Authors

Rose Cuison-Villazor

Creating a Racialized Liminal Status: The 1790 Act and Interstitial Citizenship

Abstract

This Comment began with De La Ysla’s case to highlight the political status that Filipinos held when the Philippines was a U.S. territory. This Comment argues that this status, which a court would later describe as a “hybrid status ... the so-called ‘non-citizen national,’” was a racialized liminal political status with roots in the 1790 Naturalization Act (1790 Act). Professors Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman claim that the 1790 Act played a critical role in shaping “the very composition of the people of the United States” by including the “free white person” clause in the country’s first naturalization law. One of the goals of Congress in passing this law, as Chin and Finkelman contend, was to intentionally encourage the immigration of primarily White immigrants and ensure that the country would be a White nation. The 1790 Act did so not only by explicitly restricting the group of immigrants who were deemed racially eligible to become citizens but by providing the “foundation for a variety of other discriminatory laws” as well.

[...]

In Part I, I briefly situate the arguments presented in this Comment within the liminality literature and the work of other legal scholars who have theorized liminality in immigration law. I have previously used liminality as a concept to describe noncitizen nationals as liminal or interstitial citizens and explored how this status disrupts the framing of citizenship along a citizen or noncitizen binary paradigm. I build on this prior work by connecting interstitial citizenship to the 1790 Act.

In particular, as I claim in Part II, the 1790 Act laid the foundation for the denial of citizenship to Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth century, which led to their interstitial political status. Congressional remarks surrounding the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish American War, demonstrate the overarching sentiments against extending citizenship to residents of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Based on fears of millions of people of color acquiring U.S. citizenship, Congress subsequently passed laws that created a new political status that was liminal in nature. This in-between status would subsequently receive the support of the Supreme Court in the Insular Cases.

Part III discusses the role that the 1790 Act played in naturalization cases filed by Filipinos residing in the United States. As that Part explains, courts interpreted subsequent amendments to the 1790 Act as indicative of Congress’s goal to continue to limit naturalization based on race and, in so doing, ensured that Filipinos would never be able to leave their racialized liminal status.

The final Section explores the implications of this colonial history for Chin and Finkelman’s understanding of how the 1790 Act shaped the United States as a White nation.

This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.

Repository Citation

Rose Cuison-Villazor, Creating a Racialized Liminal Status: The 1790 Act and Interstitial Citizenship, 65 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1157 (2024), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol65/iss5/6