UC Irvine

This dissertation focuses specifically on the growth of identity precarity and insecurity through a bureaucratic process that the author calls ‘de-documentation,’ the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and US passports. The dissertation focuses on the experiences of US citizens whose birth registrations federal and state officials have placed in doubt on the grounds that their births may have been fraudulently registered by midwives along the Southeast Texas border. Since the mid-2000s, this has resulted in the systematic denial of thousands of US passports per year to a growing Southeast Texas Mexican American diaspora. Through court observations and semi-structured interviews, the dissertation tracks how ‘citizens-in-question’ experience and articulate the impact of state identity surveillance, how they do or do not seek legal help when attempting to claim or reclaim access to a US passport, and how they create life worlds despite enduring bureaucratic suspicion. Through digital archival research, the project also tracks the legal outcomes of federal cases involving passport denial in the Southern District Court of Texas. The dissertation argues that while legal citizenship can become unstable for anyone, its instability is mediated by specific configurations of race, nation, and gender. More broadly, the project tracks a significant shift in how birthright citizenship is understood in the US in the last half of the 20th and first part of the 21st centuries. The project shows how discursive threats to the tenuous threads of belonging can move beyond mere xenophobic political fantasy and become part of bureaucratic practice and policy. Most specifically, the dissertation shows how new forms of ‘de-documentation,’ the withholding or revocation of core identity documents, can target specific racially and geographically marked communities while appearing to be technical, color-blind, and neutral.