Who Counts as a Citizen? A Re-Enactment of Gonzales v. Williams (An Insular Case) by Rose Cuison-Villazor

Abstract

This is a script of a re-enactment of Gonzales v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (1904), one of the Insular Cases. In August 1902, Isabel Gonzalez, a twenty-year-old pregnant widow from San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrived on Ellis Island. Officials detained her as an “alien likely to become a public charge” and ordered her returned to Puerto Rico. Isabel challenged her exclusion, claiming that she was a citizen because the United States had annexed Puerto Rico four years earlier. Her case ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (1904), which held only that Isabel was not an “alien” and avoided the question of whether she was a citizen. The ruling led to an ambiguous “noncitizen national” status and made U.S. citizenship by birth in the U.S. territories dependent on Congress, and not the Constitution. The Gonzales case still shapes the citizenship status of millions of people born in the U.S. territories.