How the real ID can turn off the “real” Americans

At 98, my father’s paper path was long – in addition to his birth certificate in the United States, he had documents to release his Air Corps Army service during World War II, his home acts, his children’s birth certificates, his social security, Medicare and the Visit.

Still, in 2023, when he applied for a true identification card for identification, a Improved by security, federally accepted form of identification These airports require this month, his application was denied because the names of his passport (Vicente) and the driver’s license (Vince) do not match. Instead, he was issued an identification card for elderly citizens in California – which would not allow him to get on the flight, enter a secured federal building or register to vote.

The sequence of my father’s names testifies to the ways in which American culture forces and seduces both the natives and the newcomers in order to comply with his norms, promising social and political inclusion and ascending social mobility. But paradoxically, the same evolution that pushed him from Vicente to Vince, from Mexican to American, made him effectively “without documents” with his refusal true application.

Born in Nogales, Arizona, to Mexican immigrants in 1924, my father’s first language, like his original name, is Spanish, a remnant of the vice -staff of New Spain and the Republic of Mexico in South Arizona. I suspect that his American teachers changed his name to Vincent when he was a boy. By the time he was a teenager in East LA in the early 1940s, Vincent became Vince.

“For Vince, a truly swollen dancer,” his girlfriend Bea Shapiro is enrolled in her high school year Garfield.

The fact that my father managed to achieve everything he did in his life with a little more than Garfield High diploma caused not only his fierce work ethics, but also the viability of the American Dream in the 20th century. My father began the life of the physical and symbolic margin of the nation in a small house that lacked an internal water supply and ended his career as a senior transport engineer in Caltrans.

But his denied application for ID effectively deleted that the biography, exposing the failure of assimilation and putting the vulnerability of the naked Americans to be reckless, regardless of their distance from immigration experience or their status as US citizens.

Thehe Protection of US Eligibility Act of VotersOr Save Act, brought this vulnerability to relief. Last month, the Chamber of US Representatives has accepted the legislation requiring Americans to provide documentary evidence of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. Proponents of the bill, almost all Republicans, claim that it will help. “Restore public confidence in electionS “Although citizenship is already a requirement to vote in federal elections and cases of voting are not voted statistically rarePresident Trump did unjustification The fact that the Democrats have hired non -voting against him.

“Illegal alien“Voter is a fantasm, but the suppression of voters is real – and the Law of Rescue threatens further discourage votersS More than 140 million US citizens do not have a passport and more than 21 million do not have a passport or birth certificate that is “easily accessibleS “Unlike my father, about 69 million women who have taken the name of their husband have no birth certificate corresponding to their legal name. Study of Transsexual American 2015 They had successfully changed the name of their birth certificate so that they would be aligned with their other documents. And since the Rescue Act imposes the imposition of future voters Documentary proof From US citizenship in the local election service, isolated rural voters and anyone who cannot or cannot drive – young adults, elderly people, voters with certain disabilities – risk discouraging.

My father died before Real identity came into force, so he had never had to suffer from injustice to be turned to an election station or airport, or, worse, to be deported because he lacked the right document. Still, his inability to get a true ID is a warning to the boundaries, federal and otherwise that millions of real Americans can now encounter.

This comment was adapted by an essay produced for Zócalo Public SquareS