of the previous night’s game and trying to match the words to what he knew had happened.
Finally, Perez was called up to the Braves, full-time in 1996. He quickly became Greg Maddux’s preferred catcher. He was the MVP of the 1999 National League Championship Series victory over the Mets.
He began coaching with the Braves in 2007, becoming a fixture in what is often a flighty business.
“This country gave me everything,” Perez said. “(Becoming a citizen) was something I owed. Thanks to this country and the Atlanta Braves I have this life.”
You want patriotic sentiments on the Fourth of July? Just talk to someone who is American by choice, not by the fortune of birth.
“This is what our country was from the beginning. We opened our arms to everybody,” said Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez, who as a child was brought here from Cuba by his parents. “It shows with Eddie, my parents. You let us in your country we are going to be good citizens.
“This country took us in from Cuba. Mom and dad became citizens. Mom retired as a school teacher. Dad worked hard, all the way to social security. I get to manage a major league team. We’ve been raised in a great country; we’ve lived the American dream,” Gonzalez said.
Having been guided through the citizenship process by a judge he met at a Braves fantasy camp, Perez said he now feels a real connection to the country that was lacking before. He has joked with those in the clubhouse that now he’s going to teach them all how to vote. Having spent the majority of his life in America, Perez is honored to be working on his second year as an American.
“That’s the best part — now I can stand up for the National Anthem, and think, alright, now I’m a part of this,” he said.
And how was this newly honored immigrant planning to celebrate the Fourth? Fully, very fully.
First he was down to run 6.2 miles with 50,000 friends in the AJC Peachtree Road Race.
Then make his way to Turner Field, where he’d change into his uniform and go to work coaching a little baseball.
Can you get any more American than that?
