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by Walter Brasch
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.walterbrasch.com
May 9, 2010
My father, a federal employee with a top secret clearance, carried a copy of his birth certificate when he went into Baja California from our home in San Diego. Many times, when he tried to reenter the U.S., he was stopped by the Border Patrol. He had thick black hair and naturally dark skin, and the Patrol thought he was a Mexican brazenly trying to sneak back into the country by claiming to be married to the black-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned woman he claimed was his wife.
If my father were still alive, and chose to drive into Arizona or to walk on the streets of any of its cities or towns, he probably would be stopped and asked to provide identification. Naturally, he wouldn’t be carrying a U.S-issued visa or Mexican-issued passport, since he was an American citizen. He probably wouldn’t even be carrying his birth certificate, since he would have assumed he was traveling within the United States, and there was no need to carry it. He would probably have a Social Security card and his California-issued ID card—he didn’t have a driver’s license because he was blind in his left eye—but both of those could easily have been forged.
Dandelion Salad 