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. He applied for a Real ID identification card, a security-enhanced, federally accepted form of identification airports began requiring 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.