Her eyes welled up during the “Celebrating Citizenship” video. Her emotions caught in her throat during the national anthem, and she wept while taking the oath of allegiance that anointed her a U.S. citizen. She dabbed away tears during the Lee Greenwood “God Bless the USA” video that concluded her naturalization ceremony Thursday in Denver.
With the solemn ritual a memory, Zoila Gomez sobbed in the arms of her sister, Alicia.
“Oh, it feels so good,” said Gomez, 26, a native of Mexico and budding elite runner who had an outstanding collegiate career at NCAA Division II power Adams State in Alamosa. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”
It was obvious from the tears, the sniffles, the way she clutched the tiny American flag and wouldn’t let go. There were 60 other “candidates for citizenship” in the room, including an 89-year-old woman from Kosovo who could barely walk and a young Peruvian in the U.S. Air Force who will be deployed to Iraq this week, but none was as visibly emotional as Gomez.
“I feel … it’s indescribable,” Gomez said. “A lot of emotions, a lot of memories. You think, ‘Wow, I’m in a very, very special group.’ Every single one of us has a story. I wanted to start asking everyone else, ‘What’s your story?’ You feel like you’re not alone for the first time.”
She says there are two Zoilas. One was born in 1979 in Charcas, a town of 10,000 in north central Mexico, the second youngest in a family of 16 children whose father died when she was 6. The other Zoila came to life after her arrival in the United States in 1996 when the runner within her awakened, even as she was learning English.
“Here I discovered something I learned to love,” Gomez said recently during lunch at an Alamosa sandwich shop. “I guess it was in me, even when I was in Mexico, but I got to discover it here. I always said the runner was born here; Zoila Gomez was born in Mexico. Running is my other half, the part that completes me as a person.”
Gomez knows she has a powerful story to share, and she wants to be a role model for other Mexican immigrants.
“I really think that’s the reason I am who I am,” Gomez said. “I really believe in God having me here for a reason … the reason Zoila Gomez got the opportunity to discover her talent and to be successful.”
Gomez left Mexico when she was 16 to join a brother in California and enrolled in high school in Costa Mesa. There she discovered her affinity for running, competing on a state champion cross country team. After high school she went to Orange Coast (Calif.) College, a community college where she won conference titles and caught the notice of Adams State coach Damon Martin.
Working for a better day
At Adams State she became a six-time national champion in track and cross country. In 2004 she was named the NCAA Division II woman of the year.
“When she came here, I thought she was a pretty good recruit,” Martin said. “Right away she started doing things that were a lot better than I expected. I saw her talent was still really untapped.”
Martin says what sets Gomez apart is her desire.
“So many kids in college, they still want to be a little bit of a student, and by that I mean the social part,” Martin said. “She wasn’t. She was just really committed to trying to do everything right from the get-go.”
She wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, either. Competing on a partial scholarship, Gomez helped pay for her education through a work-study program, sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms on campus. She was happy to do it.
“I know people do it forever, old people, immigrants who come here and that’s what they do,” Gomez said. “The money they make, they send it to Mexico. Here I am, I’m sweeping floors, but in my heart I knew it was just temporary. If you can go down to the level of these people, and you can learn how to do that, things are going to be so much easier for you.”
Taking the Big Apple
After earning an undergraduate degree last December in sociology, Gomez worked as an intern teaching English at Alamosa’s Immigrant Resource Center, which provides legal assistance and other services in the San Luis Valley. When she finished the one-month internship, she continued working there as an AmeriCorps volunteer while pursuing her master’s degree in counseling. She left this month when the center got a new crop of AmeriCorps workers.
“Her students just loved her,” said Flora Archuleta, director of the center. “She’s so energetic and she’s so kind. Everybody just loved her.”
Gomez got her first taste of big-time running in May when she ran for the Mexican team in the Bolder Boulder. There she met Mary Wittenberg, race director of the ING New York City Marathon, who would recruit Gomez to make her marathon debut in New York on Nov. 6.
“Her eyes say it all – sparkling, bright, energetic eyes that scream intense desire to be an excellent runner,” Wittenberg said. “We think (New York) is the ideal place to celebrate her new citizenship. This will be her coming-out story.”
Success in the long run
Former Adams State coach Joe Vigil, a legend in the running world who coached former Alamosa resident Deena Kastor to a bronze medal in the marathon at the 2004 Athens Olympics, hopes Gomez’s American citizenship will help her attract sponsorship so she can begin to train like an elite runner.
“If the same type of thrust goes into her marathon training that she’s had in everything else, you can’t help but think she’s going to be a success,” Vigil said. “I’ve been totally impressed with her attitude toward life in general. She doesn’t expect anything, like most people do. She’s willing to work for it; she’s willing to pay the price. She’s got an attitude and an aura about her you don’t see too often.”
So far the adjustment to marathon training has gone well.
“On long-run Sundays, I become someone else,” Gomez said. “I don’t know what happens to me. Even if it’s too long, even if my body is aching, I’m just really, really happy to be out there. One time Coach Martin said – and I’m always going to remember it – he said, ‘I’m telling you, you were born to be a marathoner.”‘
In the days leading up to her naturalization, Gomez said she started wondering if it really would happen.
“I pictured myself in Mexico, in my room, waking up and being like, ‘Mom, guess what? I just had a long, nice, incredible dream.’ I’m like, ‘Zoila, no, pinch yourself. You’re not in Mexico, and you’re not going to wake up.”‘
Staff writer John Meyer can be reached at 303-820-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com.
