Isabel González and Gonzales v. Williams

Published Sep 20, 2023, 1:00 PM

Gonzales v. Williams is one of the Insular Cases, and because it was about the citizenship status of Isabel González of Puerto Rico, it stands out from the many other Insular Cases that focus on goods and tariffs.

Research: 

  • Burnett, Christina Duffy. "’They say I am not an American...’: The Noncitizen National and the Law of American Empire.” Virginia Journal of International Law. Vol. 48, No. 4. 2008.
  • Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States at October Term, 1903. “Gonzalez v. Williams.” No. 225.. Argued December 4, 7, 1903.-Decided January 4, 1904. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep192/usrep192001/usrep192001.pdf
  • Connecticut General Assembly Office of Legislative Research. “OLR Research Report.” 3/3/1997. https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS97/rpt/olr/htm/97-R-0359.htm
  • Erman, Sam. “Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (Studies in Legal History).” Cambridge University Press. 2018.
  • Erman, Sam. “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1898 to 1905.” Journal of American Ethnic History. Summer 2008. Volume 27. Number 4. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27501851
  • Fifty-first Congress. “An act in amendment to the various acts relative to immigration and the importation of aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor.” chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/26/STATUTE-26-Pg1084a.pdf
  • Halperin, Anna Danziger. “Isabel González and Puerto Rican Citizenship: A Q&A with Historian Sam Erman.” New York Historical Society Museum and Library. https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/isabel-gonzalez-and-puerto-rican-citizenship-a-qa-with-historian-sam-erman
  • On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court Of Appeals For The Tenth Circuit. “Brief of the Descendants of Dred Scott and Isabel Gonzalez as Amici Curae in support of the Petitioners.” No. 21-1394 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
  • Silsby, Gilen. “The Legal Story Behind Puerto Rico’s Colonial Conundrum.” USC TrojanFamily. Spring 2019. https://news.usc.edu/trojan-family/sam-erman-usc-puerto-rican-citizenship/
  • Silsby, Gilen. “Who in the world was Isabel Gonzalez?” With Sam Erman. USC Gould School of Law. 10/17/2018. https://gould.usc.edu/about/news/?id=4489
  • Women and the American Story. “Puerto Rican Citizenship.” https://wams.nyhistory.org/industry-and-empire/expansion-and-empire/puerto-rican-citizenship/
  • New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]), 25 Nov. 1906. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1906-11-25/ed-1/seq-13/

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Not long ago, we talked about the Insular Cases, and I mentioned that there was one particular case that I wanted to spend more time on. I'd kind of done the thing where I was like, I wish this whole episode were about this one case that was Gonzalas versus Williams, which the US Supreme Court decided in nineteen oh four. So some scholars consider this to be one of the Insular cases.

Others don't.

There are just lots of different ways of grouping and looking at all those decisions. There were a couple of reasons why it really caught my attention while I was researching that earlier episode. One is that most of the Insular cases were about goods and tariffs, the first ones to be decided, or some times called the Insular tariff cases. That's how much the focus was on tariffs. This one, though, was not about goods. It was about a person and her family. And this was also the first time that the Supreme Court really looked at the question of Puerto Rican's citizenship status. Although as we were going to talk about they looked at the question, they didn't decide on an answer to it.

So we're not going to go back over the entirety of the insular cases since our episode on those came out just a few weeks ago, but just for a brief refresher, this was a collection of US Supreme Court cases decided after the Spanish American War related to territory that the US had acquired in the Caribbean and the Pacific at the time. That included Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and part of the Samoan Archipelago.

Prior to this, whenever the United States acquired new territory, it was just taken for granted that that territory would ultimately become one or more states. But these court decisions established the idea that, unlike all the other territory that the US had acquired before these islands were unincorporated, their status as a territory was not a temporary stop on the way to becoming a state. They could remain territories indefinitely. They belonged to the United States, but were not fully part of it, The Court described these territories as home to quote, alien races, and their citizens were not considered US citizens or entitled to all the same constitutional rights that US citizens were.

The first batch of insular cases was decided in nineteen oh one, and the cases that followed continued to revise and clarify how the Court interpreted the status of these territories and the people who lived there. Gonzales versus Williams was decided in nineteen oh four and it involved the case of Isabelle Gonzalez, who had been born in Puerto Rico in eighteen eighty two. When Isabel was born, Puerto Rico was under Spanish control, and Spain made a distinction between peninsulares or people born on the Iberian Peninsula, and creolos, or people of Spanish descent born in its colonies. People born in Puerto Rico were considered Spanish subjects unless their father was a Spanish citizen, either born on the peninsula or nationalized.

The Spanish American War took place when Isabel Gonzalez was about sixteen, and after the war ended, Spain seeded Puerto Rico to the United States. The US also gained control of Guam and the Philippines, and Cuba became an independent nation, although it was initially occupied by the United States. The Treaty of Peace between Spain and the US that formally ended this war was very careful in how it talked about the people who were living in what had been Spanish territory. Spanish subjects who were native to the peninsula and were living in the seeded territory were allowed to stay and retain all their property in business, and to retain their Spanish citizenship if they declared their intent to do so in court within a year, but quote the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by the Congress. Congress didn't determine the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of those territories right away, though. In terms of Puerto Rico, President William McKinley signed the Forker Act or the Organic Act of nineteen hundred into law on April second of nineteen hundred. The Foriker Act came up in our episode on the Insular Cases because one of its provisions was a tariff on goods moving between Puerto Rico and the United States, so in that case, the Supreme Court was looking at the whether that tariff was constitutional. The Forker Act also set up a civilian government for Puerto Rico, and in section seven the Act read quote, all inhabitants continuing to reside therein who were Spanish subjects on the eleventh day of April eighteen hundred and ninety nine, and then resided in Puerto Rico, and their children born subsequent there too, shall be deemed and held to be citizens of Puerto Rico, and as such entitled to the protection of the United States. Accept such as shall have elected to preserve their allegiance to the Crown of Spain on or before the eleventh day of April nineteen hundred, in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Peace between the United States and Spain entered into on the eleventh day of April eighteen hundred and ninety nine, And they, together with such citizens of the United States as may reside in Puerto Rico, shall constitute a body politic under the name of the People of Puerto Rico, with governmental powers as hereafter conferred, and with power to sue and be sued as such. In other words, when the Four Car Act went into effect, Isabelle Gonzalez was legally a citizen of Puerto Rico, but the law didn't actually say that citizens of Puerto Rico were also citizens of the United States, just that they were entitled to the protection of the United States. Like it didn't specifically say they weren't citizens either, there was a vagueness to this. In nineteen hundred, shortly before she turned eighteen, Isabelle Gonzalez married Jose Caballero. They had a daughter together, who they named Dolores. But then in nineteen oh two, Jose died of tuberculosis, and when he died, Isabel was pregnant with their second child. The sequence of events that followed is a little tricky to piece together because there's court testimony and personal documents and family lore that all contradict one another at some points, but it is clear that Isabel Gonzalez didn't think she was going to be able to support herself and her children by herself. Her mother was facing financial hardship as well. Isabel's brother Luis had already gone to New York to try to find better paying work so he could send money back to her. Either Isabel decided to join her brother in Staten Island with the hope of finding a better paying job there, or she was planning to marry a man named Adolfo Vignals, who had moved to New York ahead of her to find a job and a place to live before she arrived. Either way, Isabel left her daughter with her mother and sailed to New York in nineteen oh two, at the age of twenty. When she set sail, Puerto Ricans were generally being allowed to travel freely between Puerto Rico and the United States, but while she was on the way to New York, the US Treasury Department issued new guidelines for arriving Puerto Ricans, specifically that they were quote subject to the same examinations as are enforced against people from countries over which the United States claims no right of sovereignty, so the examinations being referenced there fell under the Immigration Act of eighteen ninety one. This law had established the office of Superintendent of Immigration, who was an officer of the Treasury Department. If you were thinking, why was the Treasury Department having anything to do with this. That's why this law required the commanding officers of arriving vessels to report the name, nationality, last residence, and destination of any quote aliens on board. The law empowered inspection officers to remove people from the ships for examination and to detain them, and it also made the Marine Hospital Service responsible for any medical examinations. This law stated that quote the following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States in accordance with the existing acts regulating immigration, other than those concerning Chinese laborers.

These terms are outdated. Heads up all idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, and polygamists. The law also barred anyone whose passage had been paid for by someone else, with certain exceptions. The law specified that people attempting to enter the US unlawfully would ideally be sent back on the same ship that they had arrived on.

As the Bell Gonzalez was refused entry into the United States because officials thought she was likely to become a public charge, and she was detained at Ellis Island. We will have more on that after a sponsor break. In addition to the new policies treating Puerto Ricans as aliens at port, when Isabel Gonzalez arrived in New York in August of nineteen oh two, the Port of New York had a newly appointed Commissioner of Immigration that was William Williams. Williams was aggressive about turning people away, and in his first year in office, he doubled the number of people who were excluded at Ellis Island. In particular, he was really focused on people he deemed likely to become a public charge. He ordered that anyone who was found to be traveling with less than ten dollars should face additional scrutiny. Women who were pregnant and unmarried faced additional scrutiny as well, and single women were allowed entry only if a family member came to the port to get them. A lot of accounts say that Isabel Gonzalez tried to avoid problems at port by making sure that she had eleven dollars with her and making arrangements ahead of time for her family to pick her up when she arrived. It is certainly possible that she did both of those things, but since Puerto Ricans weren't being treated as aliens at port when she left, it's not as clear that she made these arrangements because she was anticipating potential problems. Regardless, even if she did this, these steps were not enough to offset the fact that she was Puerto Rican, unmarried, and visibly pregnant, and she was detained when she arrived at Ellis Island on August fourth, nineteen oh two. Her case was sent to the Board of Special Inquiry, which held hearings for people whose immigration status was ambiguous or complicated in some way. The board usually held these hearings really quickly, but they were not public and most people didn't have any kind of opportunity for legal representation. Gonzalez's first hearing was the next day, and her uncle, Domingo Coyazzo and her brother Luis Gonzalez were both there. Coaso had married the Gonzalez aunt, Armina, and he had a long history as an activist prior to the Spanish American War. Puerto Ricans and Cubans had come together to advocate for greater autonomy from Spain, and Coyoso had been one of those activists, including working in Cuba as a publisher and organizer and joining the Cuban Revolutionary Party. After the Spanish American War, Cuba had become independent, and many Puerto Rican activists, like Cyazo had turned their focus toward advocating for Puerto Rican statehood, believing that was the best way to secure more political autonomy. Coyaso's work as an activist had also connected him to Afro Puerto Rican activist and collector Arturo Alfonso Schomberg. We covered him on the show in twenty twenty one. Gonzalez's hearing on August fifth was the first of several, and there were some patterns among all of them. US investigators based a lot of their questions and their conclusions on stereotypes and racist assumptions about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. Like a lot of Americans saw Puerto Ricans as lazy and promiscuous, so there was a big focus on Gonzalez's marital status and whether or not she was capable of being a good mother. Also, a lot of focus on whether her male relatives could or would support her. Meanwhile, Gonzales and her family saw her attention at Ellis Island as an insult to her honor. Some of their statements that these hearings come across as trying to say whatever they thought would work to get her released and back with her family, even if they were stretching the truth a bit to do it. Another thing to note here is that Isabel gave birth less than two weeks after she was released, so it's also likely that her family so her pregnancy as a motivation to just get her out of detention as quickly as possible. In that first hearing, Gonzalez's uncle and brother focused on the reason she had been given for being detained, that she was likely to become a public charge. They explained that the father of her first child had died, and they described Adolpho Vignal's not as her fiance, but as her husband. They said he wasn't at this hearing because he had to work, so there's a reason for us not to be there, and also that he had a job. Koyazo said that he would take care of Gonzalez if for some reason Vinals could not Koyazo was a printer and made twenty five dollars a week, But the board didn't really seem to believe any of these arguments, and they really insisted that if Gonzalez was married, her husband should be the person to come for her. Two days later, Isabel's aunt Ermina testified before the board, once again saying that her husband, Domingoko, was making twenty five dollars a week and that they would make sure that Isabel was taken care of. This time, the board criticized Ermina for coming by herself. Ermina also had a job, but.

The investigators didn't seem to care about her financial contributions to the household or how it could help make sure Isabel did not become a public charge. Then Isabel's brother Luis made another appearance before the board, and this time he tried to make an argument that was based on an established idea in Spanish law, but which American investigators did not find convincing at all. That's the idea of rapto, which could encompass both seduction and abandonment under the Spanish laws that had previously applied in Puerto Rico. If a man seduced a woman under the promise of marriage but then did not marry her, her family could press charges, and that if he was convicted, he could be ordered to either marry her or to pay a fine and serve prison sentence. Luis said that as soon as his sister was released, their family was going to take her to the church to be married, but the board was really opposed to this idea, that there was a man who was going to be forced to get married without his consent. Finally, on August eighteenth, nineteen oh two, Domingo Cuyazzo swore out a petition of habeas corpus, which attorney Charles E. Labarbier filed with the US Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York. Isabel Gonzalez was paroled pending the Circuit Court's decision, and on September one, nineteen oh two, she gave birth to a daughter named Ava. On the birth certificate, Isabel's name is listed as Isabel Vignal's and Ava's father is listed as Adolpho Vignal's, a mechanic. On October seventh, nineteen oh two, a judge issued the Circuit Court's decision regarding Isabel Gonzalez's status that she was quote by birth, an alien, and since she had not been naturalized, she was still an alien. This meant that the Treasury Department could continue to treat Puerto Ricans as aliens at port. That's something that the Department also applied to Filipinos shortly after this decision came out. But since she was now married to Adolpho Vignal's immigration officials really no longer had any cause to refuse her entry into the United States. A lot of the writing about these hearings and the Supreme Court case that followed make Isabel Gonzalez sound sort of like a passive participant, with various officials trying to keep her out of the US and lawyers and family members making arguments on her behalf. But at this point she could have dropped this whole issue since she was now in the US. Instead, she tried to use her experience to prove that all Puerto Ricans should be considered US citizens, and that meant taking this to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, we don't have like a lot of personal reflections from her that I know of, but there is a lot of evidence that she was like the active instigator of this effort to bring citizenship to everyone in Puerto Rico, and we will have more on that after a sponsor break. Isabelle Gonzalez's detention and the Circuit court decision about her citizenship status caught the attention of Federico Degata, a Gonzalez who was born in Puerto Rico and then studied law in Madrid. Like Isabelle's uncle Domingo Cliazzo, Degato had been an advocate for Puerto Rican self government and autonomy prior to the Spanish American War that included traveling back to Spain in pursuit of that goal. The Fouricker Act had granted Puerto Rico one non voting representative in Congress that was a Commissioner to the House. Federico Degato was the first person elected to that role, and he was serving as commissioner as all of this was happening. One part of Degato's campaign platform had been the idea that Puerto Ricans were already US citizens and needed to be acknowledged as such. Once he was in Washington, d C. He had started aggressively looking for ways to push this issue. He kept an eye out for court cases or other legal action involving Puerto Ricans, and his office fielded calls from Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean and in North America about issues related to their civil rights. For his own part, he tried to apply for a US passport, which in theory, would have identified him as a US citizen once it was issued. Ultimately, the US passed legislation allowing residents of the insular territories to be issued US passports, but ones that did not identify them as US citizens.

During his efforts to get a passport, Degato had been connected to the law firm of Frederick R. Kudair Junior, who specialized in international law. Kudair's father was also a prominent lawyer, and both of them were really well connected in Washington, d c. And New York. Kudair had been one of the attorneys on two of the first insular cases, Delima versus Bidwell and Downs versus Bidwell. He had been representing people who were suing George R. Bidwell, collector of the Port of New York, for charging import duties on goods that had been imported from Puerto Rico. So it makes total sense that both Kudair and Degato would be interested in Gonzalez's case and in the possibility of taking it to the Supreme Court. Degato had even been protesting against the treatment of Puerto Ricans's aliens at US ports of entry while Gonzalez was being detained. Kudair and Degato joined Paul Fuller and Charles E. Labarbier, who had been involved in the Corpus petition.

Briefs in the case of Isabel Gonzales versus William Williams, United States Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York, were submitted to the Supreme Court in late nineteen oh three. By that point, Isabel's brother Luis had brought their mother and their younger sisters to New York from Puerto Rico, and they had also brought Isabel's youngest daughter, Dolores.

Gonzalez's legal team did not try to argue that Puerto Ricans were fundamentally entitled to the same constitutional rights as white male citizens of the continental United States. Instead, they cited a whole array of previous decisions related to citizenship and who was entitled to it, and cases that upheld limits on the rights of citizenship, including dread Scott versus Sandford, which had decided that enslaved Africans and their descendants were not and could not be citizens. That decision was overturned by the fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they also argued that their could not be an American alien. We should note that this legal team was not arguing broadly on behalf of all the residents of all the insular territories. They were focused only on the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. This was in part because the idea of citizenship for Filipinos was incredibly contentious. As we talked about in our episode on the insular cases, if Filipinos became US citizens, roughly ten percent of the US population would then be Filipino, where a lot of people found that idea incredibly threatening, largely because of racism and prejudice. Gonzalez's lawyers also did not try to argue that all citizens were entitled to the same rights and status through citizenship. For example, women could be US citizens but did not have a constitutional right to vote. Children were citizens but had very few political rights. They were basically building an argument that there was already room for Puerto Ricans to be city within the definitions of citizen that the United States was already using, but then making Puerto Rican citizens would not necessarily confer any rights beyond what they were already considered to have. They made comparisons to other imperial powers that similarly had different classes of citizenship for different groups of people. I found a lot of this really hard to read. Of course, just as one example, Kud's treatment of indigenous people in these arguments could be really dismissive and inaccurate. He sort of portrayed them as scattered bands whose disappearance in the face of westward expansion was inevitable, and then compared that to Puerto Rico's established population of almost a million people. So the argument was, of course Puerto.

Ricans should become citizens, there were hundreds of thousands of them in Puerto Rico, but indigenous people in the continental US didn't need to be citizens in this argument because they were part of other sovereign nations and kind of disappearing anyway. It was just there's just a thread through a lot of it that's like, yeah, it's fine for citizens to not actually be equal. Here's all the ways that were already not treating all citizens equally at this point, most indigenous people were not considered citizens.

And that's fine. Yeah, it hurt me a little. Yeah. In an amicus brief, Federico Digato approached the idea of citizenship for Puerto Ricans from a broader and more personal level. He walked through the transfer of Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States and argued that by the passage of the Foricker Act, Puerto Ricans had acquired citizenship and been incorporated into the same body politic as those who were already American citizens. He referenced his own role representing Puerto Rico in the House, noting that he could not represent the US citizens living in Puerto Rico if he were in alien. He also referenced his own admission to the Supreme Court Bar, something that was at least theoretically only open to US citizens. Yeah, he's sort of like, you admitted me to the Supreme Court bar. You only do that for citizens, So I must be a citizen. Solicitor General Henry M. Hoyt argued on behalf of the United States, and his argument as summed up as quote, a pellant is not a citizen and is to be regarded as an alien within the meaning of the immigration laws. It is conceded that the people of Puerto Rico are connected with this government by a certain tie distinguishing them from other ordinary foreigners, that they may be nationals. But this does not operate to confer citizenship. Must Congress have intended that all who were not aliens in the strict and unrelieved sense should escape the immigration laws, or all that who were not citizens should be subject to them. The solution of the controversy is dependent solely upon the proper construction of the law. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December of nineteen oh three and issued its unanimous decision on January fourth, nineteen oh four. The opinion, authored by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, read, in part quote, Gonzalez was a native inhabitant of Puerto Rico and a Spanish subject, though not of the peninsula when the Session transferred her allegiance to the United States, and she was a citizen of Puerto Rico under the Act. And there was nothing expressed in the Act, nor reasonably to be implied therefrom to indicate the intention of Congress that citizens of Puerto Rico should be considered as aliens and the right of free access denied to them, But the Court didn't offer an answer to the question of whether Puerto Ricans were US citizens, going on to say, quote, we are not required to discuss the power of Congress in the premises or the contention of Gonzalez's council that the Session of Puerto Rico accomplished the naturalization of its people, or that of Commissioner Degeto in his excellent argument as amicus curia that a citizen of Puerto Rico under the Act of nineteen hundred is necessarily a citizen of the United States. The question is the narrow one whether Gonzales was an alien within the meaning of that term as used in the Act of eighteen ninety one. At the same time, the Court noted that the Immigration Act of eighteen ninety one did not apply to the people of Puerto Rico. Quote, we think it clear that the Act relates to foreigners as respects this country, to persons owing allegiance to a foreign government and citizens or subjects thereof, and that citizens of Puerto Rico whose permanent allegiance is due to the United States, who live in the peace of the dominion of the United States, the organic law of whose domicile was enacted by the United States and is in force through officials sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, are not aliens, and upon their arrival by water at the ports of our mainland, are not alien immigrants. Within the intent and meaning of the Act of eighteen ninety one, this meant that the Immigration Commissioner had no jurisdiction to detain Isabel Gonzales at port, and it meant that she had not been obligated to pursue her objections through the Superintendent of the Treasury, as immigration issues were required to do. The court also noted that quote, in order to dispose of the case in hand, we do not find it necessary to review the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the decisions of this Court thereunder. That Act was originally passed in eighteen eighty two and implemented a ten year ban of all immigration from China with a few exceptions, was renewed in eighteen ninety two and made permanent in nineteen oh two. So this ruling did not extend citizenship to Puerto Rican like Gonzales and her attorneys had hoped that it would, but Gonzales did continue to advocate for Puerto Ricans in both Puerto Rico and the United States after this point. Among other things, both she and her uncle Domingo Coyazzo wrote a number of letters to the editor that were published in the New York Daily Tribute and in the New York Times. In a nineteen oh five letter to the editor at the Times, Gonzalez asked why the US used tariffs to protect its rice exports from Louisiana but not coffee exports from Puerto Rico. In another letter that year, she described the United States as violently forcing Puerto Rico to abandon customs and traditions that had come about from being a Spanish colony for hundreds of years, including cock fighting, bullfighting, and relaxing during the Sunday Sabbath. She suggested that the US should instead follow Britain's model of settling matters related to Hindus and Muslims in India through their own respective religious laws. This is a pretty optimistic view of Britain's direct rule over India, but her point was that the United States was forcibly imposing its own laws and customs onto Puerto Rico rather than respecting the laws and customs that were already in place there. In August of nineteen oh five, Gonzales wrote a letter to The Times in which she described loving astronomy and how when she lived in Puerto Rico, she thought that in the US, the equipment and machinery needed to study astronomy would be available to everyone. After coming to the US, she was disappointed to find that this was not the case, but hoped that a philanthropist in the vein of Andrew Carnegie might fund such an endeavor.

One day in November of nineteen oh six, Gonzales wrote a letter to the New York Tribune correcting its earlier reporting on Puerto Rican citizenship. This letter read quote, Sir, permit me to congratulate you upon your article under the caption citizenship for Puerto Ricans. It is indeed encouraging and refreshing to see an influential paper like the New York Daily Tribune advocating the reforms which will lift Puerto Rico from its present anonymous political status to that of a robust child with a proud name and standing under the American flag. It is not true, however, as you state in your leader, that the Puerto Ricans quote are subjected to our immigration laws as aliens. I happen to be the cause of the removal of that law as it was applied to Puerto Rico and Filipinos. The Supreme Court of the United States declared it unconstitutional in my case Gonzales versus Williams in nineteen oh four, two years after I was detained at Ellis Island as an alien libel to become a public charge. Four years have elapsed since then, and the forecast of my jailers has not as yet been fulfilled. On the contrary, I am a useful member of the Puerto Rican colony of New York, and I have lived long enough to see your patriotic tribune pleading for the hard working and loyal Puerto Rican New York. November twenty third, nineteen oh six. Is the Belle Gonzales. Most of Gonzalez's letters to newspaper editors seem to have been printed in nineteen oh five. In nineteen oh six, it's possible that changes to her personal and financial situation played a part in that she and Adolpho Vignals had a son together, Adolpho Junior, as well as a daughter, who died in infancy, but eventually Vignal's returned to Puerto Rico, apparently abandoning Gonzalez and his son and stepchildren. Isabella's daughter Ava started living with the Coyazzos and seems to have eventually been informally adopted into that family. Dolores was placed in an orphanage.

Her financial situation does seem to have turned around, though, and when Isabelle married Juan Torres in nineteen fifteen, their marriage documents described each of them as widowed. They eventually moved to New Jersey, where she lived until her death on June eleventh, nineteen seventy one. There's probably a lot more to be discovered about her life outside of this case. A lot of what's out there today is thanks to the work of historians Sam Erman and Gonzalez's great granddaughter Belinda Torres Mary. In twenty eighteen, Ermin.

Published a book called Almost Citizens Puerto Rico, the US Constitution and Empire and that looks at this case in the broader context of Puerto Rican and US history.

In nineteen seventeen, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Schaffroth Act. It outlined a bill of Rights for Puerto Rico and established a bicameral legislature with a governor appointed by the President. This act gave both the Puerto Rican governor and the US executive branch veto power over the Puerto Rican legislature's decisions. This law also extended statutory citizenship to Puerto Ricans, meaning that citizenship came from a law and not from the Constitution. So while this law made most people born in Puerto Rico citizens of the United States, they still did not have all the same constitutional rights and protections as citizens born in one of the states. Puerto Rico was also still a territory without all the constitutional protections or autonomy that applied to the States.

Two months later, the US passed the Selective Service Act, was as World War One was happening. This established a military draft, and that draft also applied to Puerto Ricans, and the fact that these two things happened one right after the other led to an almost conspiracy theory, which was that the United States had extended citizenship to Puerto Rico in order to get access to more soldiers as it prepared to enter the First World War. There are several problems with that idea, though a big one is this Act required all men, not just citizens, to register for the draft, and it ultimately applied to the US territories of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, so Puerto Rican men would have been required to register for the draft, regardless of whether Puerto Ricans had first been made citizens. If you are wondering why that draft did not apply to the Philippines, the status of the Philippines was a little bit different from other territories. Thanks to the Philippine Autonomy Act of nineteen sixteen, the Philippines established a National Guard with the intent of its becoming part of the American Expeditionary Force, and more than fourteen thousand people volunteered, but the US was reluctant to accept this proposal, and the war ended before the Philippine National Guard could be federalized. And this whole topic of Filipino and Puerto Rican soldiers during World War One is like a whole other topic. I feel like there was clearly, like some of the reluctance of the US to accept these soldiers into the US Armed Forces was clearly motivated by racism.

But that's like sort of a whole other thing. There were definitely wartime factors involved with extending citizenship to Puerto Ricans, including the fact that after the opening of the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico lay along major shipping routes. But advocates, including Domingo Cuiazo, had been trying to get a citizenship law passed for years. There was political wrangling over this through multiple presidential administrations and sessions of Congress, so it was just it was not something that just sort of happened out of the blue. Immediately before the passage of the Selective Service Act, other laws continued to refine who was eligible for citizenship in Puerto Rico until the Nationality Act of nineteen fifty two, which declared that all people born in Puerto Rico on or after January thirteenth, nineteen forty one were US citizens at birth. Today, Puerto Rico is still considered an unincorporated US territory with one non voting commissioner in the House of Representatives, and Puerto Rico does not have delegates in the Electoral College during presidential life elections. As we talked about in that Insular Cases episode, this applies to just like so many things involving just daily life in Puerto Rico. And as a final note, in that episode on the Insular Cases, we talked about Fittisimanu versus United States, which was a case on the question of birthright citizenship for American Samoans which the US Supreme Court declined to hear in twenty twenty two. Descendants of Dred Scott and Isabelle Gonzalez filed an amicus brief in this case. Specifically that was Lynn M. Jackson, great great granddaughter of Dredd and Harriet Scott, and Belinda trres Mary, great granddaughter of isabel Gonzalez, who we mentioned earlier. Their petition was in support of the American Samoan petitioners who were calling for birthright citizenship and the overturning of the Insular cases. Oh so much legal doings. Uh huh. Do you have listener mail to take us out? I do. First, I have a super quick correction. A couple of people have pointed out that at the end of our episode on Lcoricia of Winchester, when we were talking about the unveiling of her statue. Mm hmmm, we were talking about how the current King of the UK, King Charles the Third, was supposed to be there for that unveiling, but was not there because he had COVID. I called him Charles the second It's right in the outline, and I didn't catch it, and neither of us caught it.

I had a particularly hard time saying the correct words during the recording of that episode, and later realized that I also had COVID. I feel like like my mind and body were just sort of like slowly coming offline as we were recording that. So thank you to the people who pointed that out. I just like said the totally wrong thing. And also we have email from Marci. Marcy says, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm a teacher spending my summer break getting caught up on past episodes I missed during school year. Today, while fixing dinner, I was listening to the Scott Joplin episode.

I found the inclusion of the maple leaf rags so charming. However, when I listened to the pod, I listened at one point five x speed. The effect on the pace of the music caused me to giggle and brought a Charlie Chaplin esque scene to mind. I had to stop cooking, turn the speed back to one X and then listen again to really take it in. Thank you for all of your hard work and research. As I teach, I find myself telling my middle school students. I listened to a podcast about that once. It sort of turned into a great way to get the whole class to roll their eyes simultaneously. When I geek out over history or science during class discussions, the kids asked if I learned factoids I share in a podcast. Anyway, here's my offering of our furry family member, Stella. She is a mini satin rabbit and spends summer's home with me in the school year in my classroom, hopping around between desks and over the feet of teenagers. The summer, she has tested her athletic prowess by jumping on top of various furniture pieces. Today she contemplated jumping to the top of my children's bookshelf. She thought better of it. Anyhow, keep up the excellent work. I can't wait to see what topics come up with my class discussions this year that allow me to pull out my catchphrase and get the eyes rolling. Marcie number one, what a beautiful bunny rabbit.

Buddies are so sweet. I want a pet stella so much she looks so so soft. Also, this act or intentionally listened at one point five speed really cracked me up for two reasons. One is that we talked uh in that episode about Scott Joplin's strong feelings that his music not be played too fast, and so the idea of listening to it at one and a half speed made me laugh. And then also I was listening to an old episode recently to make sure it was going to be okay to use as a Saturday classic, and somehow my phone, which was in my pocket with the screen off, suddenly shifted into one point twenty five speed, which was just enough that I thought I was like I did, did we drink too much coffee?

Like what's happening? It took me a second to realize what had happened.

So anyway, there's no such thing as too much coffee, Trasa. So thank you so much, Marci, thank you for these pictures. I love the story. Thanks again to the folks who corrected us about saying Charles the second instead of Charles the third. If you'd like to send us a note, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

And we're all over social media.

Miss in History You can subscribe to our show also on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you like to get podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

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