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Matricula cards have opened financial doors for Mexican immigrants who are not legal citizens.

Count Them In
By Dan Frosch

Published: August 24, 2005




Maria sinks into the soft cushions of the living room couch, hoping to catch a few moments of quiet.

It’s just after 9 am. Her husband José has gone to work at one of the restaurants where he’s a busser and won’t be back until nightfall. It’s only a matter of moments before their three young sons wake up from one of their extra-long summer slumbers and turn the family mobile home into the neighborhood boys’ club.

Already their littlest one, Daniel, has started to crawl, grinning and shirtless, from the small room he shares with his brothers across the sea-blue hallway carpet toward the television and the alluring Nintendo controls.

Maria smiles at her son and looks around at her house, a comfortable three-bedroom mobile home just off Agua Fria she and José bought last year. Wide-eyed family portraits hang on the pristine white wall behind her; in the wood-paneled kitchen she bakes the sweet Mexican cakes that she sells to supplement her family’s income; a Dodge Caravan and Ford 4X4 truck are crammed tight in the narrow gravel driveway. Maria and José have done well for themselves over the past five years. They have two bank accounts, two credit cards and a $902 monthly house payment that ensures their home is their own.

There’s one key difference, however, between Maria’s family and the countless other Americans whose everyday experience they share.

Maria and her husband are not in this country legally. They are undocumented immigrants who, five years ago, made the near 1,300-mile trek from Acapulco Guerrero, Mexico to Santa Fe.

While perhaps the common image of undocumented immigrants is of solitary day laborers wiring small bundles of cash back through the shadows to families in Mexico, in reality, life for undocumented immigrants has become infinitely more complicated. As the influx of undocumented immigrants has jumped an estimated 2 million since 2000, the US capitalist behemoth has birthed a lively economy to serve this growing and increasingly settled population of more than 11 million people.

Undocumented immigrants are starting to partake of all the products churned out by America’s well-oiled financial assembly line: bank accounts, loans for new homes, cell phones, even health insurance plans. It’s all become possible as the result of growing acceptance of non-traditional forms of identification.


One of the primary documents that allows the 6 million Mexican undocumented immigrants access to this new economy is the matricula consular, a pocket-sized identification card issued to Mexican nationals by the Mexican government. In combination with other forms of ID, such as the IRS-issued Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN), the matricula is nudging open financial doors right and left for immigrants like Maria. What’s more, there’s little risk of having one’s status discovered.

Over the past few years, a growing number of big businesses have started recognizing the matricula card, ITIN or, in some cases no identification at all, in lieu of a Social Security number. Now, everyone from corporate giants like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Cingular Wireless to New Mexico businesses like Homewise and Guadalupe Credit Union are shifting gears and recognizing the new needs of the undocumented demographic.

The shift has occurred just as the debate over undocumented immigrants has reached fever pitch and federal immigration enforcement has turned up the heat on those who come to this country without asking properly. The result is an uneasy paradox where people considered illegal aliens by the federal government also lawfully participate in the most American of endeavorsâ€â€