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I am pretty sure that most Mexicans could not pass the history portion of the citizenship test. I'm positive that most American citizens could not pass the citizenship test in the US! I think the test for us "old folks," which seems to be a basic fluency test, seems fair. I might give it a try. There isn't really a lot of advantage in being a citizen over being permanente but since I'm never going back to the US, I'd feel more comfortable knowing I coudn't be forced out of Mexico if the animosity between the two countries ever gets to that point. Not likely...but strange things seem to be happening every day. Alan

Last Thursday (Nov 1st) I went to Guadalajara for my citizenship exam. It was the end of a long process, that involved a trip to Mexico city, numerous rewrites of my entrances and exits because the trips logged by INS did not match my passport, and the final stumbling block was that I had lost my permanente card back in 2014, so even though I've been a permanente since they first came out, the date on the back of my card was Feb. 2014, and unless the chief let me slide, I hadn't been here for the requisite five years. Fortunately he did let me slide after I produced a photocopy of my 2012 FM2. Now on the the exam. Since I'm over sixty (though I look 45) (hah) I did not have to take the dreaded history exam. I could have never passed it either. I had to take the language exam, which consists of reading about 4 paragraphs of Spanish text, answering 5 questions about it, and then writing 3 sentences about a picture chosen at random from as set of about fifty pictures. The total time for this test is ten minutes, and you must get 5 out of 6 answers correct. Question 6 is the 3 sentences. Now I can communicate pretty well in Spanish, as long as you don't care about the gender of the noun, the tense of the verb, or whether the adjectives agree with the noun in terms of gender and quantity. Pretty much typical gringo Spanish, I'd say. They made me read the "story" out loud, which was bad for me because when I'm reading aloud I concentrate on pronouncing the words (more or less) correctly and not on the meaning of what I am reading. After reading it out loud, I quickly reread the story to myself. There were a lot of words I didn't know. It was about some area in Mexico that has a river with a dam and a bunch of endangered animals, and was turned into a nature preserve. After reading it again, I still couldn't answer the questions, so I matched the words in the question with the text in the story. I understood what the question was asking, but had to refer to the text to figure out the right answer. This was somewhat non-trivial, and there were always several dependent clauses referring to the gist of the question, so you had to understand the question in order to pick the right clause. I really took my time on this part, so that by the time I got to the picture I only had about a minute and thirty seconds left. The picture turned out to be the easy part, thanks to the magic of three and four word sentences. I came up with: 1. Hay muchas luces. 2. La gente juegan futbol. 3. La mujer toma vino. They weren't happy with sentence one, so I added arriba to the end and then they were satisfied. Everyone at the office was kind, encouraging, and helpful, but the exam was a lot harder than I expected it to be. So my advice is, read it out load as fast as possible. Don't try to understand it but try to remember where in the text the "main ideas" occur. Then go immediately to the questions, and look for the corresponding text in the story. Now figure out what the question is asking, and search the text for the answer to that question. One of the 4 multiple choices answers will match pretty closely the answer provided by the story. Don't worry about the picture. If you can use Hay and conjugate ser in the present tense, you can always come up with something. After passing the test, I was told that in only three to six months I can expect to receive my citizenship papers, provided they don't change the rules between now and then. Viva Mexico! Henry Laxen