Rene Alvarez | Shut out on Saturday night

A nice thing about Penn is the number of bars and restaurants around campus. Places like Mad4Mex and La Terrasse are great places for graduate students at the end of a busy week of teaching, research and writing. A spur of the moment gathering or a preordained happy hour is an easy way to join friends and colleagues to relax and unwind.

But some graduate and professional students confront an inconvenience when making their social plans that most of us do not typically have to consider. International students usually are denied service at campus bars and restaurants that do not accept non-United States driver's licenses as proof of legal drinking age.

"In Pennsylvania, that's the way it works," Ryan Steen, a manager at Mad4Mex, said of the legal-age verification law.

Bars and restaurants are not entirely to blame for inconveniencing grad students in this way, however. They simply are fulfilling their responsibility to abide by Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board regulations. The PLCB requires patrons to prove their legal drinking age with either a driver's license, a state identification card issued within the United States, a passport or an active duty military ID card.

"Some [establishments] follow it to a tee, some may not," Steen added. "Mad4Mex is a chain so we follow [regulations] closely to protect our interests."

To avoid problems when going out drinking, some graduate and professional students choose to brave the bureaucracy of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Consuelo Martinez-Reyes, a third-year Romance Languages graduate student, is one of them. Martinez-Reyes moved to Ohio from Puerto Rico in 2002 and to Pennsylvania in 2003.

Bars would not accept her Puerto Rican license while she was a Masters student at Ohio State University. After moving to Philadelphia, Martinez-Reyes immediately set about getting a Pennsylvania license. "I didn't want to go through that again," she said.

And just in case this idiocy is lost on anyone, Puerto Ricans are not international visitors. They have had U.S. citizenship since the Spanish-American War. (And if you don't know when that was, go take my history class.)

Although she has a Pennsylvania license, students like Martinez-Reyes must still carefully plan their social activities, particularly when their circle of friends include students from France, Spain and Germany, not to mention Puerto Rico. Any one of them may or may not have acceptable proof of age at any given time. "It's very frustrating," Martinez-Reyes said, "It feels like your own [identification] is not good enough."

So why don't international students simply carry their passports with them all the time? For some, it is a fear of losing their passports and then having to navigate the bureaucracy of canceling their lost passport and student visa and applying for new ones. This process sometimes requires international students to travel to their countries' consulates in New York or Washington. More than just an inconvenience, this is a big hassle that most international students want to avoid.

"It can be frustrating," said Ekin Atilla-Gokcumen, fourth-year Chemistry graduate student and wife of Spin columnist Omer Gokcumen. Atilla-Gokcumen is a citizen of Turkey and, like many international students at Penn, does not own a Pennsylvania driver's license or state identification card. She does, however, possess a driver's license from her native Turkey, which lists her date of birth. Nevertheless, Atilla-Gokcumen reports that occasionally she has been denied access at Mad4Mex, Smokes and other area establishments. "They probably can't tell if it is real or not," Atilla-Gokcumen said of her Turkish license.

I understand that bars and restaurants are doing what is required of them by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. But I can not help but wonder why accommodations cannot be made for drinking establishments near college campuses to better serve diverse student populations. Especially in a city that kowtows to nearly every special interest. Last week's city council vote, which expanded existing loopholes in the recently enacted smoking ban, is a prime example. More than 4,500 graduate and professional students come to Penn from outside of the United States. They deserve to freely enjoy the conviviality of campus-area bars and restaurants as much as the rest of us.

Rene Alvarez is a sixth-year History Ph.D. candidate from Chicago, Ill. His e-mail address is alvarez@dailypennsylvanian.com. Rico Suave appears on Tuesdays.

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