Citizenship without Sovereignty or Rights: Hispanos, African Americans, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, and American Samoans

The United States is often imagined to be a nation of immigrants. But many peoples have found themselves inside U.S. borders because they were forcibly brought there or because those borders crossed over them. This paper examines the citizenship of five such groups, each of which received U.S. citizenship, fought to keep it at bay, or both. The core of the paper concerns the period 1845-1925. During these eighty years, New Mexican Hispanos, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians all went from generally not having a clear hold on U.S. citizenship to unequivocally being U.S. citizens. Prior to the shift, U.S. officials described the expected impact of the status on each group as highly consequential, including the bestowal of substantial rights. Following its extension, however, U.S. officials changed their tunes to stress that few technical legal rights attached to citizenship. Three of these groups – New Mexican Hispanos, American Indians, and Puerto Ricans – also experienced sea changes in the sovereignty status of their polities during these years. For each of them, U.S. citizenship marked the end of sovereignty, justified the destruction of sovereignty, or foreclosed the recovery of sovereignty. By reading the experiences of these four groups together, citizenship and sovereignty emerge – hammer-and-claw-like – as a single tool that U.S. officials repeatedly use as they come to see varied people and polities – nail-like – as variations on the single problem of eliminating “surplus” sovereignties and subjecting their peoples to less-than-equal terms of belonging. In a coda, the papers turns to American Samoa, where the dynamic still operates. Except there, those affected have perceived the dynamic and sought to preempt – but perhaps just reinforced – colonialism by rejecting U.S. citizenship.