My father’s passport expired in 2023. He was 98 and had taken his last international trip a few years earlier. He’d also stopped driving and no longer had, or needed, a valid driver’s license. So he applied for a Real ID identification card, a security-enhanced, federally accepted form of identification airports require as of this month.
His passport identified him as Vicente, the name on his birth certificate; his driver’s license, as Vince. The passport was still valid when my father applied for his Real ID, but his application was declined because the names on his passport and driver’s license didn’t match. Instead, he was issued a California Senior Citizen Identification Card — which wouldn’t let him board a flight, enter a secured federal building, or register to vote.
My father’s succession of names testifies to the ways American culture coerces and seduces both natives and newcomers to comply with its norms, promising social and political inclusion and upward social mobility. But paradoxically, his evolution from Vicente to Vince, from “Mexican” to American, effectively rendered him “undocumented.”
At the end of his life, his paper trail was long — his discharge papers from World War II Army Air Corps service, his house deed, his children’s birth certificates, his Social Security, Medicare, and business cards — but it wasn’t sufficient to prove he was a “real” American worthy of a Real ID. These documents speak to a long, rich life and the viability of the American dream in the 20th century.
In the United States, changing one’s name or having one’s name changed is old hat. Nearly 80% of women take their spouses’ surnames when they get married. Most states allow trans people to change the legal name and gender on their birth certificate. Some immigrants anglicize their names.
My father wasn’t an immigrant, nor was he trans or a married woman. 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 sizable chunk of southern Arizona from Mexico to the United States. Because the 14th Amendment established and United States vs Wong Kim Ark affirmed citizenship based on place of birth, and because he was born on U.S. soil, my father was a U.S. citizen.
And yet, like so many people today, my father faced exclusion because of his names, which tell a familiar story about colonialism and assimilation. Like his original first name, my father’s first language was Spanish, a vestige of the viceroyalty of New Spain and the Republic of Mexico in southern Arizona.
I suspect his American teachers changed his name to Vincent when he was a boy. By the time he was a teenager in East L.A. in the early 1940s, Vincent had morphed into Vince. “To Vince, a real swell dancer,” his girlfriend, Bea Shapiro, inscribed in his Garfield High School yearbook.
My father was born on the physical and symbolic margin of the nation in a small house that lacked indoor plumbing. His children were born in hospitals in a megalopolis. His birth certificate from Santa Cruz County, Arizona, notes his parents’ “color or race” as “Mex.” My 1969 birth certificate from Los Angeles County identifies me as “Caucasian.”
In 1959, my fatherwas able to buy a new house in suburban Monterey Park with the support of the GI Bill and a steady paycheck from the California Department of Transportation. When he started at Caltrans, a state agency buoyed by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, he was a construction worker who literally built Southern California’s freeways.
By the time he retired, 38 years later, he was a senior transportation engineer. That he managed to achieve all that he did with little more than a high school diploma evinced not only his fierce work ethic, but the vital role the welfare state — in particular, public education, public investment, Social Security, and Medicare — played in fomenting upward social mobility.
But my father’s declined Real ID application effectively erased his biography, exposing a failure of assimilation, and laying bare Americans’ vulnerability to disenfranchisement, regardless of their distance from the immigration experience or their status as U.S. citizens. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has brought that vulnerability into relief.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation, which would require Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote, on April 10, 2025. The bill’s supporters, nearly all Republicans, maintain that it will help “restore public confidence in elections.” Even though citizenship is already a requirement to vote in federal elections and cases of noncitizens voting are “statistically rare,” Trump has made the baseless claim that Democrats have recruited noncitizens to vote against him.
The “illegal alien” voter is a phantasm, but voter suppression is real — and the SAVE Act threatens to further disenfranchise myriad eligible voters. More than 140 million U.S. citizens don’t have a passport and more than 21 million don’t have a passport or birth certificate that’s “readily available.” Not unlike my dad, some 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name don’t have a birth certificate matching their legal name.
Only 18% of respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey had successfully changed the name on their birth certificate so that it aligned with their other documents. And because the SAVE Act mandates that prospective voters present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship at their local election office, isolated rural voters and anyone who doesn’t or can’t drive — young adults, older people, voters with certain disabilities — risk disenfranchisement.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the bill’s sponsor, has insisted that the SAVE Act will allow registered voters “to vote under their current registration.” My father’s declined Real ID application — not to mention the experiences of married women who were turned away from polls in recent New Hampshire elections — suggests that the story might be more complicated. Against the backdrop of calls to eliminate birthright citizenship, the SAVE Act’s potential impact looks all the more sinister. While the means—creating one law and changing or abolishing another—differ, the end—exclusion—is the same.
My father died a few months before the Real ID went into effect. He never had to suffer the injustice of being turned away at a polling station or an airport, or, worse, of being deported because he lacked the right document. Still, his inability to get a Real ID is a warning of the limits, federal and otherwise, that millions of real Americans may now face.
Catherine S. Ramírez is a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History. She was born in Montebello, California. She wrote this column for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
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