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On January 4, 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Gonzales v. Williams, a closely watched case that was widely expected to solve the puzzle of the citizenship status of the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines —islands that had been annexed by the United States after the war with Spain in 1898.1 The inhabitants of earlier territories had become U.S. citizens promptly following their annexation.2 But in legislating for the former Spanish colonies Congress had simply declared Puerto Ricans “citizens of Porto Rico” and Filipinos “citizens of the Philippines” while remaining mum with respect to the question on everyone’s mind: were these people now citizens of the United States?3 The Gonzales decision delivered a crushing blow to those who had pinned their hopes for an answer on the Supreme Court. The court held that the native inhabitants of the newly annexed territories were no longer “aliens” (i.e., citizens of a foreign country), but at the same time it declined to consider the question of whether they were U.S. citizens. The court’s reluctance to address the issue squarely was widely understood to mean that the inhabitants of the new territories were neither citizens nor aliens but something in between. The cryptic Gonzales opinion offered little by way explanation of that“something in between,” but eventually the ambiguous status of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos acquired a formal legal designation: they were noncitizen “nationals,” members of the U.S. polity but only partial members, subject to U.S. sovereignty but denied citizenship. The events culminating in the Gonzales decision mark a watershed moment in the legal history of American citizenship. Contrary to the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which in 1868 declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens 332 Empire and the Transformation of Citizenship christina duffy burnett of the United States,” the imperial policies developed in the wake of 1898 established that not all persons born within the internationally recognized boundaries of the United States and subject to its jurisdiction enjoyed the amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.4 The guarantee did not apply to persons born in places that, though completely subject to U.S. sovereignty, were “not a part of the United States.”5 Such people—the colonial subjects of the United States— were merely “nationals,” occupying the lower rung in a legal hierarchy of political membership crafted to meet the needs of empire. This essay examines the origins, emergence, and significance of the legal category of the noncitizen national in American law. As I interpret them, the events culminating in the Gonzales case transformed the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, replacing its guarantee of birthright citizenship with a two-tiered legal framework consisting of full and partial membership in the American polity. Or, to put it another way, empire created the occasion for a reconceptualization of the law of American citizenship and the Supreme Court did its part in the Gonzales case.6 “Puerto Ricans Are Now Americans” The summer before the decision in Gonzales came down, the chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs at the War Department received a letter from Federico Degetau y González, who was then serving as Puerto Rico’s first “resident commissioner,” or nonvoting representative, in Washington.7 Degetau wrote with a question concerning two government reports on Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island that had recently been added to the portfolio of U.S. overseas possessions.8 The first of these reports identified the inhabitants of the island as “American citizens.” But the second, issued by the War Department, described them (“by mistake,” Degetau noted hopefully) as “in suspense.” Degetau had recently heard a rumor that the director of the census considered the designation American citizens erroneous and for that reason had decided to replace it with a note concerning the suspended citizenship status of the people of the new territories; Degetau wrote to inquire about this decision. Although he phrased the letter as a polite request for further information, his characterization of the change in designation clearly reflected his views on the matter: Puerto Ricans were American citizens . (Weren’t they?) The citizenship status of his constituents was a strange issue for Degetau to have to spend his time on: how could they be anything other than U.S. citizens? Puerto Rico had been annexed by the United States in...

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