United States Recognition of Puerto Rican Citizenship
On April 12, 1900, the Congress of the United States enacted the Foraker Act of 1900, which replaced the governing military regime in Puerto Rico with a civil form of government. Section VII of this act created a Puerto Rican citizenship for the residents "born in Puerto Rico and, therefore, subject to its jurisdiction". The Puerto Rican citizenship replaced the Spanish citizenship that Puerto Ricans enjoyed at the time of the American invasion in 1898. Such Puerto Rican citizenship was granted by Spain in 1897. This citizenship was reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1904 by its ruling in Gonzales v. Williams which denied that Puerto Ricans were United States citizens and labeled them as noncitizen nationals. In a 1914 letter of refusal to the offer of U.S. citizenship and addressed to both the President of the United States and the U.S. Congress, the Puerto Rico House of Delegates stated "We, Porto Ricans, Spanish-Americans, of Latin soul ... are satisfied with our own beloved Porto Rican citizenship, and proud to have been born and brethren in our own motherland." The official 1916 Report by the American colonial governor of Puerto Rico to the U.S. Secretary of War (the old name for the Secretary of the Army), addresses both citizenships, the Puerto Rican citizenship and United States citizenship, in the context of the issuance of passports, further evidencing that the Puerto Rican citizenship did not disappear when the Americans took over the island in 1898. A similar 1918 official report, this one after the Jones Act of 1917 had become law, states that the "passports... prove a person's nationality", thus making clear that Puerto Rican citizenship and Puerto Rican nationality were one and the same.
Read more about this topic: Puerto Rican Citizenship
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, recognition and/or citizenship:
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Maybe we were the blind mechanics of disaster, but you don’t pin the guilt on the scientists that easily. You might as well pin it on M motherhood.... Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen. The scientists signed petition after petition, but nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk that the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“To see self-sufficiency as the hallmark of maturity conveys a view of adult life that is at odds with the human condition, a view that cannot sustain the kinds of long-term commitments and involvements with other people that are necessary for raising and educating a child or for citizenship in a democratic society.”
—Carol Gilligan (20th century)