Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration

The United States in the World

by Robert McGreevey

Borderline Citizens explores the intersection of U.S. colonial power and Puerto Rican migration. Robert C. McGreevey examines a series of confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking work and citizenship in the metropole and various groups—employers, colonial officials, court officers, and labor leaders—policing the borders of the U.S. economy and polity. Borderline Citizens deftly shows the dynamic and contested meaning of American citizenship.

At a time when colonial officials sought to limit citizenship through the definition of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans tested the boundaries of colonial law when they migrated to California, Arizona, New York, and other states on the mainland. The conflicts and legal challenges created when Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. mainland thus serve, McGreevey argues, as essential, if overlooked, evidence crucial to understanding U.S. empire and citizenship.

McGreevey demonstrates the value of an imperial approach to the history of migration. Drawing attention to the legal claims migrants made on the mainland, he highlights the agency of Puerto Rican migrants and the efficacy of their efforts to find an economic, political, and legal home in the United States. At the same time, Borderline Citizens demonstrates how colonial institutions shaped migration streams through a series of changing colonial legal categories that tracked alongside corporate and government demands for labor mobility. McGreevey describes a history shaped as much by the force of U.S. power overseas as by the claims of colonial migrants within the United States.

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2018

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that many US citizens fail to see Puerto Ricans as their citizens-in-arms points to the very necessity of McGreevey's historical treatment of the colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, a relationship governed as much by the vestiges of empires as the many contestations over immigration law, trade law, and the limitations and advantages of citizenship. His intervention is to blend colonial history and legal history, and as such he also gets to incorporate a history of nativism and immigration anxieties as well as a history of migrant labor. (This is especially valuable in Chapter 3, a good teaching excerpt), where he talks about the AFL’s Samuel Gompers’ support of labor rights within Puerto Rico (so as to forestall Puerto Rican migration to the US mainland and presumed competition with mainland residents for jobs.) He provides a good background on the colonial contestation over PR that shaped the period prior to and through 1899, including the decisions to expand Puerto Rican citizenship rights under the Spanish crown (aspects that were preserved as a form of autonomy within the subsequent era of US military rule). He also does an excellent job incorporating debates over citizenship regarding Puerto Rico as they were also imagined for migrants from the Philippines and for residents of Hawaii (noting how different attitudes about racial capacity and threat extended to Latin American and Asian migrants). The only shortcoming of this text is the limited amount of primary material from Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico itself—while his later chapters cover the parameters of migrants within the US, one has to wonder how the debates over citizenship rights were addressed from within the island nation. Were they as heated, as racialized, when articulated by the PR elite? This merits further discussion…

[Mills College Library]

305.86872 M1475 2018

[Liam Coussens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be thoroughly researched and a great overview of Puerto Rican citizenship status in the early 1900's, highlighting a number of factors that wouldn't be obvious on the surface.