My father’s passport expired in 2023. He was 98 and had taken his final worldwide journey a couple of years earlier. He’d additionally stopped driving and now not had, or wanted, a sound driver’s license. So he utilized for a Real ID identification card, a security-enhanced, federally accepted form of identification airports require as of this month.
His passport recognized him as Vicente, the identify on his beginning certificates; his driver’s license, as Vince. The passport was nonetheless legitimate when my father utilized for his Actual ID, however his software was declined as a result of the names on his passport and driver’s license didn’t match. As an alternative, he was issued a California Senior Citizen Identification Card — which wouldn’t let him board a flight, enter a secured federal constructing, or register to vote.
My father’s succession of names testifies to the methods American tradition coerces and seduces each natives and newcomers to adjust to its norms, promising social and political inclusion and upward social mobility. However paradoxically, his evolution from Vicente to Vince, from “Mexican” to American, successfully rendered him “undocumented.”
On the finish of his life, his paper path was lengthy — his discharge papers from World Battle II Military Air Corps service, his home deed, his kids’s beginning certificates, his Social Safety, Medicare, and enterprise playing cards — nevertheless it wasn’t adequate to show he was a “actual” American worthy of a Actual ID. These paperwork converse to a protracted, wealthy life and the viability of the American dream within the twentieth century.
In the US, altering one’s identify or having one’s identify modified is previous hat. Practically 80% of women take their spouses’ surnames once they get married. Most states enable trans individuals to vary the authorized identify and gender on their beginning certificates. Some immigrants anglicize their names.
My father wasn’t an immigrant, nor was he trans or a married girl. He was born to Mexican immigrants in Nogales, Arizona, in 1924, 70 years after the Gadsden Purchase transferred a sliver of southwestern New Mexico and a large chunk of southern Arizona from Mexico to the US. As a result of the 14th Amendment established and United States vs Wong Kim Ark affirmed citizenship based mostly on place of origin, and since he was born on U.S. soil, my father was a U.S. citizen.
And but, like so many individuals as we speak, my father confronted exclusion due to his names, which inform a well-known story about colonialism and assimilation. Like his unique first identify, my father’s first language was Spanish, a vestige of the viceroyalty of New Spain and the Republic of Mexico in southern Arizona.
I think his American academics modified his identify to Vincent when he was a boy. By the point he was an adolescent in East L.A. within the early Forties, Vincent had morphed into Vince. “To Vince, an actual swell dancer,” his girlfriend, Bea Shapiro, inscribed in his Garfield Excessive College yearbook.
My father was born on the bodily and symbolic margin of the nation in a small home that lacked indoor plumbing. His kids had been born in hospitals in a megalopolis. His beginning certificates from Santa Cruz County, Arizona, notes his dad and mom’ “shade or race” as “Mex.” My 1969 beginning certificates from Los Angeles County identifies me as “Caucasian.”
In 1959, my fatherwas capable of purchase a brand new home in suburban Monterey Park with the assist of the GI Invoice and a gentle paycheck from the California Division of Transportation. When he began at Caltrans, a state company buoyed by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, he was a development employee who actually constructed Southern California’s freeways.
By the point he retired, 38 years later, he was a senior transportation engineer. That he managed to realize all that he did with little greater than a highschool diploma evinced not solely his fierce work ethic, however the very important position the welfare state — specifically, public schooling, public funding, Social Safety, and Medicare — performed in fomenting upward social mobility.
However my father’s declined Actual ID software successfully erased his biography, exposing a failure of assimilation, and laying naked Individuals’ vulnerability to disenfranchisement, no matter their distance from the immigration expertise or their standing as U.S. residents. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has introduced that vulnerability into aid.
The U.S. Home of Representatives handed the laws, which might require Individuals to offer documentary proof of citizenship, resembling a passport or beginning certificates, to register to vote, on April 10, 2025. The invoice’s supporters, almost all Republicans, preserve that it’ll assist “restore public confidence in elections.” Despite the fact that citizenship is already a requirement to vote in federal elections and circumstances of noncitizens voting are “statistically rare,” Trump has made the baseless claim that Democrats have recruited noncitizens to vote towards him.
The “illegal alien” voter is a illusion, however voter suppression is actual — and the SAVE Act threatens to additional disenfranchise myriad eligible voters. Greater than 140 million U.S. residents don’t have a passport and greater than 21 million don’t have a passport or beginning certificates that’s “readily available.” Not not like my dad, some 69 million ladies who’ve taken their partner’s identify don’t have a beginning certificates matching their authorized identify.
Solely 18% of respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey had efficiently modified the identify on their beginning certificates in order that it aligned with their different paperwork. And since the SAVE Act mandates that potential voters present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship at their local election office, remoted rural voters and anybody who doesn’t or can’t drive — younger adults, older individuals, voters with sure disabilities — threat disenfranchisement.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the invoice’s sponsor, has insisted that the SAVE Act will enable registered voters “to vote under their current registration.” My father’s declined Actual ID software — to not point out the experiences of married ladies who had been turned away from polls in recent New Hampshire elections — means that the story is perhaps extra sophisticated. Towards the backdrop of calls to eliminate birthright citizenship, the SAVE Act’s potential affect seems to be all of the extra sinister. Whereas the means—creating one legislation and altering or abolishing one other—differ, the tip—exclusion—is similar.
My father died a couple of months earlier than the Actual ID went into impact. He by no means needed to endure the injustice of being turned away at a polling station or an airport, or, worse, of being deported as a result of he lacked the correct doc. Nonetheless, his incapacity to get a Actual ID is a warning of the boundaries, federal and in any other case, that tens of millions of actual Individuals could now face.
Catherine S. Ramírez is a professor of Latin American and Latino Research on the College of California, Santa Cruz, and the writer of Assimilation: An Alternative History. She was born in Montebello, California. She wrote this column for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
