Sam Erman. Almost Citizens

Soon after the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, U.S. major general Nelson A. Miles released a broadside throughout the island proclaiming that the people of the United States “come bearing the banner of freedom, inspired by a noble purpose . . . [to] bring you the fostering arm of a nation of free people, whose greatest power is in justice and humanity to all those living within its fold . . . and to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our government.” In Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, Sam Erman has written a fascinating legal history of how this promise was broken. Erman tracks the shift from the post–Civil War amendments requiring citizenship and statehood for annexed territories to the post–Spanish-American War Insular Cases establishing Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory outside the protections of the U.S. Constitution. Erman traces how lawyers, judges, legislators, and a handful of activists debated citizenship for Puerto Ricans as the doctrine of “nonincorporation” became the “dominant legal framework for overseas empire” (7). With impressive research attentive to the intricacies of competing legal decisions, Erman shows how deliberately vague rulings reflected tensions between the Constitution and imperialism that could not be resolved. “Puerto Rico was within the nation for one statutory purpose but not for another constitutional one,” he argues (53).

Citizenship · Constitution · Economic Justice · Empire · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies