An insidious terminology has taken root in the United States: it distinguishes “heritage Americans” from the rest of us. It is a euphemism for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and, increasingly, also for evangelical nationalists. This language is being deployed systematically. In practice, the U.S. Supreme Court has legalized a control apparatus in which ethnicity—even how someone speaks, how they dress, what they do for a living—can be used as justification for federal officials, quasi-military forces such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to detain someone and ask them, “your papers, please.”
In Minnesota right now, ICE’s actions have become a form of state terror—raids, detentions, fear in immigrant neighborhoods, and public protests—and have included lethal force, with the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents. But this is also happening elsewhere, through new processes that are quiet and publicly invisible.
On January 5, 2026, after working for sixteen years at the University of Colorado, the Human Resources Department sent me an email saying that I had not submitted documents proving that I was a legal resident or a U.S. citizen. The university insisted that I had not provided that documentation when I was hired. And I was required to present physical proof of my citizenship (my U.S. passport) to a university official for verification. I am a foreigner in my own country.
The email used the calm language of administration. Was it, as they said, a “routine internal review” applied to everyone? The key sentence was simple: “This step must be completed by presenting original, acceptable documents… Copies are not accepted.”
University staff told me I was not being singled out. But none of the “heritage Americans” in my History Department, with Anglo and German surnames, were asked to come in and physically prove their citizenship. I was: Martínez-Dávila. And a colleague in my department—employed for more than twenty-five years—was also forced to present her papers; yes, she also had a Spanish surname. What are the odds? One hundred percent in the United States.
When I shared this publicly on a professional network, a stranger replied with the kind of phrase that normalizes everything: “Nobody cares. Show the papers and that’s it.” The demand becomes banal, ordinary. Public humiliation becomes something insignificant—something you are told to endure in silence.
What is so alarming—and so disorienting—is that I am descended from Spaniards with Indigenous Mexican roots. My family founded Spanish San Antonio, Texas, in 1718. My genes tell the truth: 33% Iberian, 16% Sephardic Jewish, and 25% Native American. Who, then, is the “heritage American” here?
My family relationship with Texas carries its own archive of paradoxes, embodied in Juan Nepomuceno Seguín: my ancestor. Born in 1806, he was a Texan leader in the revolution for independence. And he was at the Alamo. On February 25, 1836, during Santa Anna’s siege of the Alamo, Juan Seguín was sent by Colonel William B. Travis to request military reinforcements from the Texan general James Fannin. Juan was the only survivor of that ill-fated demonstration of resistance and courage.
The rest is history and the origin of our battle cry: “Remember the Alamo!” Later he organized the only Texan (Hispanic American) company that fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He then returned to San Antonio and supervised the burial of the Alamo dead.
And then the story turns: after serving in the Senate of the Republic of Texas, growing Anglo hostility toward Texans pushed him to flee with his family to his former enemy, Mexico. In other words: the American founding myth includes Spanish-speaking patriots and, in my case, it is literally blood—as it is for millions of people with Spanish ancestry.
Back to the present. In the United States, someone like me—like millions of people with Spanish ancestry—can be required at any moment to prove their nationality. In Minnesota, the pressure has become visible in the streets. In Colorado, I lived the quieter version: not a raid, not a checkpoint, but an institutional email that ends in the same place: hand over your documents.
Spaniards know—in a way Americans do not—how quickly identity hardens through paperwork. Under Francoism, the state activated the “obligation to present” the national ID card (DNI) and imposed the requirement to prove identity in order to move through ordinary life. I am not saying the United States is Francoist Spain. I am saying this: when institutions normalize documentary demands—and when those demands fall unequally on certain surnames and certain faces—history issues a warning.
In the United States we are “fine” for now… until we aren’t. That is the lie we tell ourselves until the day we can’t anymore.
Last year I began the process of obtaining Spanish citizenship not only for practical reasons, but also profoundly personal ones. As a professor of medieval Spain and Spanish colonial America, I have devoted my life to finding and reassembling that communion with Spain. I feel Spain’s pull as home: my real home. But now love is not the only reason. Need is. I wonder whether I will need that citizenship not as a symbol but as a refuge, before it is too late.
Roger Martínez-Dávila is a professor of medieval Spanish history at the University of Colorado.
A medievalist of Spanish origin in the age of ICE: a foreigner in his own country.
