Self-Organizing Man

The Mis/Documented Blues

January 9, 2007 – 2:43 pm

I have been following the lives of Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Oscar Vazquez and Luis Aranda for some time. In March 2006 MIT named them the winners of the NASA sponsored Underwater Robotics contests. Dubbed “The Smartest Kids in America,” they beat the well-manned, and very well-funded, team from MIT.

Vazquez and Aranda graduated from Hayden last spring, but they’re not in college now because they’re undocumented immigrants and thus ineligible for student loans or low cost in-state tuition. Vazquez is hanging drywall and Aranda is filing papers at a Social Security office. Santillan and Arcega are still at Hayden; their chances for a college education are slim. (more here.)

I wish to write briefly about this practice of “undocumenting” people. While I cannot speak to any personal consequences of UN/documentation, I can speak to its sister practice of “misdocumenting” people.

As a transsexual, I had lived for more than ten years with seemingly contradictory documentation. [Birth certificate and drivers license did not match. A crime in most states!. Furthermore, stating a gender moniker on insurance forms other than the one on the birth certificate, a crime! Doing so on a job application, a crime!.]

So I’ve broken the law innumerable times because the governments that be decided I should be mis/documented. {Frankly society did too, but that’s a different post} At times I chose temporary NONdocumented STATUS [not, mind you, the same as UNdocumenting STATUS] for safety. Better to explain I had no documentation at all than try to explain why I look like x when the docuMENts say y.

It is really shitty to live in a country where your movements become restricted because you don’t have the right types of dead trees in your pocket. These four young men are smarter than I could ever hope to be. Who knows what types of civic and cultural contributions they could make were they given the opportunity to go to, say, MIT or CalTech.

But hey, no dead trees in your pockets, too fucking bad. Come to America. Become un/documented. (The gerund, is of course, un/documenting, which suggests an exterior process to the boys lives. It is something done them. As a mis/documented one, it is certainly something done to me…mis/-UN–documenting ~ a willful and persistent act of lying on the part of the population that think that La Frontera (both geopolitical and genderpolitical) can be controlled.)

I can say from own experience that un- and mis/documenting people in america is an arbitrary, capricious, mean spirited practice that has no place in a society that supposedly values democracy. Wait. I forgot. Its duhhh-mocracy.

Through the practices of my racial and class privilege I have been blessed (I say this whole/heart/edly and supersarcastically both at the same time [can you dig that?]) to now be “documented.” But my current status as a Documented Citizen is, of course, contingent.

Some federal whack jobs might decide that they don’t want to recognize my changed birth certificate. Documented in the morning. Mis/Documented by happy hour. Maybe on that day, they’ll decide that amnesty punches the tickets for all the Un/Documented Citizens. Probably not. But it’s nice to think so.

As a formerly-but-could-at-any-time-become (a) Mis/Documented One, I stand squarely in solidarity with Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Oscar Vazquez and Luis Aranda and the millions of citizens of this country who don’t have the right dead trees in their pockets.  I deplore this continuing undocumenting and misdocumenting efforts on behalf of the sociopolitical climates of this country. Capriciousness and viciousness are our constant companions. Go in peace and continue to fight.