How Real ID can exclude 'real' Americans from flying, voting and more

[douglas9]

At 98, my father’s paper trail was long — in addition to his U.S. birth certificate, there were his discharge papers from his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, his house deed, his children’s birth certificates, his Social Security, Medicare and business cards.

Yet in 2023, when he applied for a Real ID identification card, a security-enhanced, federally accepted form of identification that airports require as of this month, his application was declined because the names on his passport (Vicente) and driver’s license (Vince) 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, that same evolution, which pushed him from Vicente to Vince, from “Mexican” to American, rendered him effectively “undocumented” with his declined Real ID application.

Born in Nogales, Arizona, to Mexican immigrants in 1924, my father’s first language, like his original first name, 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.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/05/real-id-excludes-real-americans/