Converting a Mexican to Massachusetts Driver's License

It took me two days to convert my Mexican driver's license to a Massachusetts driver's license. It was a hassle of enormous proportions. The process was bureaucratic and slow, involved documents the Mexican government hardly knows to process (driving record) and these documents had to be translated and notarized. It was not only the standard hassle of these kinds of bureaucratic processes that felt aggravating – but the nature of mediating between two governments and two faceless bureaucracies.

Yet a Mass driver's license is necessary, not only to secure the ability to drive—which as anyone who has lived in the United States knows, is a requirement for a full-fledged existence—but also as a form of ID. I am clearly not under 21, yet bouncers everywhere are fully entitled to block my entry when I show them my Mexican license. And being turned away for the vulgar reason of being unable to prove that I can hold my liquor is shameful indeed. They'll take a condescending tone and after squinting briefly at the foreign-made plastic, say “In this state – that's not a valid form of ID, buddy.” But I would sooner walk the streets naked and barefoot than carry my passport around to appease diligent bouncers. Losing my passport would have probably gotten me waterboarded under the previous administration – probably no less than 150 times in a single work week. Fortunately some sanity has been restored to the administration, and these kinds of measures are unlikely to be brought to bear in such circumstances. Still -- I want my passport to stay home in a dark place ready for airport time.

It took no less than three weeks for the Mexican secretary of transportation to return my requests for a driving record – and the petty little thing they send is an almost empty sheet which repeats the stuff on my license, and remarks “Reasons for which there is a lock: [empty space]” Anyone who reads this document looking to glean knowledge--presumably of my driving history!-- very quickly will fall flat on their face. It does not say whether I have run over a truckload over children and old people (I have not). It does not say whether or not I have raced around the city and crashed into an icecream truck (icecream probably acts as a sort of creamy padding and I presume would mitigate damage). And I have not done that either. In short -- this document says nothing but the fact that there is some objective correlate to my driver's license hidden in the Mexican registry.

You can imagine that as someone who was now expected to brandish these sheets of paper (one of which was a cover letter written in the most stupidly languid way – and in torn paper no less!) I stepped into this driver's license conversion process (which had to be done) in the most doomed half-hearted way possible.

But the senselessness builds upon itself and slowly snowballs into a giant mass of nonsense. This stupid pieces of paper then had to be translated, and notarized. The contact details of the translator attached, and the whole translations and notarizations attached to a translated and notarized copy of the Mexican license itself, and this attached to an application for a US license. In the end, no one cared about the substance-less paperwork from Mexico, it was only to check a box.

But the translation part is also something which might seem obvious to good-intentioned Americans from the midwest. But to someone who breathes multiple languages it really feels like an extra hoop meant to generate zero value-add jobs to the economy: notaries and translators of documents which really say nothing. Heck, I could do the translation and much more quickly – as I would not have to go out into the marketplace and find these people.”Reasons for which there is a lock: [blank space]” That's the supposed substance of the wretched document.

After two days of translating and notarizing documents and returning to the Registry in downtown Boston and getting sent away to get another detail or other fixed – there was success! I was handed a temporary license and told the card would arrive through the snail mail. And they kept my Mexican license (in their bureaucratic logic, no individual should be allowed to drive around with multiple licenses, lest they escape detection for infractions.) But I have no intention of driving around Mexico with a US license, so I will have to get a replacement in Mexico.