Críticas Magazine

Feel any safer all of a sudden? Why, of course you do. Big changes at la línea today as U.S. Customs & Border Protection officers start requiring citizens to show a passport, or a drivers license plus a birth certificate--preferably an original--upon return to the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. A couple miles down the road from here the lines coming north across the Rio Grande just got longer.

Lots of border TV stations have live cameras at the ports of entry to help viewers figure out how many hours they’ll need to wait. It wasn’t always this way: not so many years ago folks used to be able to cross at lunchtime to grab some taquitos and be back on the job before the clock struck one.

Nowadays those who must cross daily, such as maquila workers, need to allow another few hours at one end or the other of their workdays. Businesses around here aren’t thrilled by tightened ‘security‘ either. Longer lines at the border mean shorter lines at their cash registers.

In anticipation of this latest change there has for months been a run on birth certificates and passport centers here in the borderland. Birth certificates, now, to get back into your country. 

So what is acceptable identification for getting a library card?

Typically we ask for a government-issued photo ID along with evidence of a local address, like a piece of mail or a checkbook, if that’s not on the card itself. It’s good to see that a great many libraries now accept the Matrícula Consular, a photo card available to Mexican nationals, Salvadorans, Hondurans and citizens of a few other countries at their local consulate office. And some libraries, like ours, honor the Mexican voter’s card. Hey, it’s issued by a national government, it has a picture, a name, even a fingerprint--what more could you want? A birth certificate, maybe?

The wonderful Ms. Robin Imperial’s Librarian’s Toolkit responds to all this with practical tips, displaying reason and good common sense that our protectors of the Homeland would do well to notice.

Crossing the border into Mexico, by the way, is not such a hassle. You press a button on a stoplight. If it turns green, as it usually does, you keep walking. If it turns red, you can stop. Or not. Nobody pays too much attention one way or the other.