On August 4, 1902, Isabel Gonzalez, a twenty-year-old pregnant widow, arrived in New York on the S.S. Philadelphia from Puerto Rico. With eleven dollars in hand after having paid her own passage, she entered New York harbor eager to meet up with her brother, Luis, who had arrived six months earlier to work in a linoleum factory on Staten Island. However, before Gonzalez set foot in the city, immigration agents at Ellis Island detained her, alleging that she was “likely to become a public charge.”Footnote ² Considered common grounds for detention in this period, such a charge was routinely leveled against foreign immigrants. However, Gonzalez, together with the Courdert brothers, a pair of young lawyers from Manhattan who specialized in international law, contested the charge before the U.S. District Court in New York. In their petition for Gonzalez they wrote, “Your petitioner denies that she is an alien and asserts her right to entry into the United States.”Footnote ³ By arguing that residents of U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico were not, in fact, foreigners and thus not subject to immigration restrictions, Gonzalez challenged the legal boundaries of the United States and its polity.

This case was one in a series of confrontations in the early twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking entrance to the U.S. metropole and Bureau of Immigration agents policing U.S. mainland borders. Conflicts over colonial migration centered on the question of whether colonial territories and their subjects should be classified as “foreign” or “domestic.” At the time of Gonzalez's arrival at Ellis Island, various U.S. bodies of law defining Puerto Rico's relationship to the mainland were at odds. Though the United States had ruled the island as a colony since the War of 1898, immigration laws governing the entrance of people to the U.S. mainland defined Puerto Rico as a foreign nation.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, “coastwise” shipping laws, which regulated the movement of goods, defined Puerto Rican ports as within U.S. domestic shipping channels.Footnote ⁵ It was in this context of conflicting legal precedents that Isabel Gonzalez took her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Gonzalez v. Williams (1904), the Court defined Gonzalez as a “U.S. National,” a new legal category between citizen and alien. As nationals, Gonzalez and other residents of U.S. territories could enter the U.S. mainland free from immigration restrictions. However, nationals were also denied the most basic citizenship rights, including the right to vote for president and representatives in Congress.Footnote ⁶

Colonial categories such as “national status” and “coastwise shipping” created legal dilemmas for Puerto Ricans. As nationals, migrants were partially external to the U.S. polity. Still, at the same time, “coastwise shipping” defined the island as internal to the U.S. economy. The Gonzalez case and others like it show not only how legal categories such as these conditioned colonial migration patterns, but also how migrants, in turn, contested and shaped colonial legal categories.

Drawing on sources from both U.S. and Puerto Rican archives, this article is part of a larger project on the legal and political origins of colonial migrations. Historians have just begun to examine how U.S. colonialism abroad has shaped particular immigration patterns at home.Footnote ⁷ Recent cultural histories of the U.S. empire in the Philippines have shown how a culture of imperialism shaped Filipino migration to the U.S. mainland, as hierarchies of race and nation spurred the movement of colonial subjects to the metropole.Footnote ⁸ U.S. schools in the Philippines, for example, not only taught English to Filipinos, but also, unintentionally, inspired many to pursue higher degrees at mainland universities.

Such work on the cultural legacies of imperialism and their effects on labor mobility has contributed significantly to our understanding of the cultural sources of imperial migrations. However, the political and legal origins of colonial migration are still not fully understood.Footnote ⁹ How, for example, did the shift in legal status from “alien” to “U.S. national” shape the migration of colonial subjects? How did colonial migrants help bring about those changes to U.S. law in the first place? Such questions point to the intertwining of colonial law and migration. As in the history of other empires, such as that of Great Britain, a variety of imperial laws spurred migration from the colonies to the metropole.Footnote ¹⁰ In revealing the central role of legal categories in shaping colonial labor migrations, this article suggests that U.S. colonial immigration patterns have at times resembled those of other imperial nations.

If, however, colonial law has shaped particular migration streams, migrants have also shaped colonial law. Historians have amply demonstrated that law is an instrument of imperial power.Footnote ¹¹ These authors have shown, for example, how colonial law wrought a violence of exclusion as the United States created new categories such as “foreign in a domestic sense” and “unincorporated territories” as means of withholding constitutional protections from lands deemed outside the U.S. “territorial domain.”Footnote ¹² Still, this focus on the legal architecture of imperialism as imposed from the metropole risks leaving unexamined various ways in which colonial subjects challenged such laws, often through migration to the mainland. This article shows how colonial subjects seeking entrance to the metropole challenged the legal definitions of unincorporated status and noncitizenship that marked U.S. colonial rule. Working-class vulnerabilities pushed many from the colonies to the forefront of legal battles on the mainland over colonialism, migration, and citizenship. Imperial law, then, was a charged political arena in which migrants desperate to find work in the “domestic” United States contested, at times successfully, the very colonial legal categories that defined them as “foreign.”

The migration of Puerto Ricans in the early twentieth century was a small-scale phenomenon when compared with the millions of immigrants coming from Europe in this period.Footnote ¹³ Still, the early Puerto Rican case examined here illuminates patterns that would shape large-scale movements of people later in the twentieth century. As Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Mexicans, and Cubans, among others, entered the United States in increasing numbers, their migrations continued to be, in the words of historian George Sanchez, “wrapped within both domestic and foreign policy.”Footnote ¹⁴

Understanding the relationship between colonial legal categories and Puerto Rican migration begins with understanding conditions on the island.Footnote ¹⁵ U.S. takeover in 1898 profoundly transformed Puerto Rico's political economy.Footnote ¹⁶ With the end of Spanish rule, Puerto Rico lost access to its most profitable export markets in Spain and Cuba. Throughout the nineteenth century, coffee had been the primary export of the island, accounting for fully 70 percent of all exports. Grown in ideal conditions in the tropical highlands, Puerto Rican coffee was coveted in Europe for its strong and distinctive flavor, selling in Spain and other parts of Europe for prices equivalent to Mocha and Java beans from Indonesia, the highest priced coffee in the world. Puerto Rico also sold its coffee to Cuba, a country with little domestic coffee production. As the Cubans preferred the cheaper grades and Europeans the most expensive, Puerto Rican coffee farmers could routinely export their yearly harvest worth seven to eight million dollars.Footnote ¹⁷

However, with the shift from Spanish to U.S. sovereignty in 1898, the U.S. Congress enacted the Coastwise Shipping Laws, mandating that Puerto Rico trade exclusively with the United States.Footnote ¹⁸ Puerto Rican goods were required by law to be shipped by American steamers, ships that only operated between the island, New York, and New Orleans. The Coastwise laws not only redirected Puerto Rican exports, but also raised the prices of shipping. As American steamship companies no longer had to compete with foreign companies for the transport of Puerto Rican exports, they held a de facto monopoly on trade, causing shipping rates to rise considerably.Footnote ¹⁹

Along with the American steamship trust, sugar and tobacco producers also benefited from increased trade with the United States. These sectors boomed after 1900, when Congress passed free trade provisions allowing Puerto Rican exports free entrance to the United States as part of the Foraker Act.Footnote ²⁰ Because of inflated prices produced by U.S. tariffs on imports from foreign nations such as Cuba, sugar and tobacco producers in Puerto Rico, including U.S. trusts, reaped an economic bonanza. Though workers in these sectors experienced flat wages and continued hardships, sugar and tobacco producers supported the free trade provisions and coastwise laws.Footnote ²¹

Though the designations of “free trade” and “coastwise” were a boon to the U.S. steamship, sugar, and tobacco trusts, these classifications proved devastating for the Puerto Rican coffee sector. Because the U.S. market was already saturated with coffee from Brazil, Puerto Rican coffee, which sold for higher prices for reasons of quality and shipping costs, could not compete. Recognizing the impact on Puerto Rico of losing the Spanish markets without gaining a replacement market in the United States, General George Davis, the American governor on the island, observed that economic conditions in the early years of the American occupation were “much worse than before the troops landed.”Footnote ²²

Amidst growing frustration, especially within the foundering coffee sector, Puerto Ricans contested the legal characterization of their island as “coastwise.” In a 1900 petition to Congress, T. Larrinaga and twelve other Puerto Ricans described themselves as "children by late adoption” and asked Congress, “Who are we, what are we? Are we citizens or are we subjects?” Decrying the fact that Puerto Ricans had “no voice in the government" and “no markets where to dispose of their goods,” they argued that only the intervention of the U.S. Congress could keep Puerto Ricans from the “starvation and ruin before them.” Recognizing the impact of the decimated coffee industry, Larrinaga wrote that the island found its “props and mainstays cut from beneath her whole commercial structure.” He called for a repeal of the coastwise laws, stating that non-U.S. ships would “gladly accept lower rates, were we privileged to utilize them.” However, given that coastwise laws benefited the U.S. steamship, sugar, and tobacco trusts, Larrinaga's petition went unheeded.Footnote ²³

Even as the legal definition of the island as “coastwise” placed Puerto Rico and its exports within the American economy, Puerto Rican migrants were routinely categorized as racial others firmly outside the bounds of American citizenship. U.S. government officials repeatedly cast Puerto Ricans as racially inferior to Anglo Saxons in an effort to justify their exclusion from U.S. citizenship. Asked by Congress to describe their intelligence, for example, General Davis, the U.S. colonial governor of Puerto Rico, likened Puerto Ricans to Mexicans in the southwestern territory seized from Mexico in 1846–48. Casting doubt on the mental capacities of both groups, he claimed, “We do not appear to have made any impression on [Mexicans] in the way of education or social progress in over fifty years.”Footnote ²⁴ Arguing that Puerto Ricans were unfit for self-rule, Henry Curtis, a member of the U.S. Insular Commission, declared, “It would be a calamity to us and to them also at present.”Footnote ²⁵ Davis echoed the sentiment predicting they would govern “very badly.” More broadly, he asserted, “The trouble with the Latin race so far as I have had an opportunity to observe it in Mexico, New Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, is that . . . they seem to have very little conception of political responsibility and the obligation of all to bow to the will of the majority.”Footnote ²⁶ Curtis concurred, claiming that Puerto Ricans are “a people who are swayed by all sorts of passions—by rum, some of them, and by bribery.”Footnote ²⁷

Not everyone agreed, of course, with the assessment of Davis and Curtis. Lucas Amadeo, a Puerto Rican coffee planter stated, “I have not the least doubt that the Puerto Ricans are capable of governing themselves.”Footnote ²⁸ Pointing to the experience of Puerto Ricans granted suffrage under Spanish rule, Amadeo stated that even those who are illiterate “have a very good common sense, and understand government better than a great many who can read and write.”Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, despite essentialized understandings of the “latin race,” Governor Davis still argued that it was the overwhelming structural constraints that kept Puerto Ricans from attaining high levels of education: “The support of ten or twelve in a family on a wage of thirty cents a day, even with the aid of a garden patch, would not . . . leave much for higher education and cultivation of the mind.”Footnote ³⁰

Given the prevailing conception of Puerto Ricans as racial others unfit for republican citizenship, most in Washington expressed concern at the prospect of their migration to the mainland. In the midst of the island's economic crisis in 1900, U.S. senators openly worried that Puerto Ricans would stream into U.S. ports. “Is there any probability,” asked Senator Knute Nelson during a hearing of the Committee on Pacific Islands and Porto Rico, “that they will come in any great numbers?” Governor Davis responded, “Yes, sir. You know how many Cubans there are in New York City . . . the same will be the case with Puerto Ricans.”Footnote ³¹ Despite Governor Davis's prescient view of the long-term impact of U.S. policies, most in Washington, like Senator Nelson, conceived of immigration as a process unto itself, insulated from the effects of America's world power.Footnote ³²

In fact, Puerto Rican migration to the mainland in the early years of the twentieth century was profoundly shaped by American colonial legal categories.Footnote ³³ The designation of Puerto Rico as “coastwise” led to a shrinking coffee export market and growing numbers of unemployed coffee workers on the island. At the same time, U.S. companies sought contract laborers who could be classified as non-foreign in an effort to comply with the 1885 Foran Act's prohibition on foreign contract labor. Labor agents hired by American companies first arrived in San Juan and Ponce in 1900 to recruit—and sometimes coerce and trick—workers to migrate to the United States.Footnote ³⁴

The colonial categories of “coastwise shipping” and “non-foreign labor” had the combined effect of making Puerto Rican workers especially vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of contract labor recruiters. In one example of this heightened vulnerability, labor agents kidnapped a boatload of Puerto Rican workers in Ponce in 1900. In December of that year some two hundred workers boarded a steamship for what they thought was nothing more than a trip to the other side of the island in search of work. Far from circling the Caribbean island, however, they soon found themselves heading west en route to the Hawaiian Territory.Footnote ³⁵ After an uncertain voyage lasting six days, these men, women, and children arrived in New Orleans. There, contract labor agents, who had been hired by Spreckels Sugar Company of Honolulu to bring 2,500 Puerto Ricans to work on contract, boarded the Puerto Ricans onto two Southern Pacific train cars heading west. Stopping along the way in remote locations, hundreds of miles from the nearest cities, they traveled through the U.S. Southwest en route to San Francisco with the aim of avoiding detection by Bureau of Immigration agents. Halfway through the journey, the labor agents stopped the train in the middle of a desert three hundred miles outside El Paso, Texas, in an effort to avoid a long layover waiting for the steamship in San Francisco.Footnote ³⁶ Waiting in the city of San Francisco, they feared, would give workers a good chance at escape. After the five-day rail journey, they arrived on schedule, and with careful timing, quickly boarded their charges onto a steamship to cross the Pacific, arriving in Hawaii seven days later.Footnote ³⁷

Ponce, New Orleans, El Paso, San Francisco, Honolulu. The route of this migration reflected the contradictions of U.S. colonial legal categories. Puerto Rican port cities like Ponce were flooded with unemployed coffee workers desperate for work after the designation of the island as coastwise. As part of a U.S. colonial territory, Ponce was an attractive site of labor recruitment for U.S. companies wary of the Foran Act's prohibition on foreign contract labor.

Nevertheless, the definition of Puerto Ricans as non-foreign or foreign was still being debated among officials in Washington in 1900. Indeed, in a case earlier that year, Jorge Cruz, a contract laborer from San Juan, was detained at Ellis Island as an alien in violation of the Foran Act. Shortly thereafter, Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage, who was then charged with overseeing the Bureau of Immigration, reevaluated Cruz's status and allowed him to enter the United States under the condition that the federal government could deport him at anytime.Footnote ³⁸ Perhaps it was because of this ambiguous ruling and Cruz's much-publicized detention in New York that labor agents opted for entering the mainland through New Orleans, the only other city besides New York serviced by steamships sailing from the island.

Uncertain of their charges’ non-foreign status, the labor agents commissioned by Spreckels moved strategically from New Orleans to Hawaii. The choice to stay outside El Paso reflected the reality of U.S. border patrols along the U.S.–Mexican border. While the Foran Act was difficult to enforce, almost one-third of the federal cases against the importation of contract labor originated in El Paso, the center of U.S. corporate recruitment efforts of Mexican labor.Footnote ³⁹ Agents trafficking laborers from Ponce who were unclear of Puerto Ricans’ official status surely sought to avoid one of America's most heavily policed border cities. As the commercial hub of Hawaii, Honolulu served as a gateway to sugar plantations throughout the Hawaiian Islands. During this period, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) exerted tremendous influence over the governor of the Hawaiian Territory and strongly favored the continuation of territorial status over statehood, because it allowed for the importation of foreign contract laborers, a practice prohibited in states but not in territories under the Foran Act.Footnote ⁴⁰

Puerto Ricans diverted by labor agents to Hawaii strategically embraced the category of non-foreign labor to assert their position within the U.S. political economy and thereby make claims on the colonial state. Several protested that although “thieveries are committed on these islands mostly by Canacas, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and other foreigners, Porto Ricans alone are held responsible.” Calling for justice, they asserted, “Some of our poor countrywomen who would rather starve than steal are accused of robbery.” Though such claims were, of course, partisan and unconcerned with how other groups were also racially targeted, they pointed to Puerto Ricans’ heightened sense of injustice. Unlike Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese workers in Hawaii, Puerto Ricans could claim to be part of the United States: “It is a shame to all . . . that today when we are under the domain of the United States, we are compelled to emigrate to a place void of enlightenment and ideals, to live oppressed and without hope.”Footnote ⁴¹ In response to their requests and mounting evidence of mistreatment, most of the Puerto Rican workers sent unwillingly to Hawaii were brought back to Puerto Rico at U.S. government expense.Footnote ⁴²

In the years immediately following U.S. takeover, then, Puerto Ricans remained at the margins of the United States, migrating from the Caribbean to America's Pacific territories and back again. By 1902, however, more and more workers began seeking entry to the U.S. mainland. Driven by the ravaged “coastwise” economy on the island and pulled by mainland employers’ need for cheap, “non-foreign” labor, Puerto Ricans migrated to New York, St. Louis, and Washington. However, even as U.S. employers sought to define Puerto Ricans as non-foreign to comply with the Foran Act, colonial laws continued to define Puerto Ricans as aliens. Indeed, the 1900 Foraker Act, which declared Puerto Ricans were not U.S. citizens, and the 1902 Treasury Department Circular, which declared that immigration laws regulating entry to the mainland United States applied to residents of Puerto Rico, both defined Puerto Ricans as aliens.

Migrants to the mainland, like those to the Hawaiian Territory, drew on the contradictions between the colonial legal categories of “coastwise” and “alien” to protest their noncitizen status. When Mary Coy arrived on Ellis Island from Puerto Rico in 1902, for example, she raised many of the same questions about the right of Puerto Ricans to enter the mainland United States that Jorge Cruz had raised two years earlier.Footnote ⁴³ A native of Puerto Rico, Coy traveled to New York, where she was detained on Ellis Island and ordered deported. Federico Degetau, the U.S. resident commissioner of Puerto Rico who held a non-voting position in the U.S. House of Representatives, objected to Coy's deportation with arguments that directly questioned the contradictory status of Puerto Ricans, stating, “I protest against the application of the restrictions of the immigration laws to the natives and residents of the Territory of Porto Rico.”Footnote ⁴⁴ After the Supreme Court declared in Downes v. Bidwell (1901) that Puerto Rico was an unincorporated territory of the United States, Degetau asserted, “It is beyond my comprehension how a native born of a territory of the United States . . . can be declared to be an alien.”Footnote ⁴⁵

However, it was the case of Isabel Gonzalez that ultimately brought the contradictions of colonial legal categories before the U.S. Supreme Court. When Gonzalez arrived in New York harbor in 1902, the Bureau of Immigration's Board of Special Inquiry held a series of hearings on Ellis Island to determine whether she should be allowed entry. As a pregnant, nearly penniless widow, it seemed incontrovertible that she would become a public charge. Domingo Collazo, a relative of Gonzalez and a naturalized citizen of the United States who had lived in New York City for fifteen years, appeared before the board to state, however, that he and his wife would provide for Gonzalez and allow her to stay in their home.Footnote ⁴⁶ Upon further questioning, U.S. Immigration Inspector Semsey determined that Gonzalez was traveling to be reunited not just with her brother, but with a new husband as well. “Why didn't her husband come here for her?” Semsey asked incredulously. While Collazo attempted to explain, Semsey interjected, “But his wife is here and he should come here for her.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Gonzalez's brother, Luis, clarified the point by revealing that his sister was not yet married. When asked why her husband-to-be had still not come to meet her, Luis responded, “He does not want to marry her.” Still, Luis continued, their aunt “is sure of making a reconciliation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ However, despite such assurances, Inspector Holman moved to exclude Gonzalez on the basis of her being “likely to become a public charge.”

Determined to protect his niece, Domingo Collazo filed a petition for habeas corpus on behalf of Gonzalez at the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York. In it he claimed, “Isabella Gonzalez is imprisoned or restrained in her liberty in Ellis Island, illegally.” Asserting that Gonzalez had a right to enter the United States, Collazo argued, “She should not be treated as an ‘alien immigrant,’ and that she is not likely to become a public charge.”Footnote ⁴⁹

For his part, William Anderson, counsel for the U.S. commissioner of immigration, countered with an argument that pointed to the novelty of Puerto Rico's legal status as the first colony of the United States. Unlike previous treaties by which the United States acquired territory—including, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the 1819 Florida Purchase, the 1848 Treaty with Mexico, and the 1867 Alaska Purchase—the 1898 Treaty of Paris did not declare Puerto Ricans to be citizens of the United States. Anderson further appealed to prevailing racial ideologies, which positioned Puerto Ricans above Filipinos. Arguing that whereas Puerto Ricans might have been civilized, educated, and capable of self-government, “Philippinos are not.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Far from supporting Puerto Rican citizenship, Anderson appealed to this racial hierarchy in order to flag the dangerous prospect of Filipino immigration if Puerto Ricans were granted free entry to the United States.

Responding to such arguments, Judge E. Henry Lacombe of the circuit court dismissed Gonzalez's request on the grounds that she was “foreign born” and not naturalized.Footnote ⁵¹ Gonzalez was remanded to the custody of William Williams, U.S. commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York.Footnote ⁵² The Lacombe decision met with approval in the Bureau of Immigration. Commissioner-General E.P. Sargent declared the decision to be “exceedingly gratifying to the Bureau.”Footnote ⁵³

However, Gonzalez pushed back. In 1903, Collazo hired the Courdert brothers, attorneys who would appeal the case and eventually argue it before the U.S. Supreme Court. In their petition for Gonzalez, they wrote, “Your petitioner denies that she is an alien and asserts her right to entry into the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In a motion to advance the Supreme Court hearing, they argued that the Gonzalez case would be “the test case upon which will probably be determined the question as to whether citizens of Porto Rico and certain others of our insular possessions are aliens within the purview of the Constitution and laws of the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The Gonzalez appeal in 1904 did prove a test case on the question of how the law would categorize colonial migrants. Wary of what admitting Gonzalez would mean for U.S. policy toward Filipinos, Philander C. Knox, the U.S. attorney general, wrote to George B. Cortelyou, secretary of the newly formed Department of Commerce and Labor, which oversaw the Bureau of Immigration: “The question of Immigration from the Philippines is involved, and it would seem that no hasty action in opposition to the views of the lower court in the Gonzalez case should be taken.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In contrast, Federico Degetau, the Puerto Rican resident commissioner, filed an amicus brief in support of Isabel Gonzalez before the U.S. Supreme Court. Degetau asserted that the decision to deny Gonzalez admission to the United States was “inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States and the laws I have sworn to support.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Finding for Gonzalez and agreeing with the logic of Degetau, the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court on January 4, 1904. In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Melville Fuller eschewed the question of citizenship to decide instead on Gonzalez's alien status. “The question,” Fuller claimed, “is the narrow one whether Gonzalez was an alien within the meaning of that term as used in the act of 1891.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Because of the earlier Supreme Court decision, Downes v. Bidwell (1901), which resolved the question of import duties by declaring that Puerto Rico was a dependency of the United States, the Court decided that residents of a dependency were neither U.S. citizens nor foreigners. The Court granted Gonzalez the right of admission to the United States on the grounds that as a resident of an insular territory she was not an alien. The Court also ordered that Gonzalez be entitled to recover seventy-one dollars and ninety cents for wrongful detention from the U.S. commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York.

This remarkable decision created a new legal category of belonging: U.S. nationals. Neither aliens nor citizens, nationals owed allegiance to the United States and were granted freedom of movement within U.S. borders.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, they were also denied the most basic citizenship rights, including the right of representation in Washington. Indeed, national status was the perfect legal expression of the fundamental tension in U.S. colonial policy, as Puerto Ricans were made part of the U.S. economy but kept outside the polity.

Reacting to the ruling, The Nation magazine expressed deep anxiety about the effects of American imperialism on migration.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although supporting Puerto Ricans’ legal “promotion from an anomalous position,” the Nation, like Bureau of Immigration officials, worried about the implications for Filipino immigration. Predicting that after the Gonzalez ruling Filipinos could not be legally excluded, the magazine warned, “Here is only a hint of the embarrassments of a republic which injects into its body politic a great class of people who are neither citizens nor aliens.”Footnote ⁶¹

Indeed, because of the Gonzalez ruling and in spite of opponents’ protests, nationals entered the United States with labor contracts from Puerto Rico and the Philippines in growing numbers beginning in 1904. In March of that year, 239 Filipinos arrived in the port of Tacoma, Washington, en route to work in St. Louis under contract. The surgeon of the U.S. Marine Hospital at Tacoma Port examined the immigrants and found thirty-five to be infected with trachoma. Secretary Cortelyou stated that “this represents about 15 percent of the Filipinos arriving affected with a dangerous contagious disease.”Footnote ⁶² Cortelyou asserted that such a condition would have justified exclusion for Mexican, Chinese, and most other immigrants seeking entrance to the United States. However, because the 1904 Gonzalez case had ruled that “citizens of our insular possessions must be admitted to the United States, without reference to the provisions of the immigration laws,” even these sick Filipinos were admitted. Frustrated that the “sanitary purpose” of the immigration laws could be so willfully bypassed, Cortelyou urged Vermont senator William Dillingham, chair of the Committee on Immigration, to “declare in express terms that the provisions of the immigration laws extend to all persons not actually citizens of this country.”Footnote ⁶³ Though Cortelyou sought to bar “infectious subjects” and contract laborers, he proved unable to bring about a reversal of the Gonzalez decision.

As nationals exempt from immigration restrictions, Puerto Ricans were increasingly recruited to American states—not just territories—to work as non-foreign contract laborers. Francis Lynch, a labor agent for the St. Louis Cordage Company, traveled to Puerto Rico to recruit workers for his client in June 1904. After signing contracts and buying second-class tickets from the New York and Puerto Rico Steamship Company, Lynch and twenty-four Puerto Ricans—twenty-two unmarried women and one widow with her young son—set sail on the S.S. San Juan for New Orleans. Upon delivering his charges to the rope factory in Missouri, Lynch sailed back to Puerto Rico to recruit additional workers, returning with thirty-five more women and one nine-year-old girl in October.

However, if the category of “national” allowed for employers to avoid prohibitions on foreign contract labor, it also allowed for the continued exploitation of workers not considered full citizens. In the winter of 1905, arguing that their working conditions were intolerable, several of the Puerto Rican women in St. Louis wrote a letter of protest to the governor of Puerto Rico. “The conditions which we were placed in when we reached this city,” they explained, “were very different from those which Mr. Lynch had promised we should be surrounded by.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Claiming that working conditions had deteriorated over their four months in St. Louis, the petitioners cited the company's dismissal of their matron, Mrs. J. Reyes de Rosales, who had accompanied them from Puerto Rico.Footnote ⁶⁵ More alarming, the women reported that “in midwinter, we have been thrown into the street, where the snow lies one-half yard deep.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Reflecting their desperate situation and ambiguous citizenship status, they petitioned the governor of Puerto Rico for help in redressing their grievances with their U.S. employer.

The plight of these women attracted attention in both St. Louis and San Juan. N.C. Dauron, a Puerto Rican living in St. Louis, wrote to the governor of the island to alert him to the conditions of the women in the rope factory. “Without any notice,” he claimed, “[St. Louis Cordage Co.] has turned fifteen out into the city streets, penniless, hungry, and without a shelter.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While the St. Louis police took these women in from the street, Dauron called on “kindhearted citizens of this country, Porto Rico, or the Government” to lend aid.Footnote ⁶⁸ Maria Casalduo, writing from Utuado, Puerto Rico, also wrote the governor: “Among the girls abandoned in St. Louis is my sister.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Demanding that her sister and the other women who had been mistreated be brought back to Puerto Rico at the government's expense, she urged the governor to “see that the tears may be dried which are now being shed by families full of grief.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Arturo Cordova, writing from San Juan, declared that local newspaper articles and the many letters of protest he had received from the women themselves impelled him to write to the governor on their behalf. Decrying the plight of young women treated so poorly in America, he questioned how this could happen in “a land that is no doubt noble and grand.”Footnote ⁷¹ Indeed, since the 1885 Foran Act, American political culture had regarded contract labor, marked by the inability to negotiate wages and working conditions, as dangerously close to slavery, as the opposite of free labor. Like other Puerto Ricans on the island, in Hawaii, and on the mainland, Cordova brought into focus the contradictions of colonial legal categories that had defined Puerto Ricans as “coastwise,” “non-foreign,” and now “national,” but not yet as fully part of the United States.

In response to such pleas for help, the House of Delegates of Puerto Rico appointed a commission in January 1905 to investigate the conditions of the contract laborers in St. Louis.Footnote ⁷² Responding to inquiries from San Juan, Benjamin G. Crosby, president of the St. Louis Cordage Company, admitted, “It is true that some of the girls who came from Porto Rico with Mr. Lynch left our employ.”Footnote ⁷³ “But,” he quickly added, “reports that they were in destitute circumstances were not true.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Despite such claims, the majority of women who contracted with St. Louis Cordage returned to Puerto Rico before their contracts came due. By the end of January, Lynch himself returned to the island with twenty of the women. Six more returned by way of New York in early February. Only eight of the original fifty-four remained working for the Cordage Company by late winter 1905.Footnote ⁷⁵

National status, then, allowed for Puerto Ricans to be even further incorporated into the U.S. economy, albeit on disadvantaged terms. Pushed by the crippling effects of coastwise shipping and pulled by U.S. companies’ extensive recruitment of non-foreign labor, workers migrated first to territories and, increasingly after 1904, to states. Although the legal category of “national” offered unrestricted immigration rights, it also created new dilemmas for Puerto Rican migrants.

The case of Juan Rodriguez illuminates the tensions and contradictions inherent in national status. A day laborer who migrated from the island to New York, Rodriguez later found his way to Washington, D.C., where he applied for employment at the U.S. Navy Yard on Capitol Hill. When the Board of Labor Employment responded that he could not file for employment because he was not a citizen of the United States, he asked for help from Commissioner Degetau, who took up the case, filed for a writ of mandamus, and eventually represented Rodriguez before the Supreme Court. However, despite his arguments that the Treaty of Paris, the Foraker Act, and the Supreme Court's ruling in the Gonzalez case earlier that year all protected Rodriguez's right to be considered for employment in the United States, the Supreme Court ruled against him, citing the fact that the rules governing the employment of workers at the Navy Yard made no allowances for “nationals.”Footnote ⁷⁶

National status thus enshrined in law America's deep ambivalence toward its new colonial subjects. Included in the economy but legally defined as outside the polity, Puerto Rican nationals were permitted to work as contract laborers with private employers but not allowed to seek employment with the U.S. government. Such restrictions on the freedom of labor were seemingly at odds with the protections of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, passed on the heels of the Civil War with the aim of making illegal slavery and other forms of coercive labor, except in prisons. Indeed, when these civil rights amendments were passed, many legal experts understood the chance to freely seek employment as a basic right of American citizenship. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley's dissent in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases: “The right of any citizen to follow whatever lawful employment he chooses to adopt (submitting himself to all lawful regulations) is one of his most valuable rights.”Footnote ⁷⁷ However, the Supreme Court's decision in the Rodriguez case constrained the freedom of nationals to seek employment at will.

National status eventually came to an end in 1917 when the U.S. Congress declared Puerto Ricans to be citizens. Still, even with this new status, Puerto Ricans continued to face the dilemmas of being defined as both internal and external to the Untied States, dilemmas dating back to the establishment of coastwise shipping and national status. Though citizenship offered free movement to the mainland and increased chances of employment there, it did not extend statehood to the island or the full rights of representation to its residents (the rights of voting for president and full representation in the U.S. Congress continued to be withheld). In the case of the Philippines, by contrast, Congress declined to extend U.S. citizenship. As nationals, Filipino migrants were continually denied naturalization on the basis of U.S. legal precedents, which made Asians ineligible for U.S. citizenship.Footnote ⁷⁸

In identifying the colonial legal categories of “national status” and “coastwise shipping” and their effects on the mobility of goods and people, this article highlights the legal sources of colonial migrations to the United States. Both of these categories profoundly shaped Puerto Rican migration to the mainland in the early twentieth century. In constricting the market for the island's largest export, coastwise shipping led many Puerto Ricans to seek employment in the mainland United States. Moreover, in defining colonial subjects as exempt from immigration restrictions, national status allowed U.S. employers to more freely recruit laborers from the island.

At the same time, the evidence presented here also points to the various ways in which Puerto Ricans contested, redeployed, and sometimes even shaped these legal categories. Shortly after U.S. takeover of the island in 1898, Puerto Ricans such as T. Larrinaga contested their newfound “coastwise” status by petitioning the U.S. Congress. When U.S. employers defined migrants in Hawaii as non-foreign in an attempt to circumvent the prohibition on foreign contract labor, migrants redeployed the category to their advantage and successfully made claims on the U.S. colonial state. Furthermore, when Puerto Ricans such as Gonzalez sought to enter the U.S. mainland, they pointed to the contradictions between the categories of coastwise and alien and in the process helped shape the new category of “national.” As these examples illustrate, imperial law was a charged political arena in which migrants desperate to find work in the “domestic” United States contested, at times successfully, the colonial legal categories that defined them as “foreign.” While social theorists have long suggested that foreign policy has shaped particular immigration patterns, examples such as these reveal not only how legal categories shaped colonial migration patterns, but also how migrants shaped colonial categories.