Isabel Gonzalez

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name = Isabel Gonzalez
caption = "Gonzales v. Williams"
Paved the way for Puerto Ricans to be given United States citizenship
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birthdate = 1882
birthplace = Puerto Rico
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occupation = activist
nationality = Puerto Rican
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Isabel Gonzalez (born c. 1882) was a young, pregnant, single Puerto Rican mother who helped pave the way for Puerto Ricans to be given United States citizenship, by challenging the Government of the United States in the groundbreaking case "Gonzales v. Williams", 192 U.S. 1 (1904) after immigration authorities derailed her plans to find and marry the father of her unborn child by excluding her as an alien "likely to become a public charge." It was the first time that the Court confronted the citizenship status of inhabitants of territories acquired by the United States.cite journal
accessdate=
url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jaeh/27.4/erman.html
title=Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1898 to 1905
author=Erman, Sam
journal= Journal of American Ethnic History
volume=27 |issue=4 |date=Summer 2008]

ituation in Puerto Rico pre-1904

Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1898 which was ratified on December 10, 1898, Puerto Rico was annexed by the United States after the 1898 Spanish–American War. Spain had lost its last colony in the western hemisphere. The United States established a military government which acted as both head of the army of occupation and administrator of civil affairs. [cite book
accessdate=
url=http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Miles
title=Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles - Embracing a Brief View of the Civil War, or, From New England to the Golden Gate : and the Story of his Indian Campaigns, with Comments on the Exploration, Development and Progress of Our Great Western Empire
last=Miles |first=Nelson Appleton
location=Chicago
publisher= Werner
year=1896] Almost immediately, the United States began the "Americanization" process of Puerto Rico. The U.S. occupation brought about a total change in Puerto Rico's economy and polity and did not apply democratic principles in their colony. Puerto Rico was classified as an "unincorporated territory" which meant that the protections of the United States Constitution — including the right of citizenship — did not automatically apply, because the island belonged to the U.S., but was not part of the U.S.cite journal
accessdate=2008-08-03
url=http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-4172324_ITM
title=Changing forms of U.S. hegemony in Puerto Rico: the impact on the family and sexuality
journal=Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development
date=March 22, 2003
last=Safa |first=Helen]

On January 15, 1899, the military government changed the name of Puerto Rico to Porto Rico (On May 17, 1932 U.S. Congress changed the name back to "Puerto Rico") and the island's currency was changed from the Puerto Rican peso to the American dollar integrating the island's currency into the U.S. monetary system. [ [http://welcome.topuertorico.org/history4.shtml Puerto Rico History] Retrieved September 3, 2008] The United States exerted their control over the economy of the island by prohibiting Puerto Rico from negotiating commercial treaties with other nations, from determining tariffs, and from shipping goods to the mainland on other than U.S. carriers.

Opposition to U.S. Citizenship for Puerto Ricans

There were various factors which contributed to the opposition of giving United States Citizenship to Puerto Ricans by the Government of the United States. The U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland. [ [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-4172324_ITM Changing forms of U.S. hegemony in Puerto Rico: the impact on the family and sexuality] , Retrieved September 3, 2008] In 1899, U.S. Senator George Frisbie Hoar described Puerto Ricans as: "uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who were only interested in wine, women, music and dancing" [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D0CE2D6163DE433A25751C2A9649C94689ED7CF Americanizing Puerto Rico, New York Times Feb. 22, 1899] Retrieved September 3, 2008]

Prior to 1898, the United States had organized new acquisitions from nontribal governments into largely self-governing territories as a prelude to statehood and had generally extended broad constitutional protections and U.S. citizenship to free, nontribal residents. After 1898 this process changed and in Puerto Rico, Congress established a centrally controlled administration and declined to recognize Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens.

In the "Downes v. Bidwell" case of 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that the U.S. Constitution functioned differently in Puerto Rico than on the mainland. Justice Edward Douglass White introduced the concept of unincorporated territorial and reasoned that unlike prior territories, Puerto Rico had not been incorporated by Congress or by treaty into the U.S. union. It was thus "foreign to the United States in a domestic sense", that is, foreign for domestic law purposes, but also part of the United States under international law. The decision permitted the establishment of unequal, undemocratic polities in such territories, did not demand that those territories eventually be incorporated, and granted wide latitude to Congress and the executive in structuring those polities.

González travels to New York City

Gonzalez was born and raised in Puerto Rico when the island was still a Spanish possession. She was a native inhabitant of Puerto Rico and a Spanish subject, though not of the Peninsula (Spain). She was residing in the island on April 11, 1899, the date of the proclamation of the Treaty of Paris of 1898 which ceded the island to the United States. One of the conditions of the treaty was the transfer by cession the allegiance of the islanders to the United States. Gonzalez was a citizen of Puerto Rico, but not of the United States even though the island was governed by that nation. [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=192&invol=1 U.S. Supreme Court] , Retrieved September 3, 2008]

Gonzalez's fiance left Puerto Rico for New York City in 1902, leaving her pregnant and with another child from a previous marriage (she was a widow) behind. He went with the intention of finding a job in a factory in Linoleumville, Staten Island, in the neighborhood where Isabel's brother, Luis González worked. Gonzalez was to join him there and they were to marry after he settled down. In the summer of 1902, Gonzalez boarded the S.S. "Philadelphia", a steamship which departed from San Juan, Puerto Rico with New York City as its destination. She telegramed her family about her expected arrival which normally would be in the docks of New York, however while the "S.S. Philadelphia" was en route, the United States Treasury Department's Immigration Commissioner General F. P. Sargent issued new immigration guidelines that changed Gonzalez's and her fellow countrymen's status. Gonzalez and the others arrived on August 24, 1902 and were transferred to Ellis Island.

The new commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island was William Williams, a former Wall Street lawyer. He was aggressively construing the statutory bar on aliens "likely to become a public charge" and he was strictly enforcing immigration laws. Williams directed inspectors to treat aliens as suspect if they traveled with less than ten dollars. He also instructed his inspectors to attach the label of "public charge" to unmarried mothers and their children, even though most of them had jobs waiting for them. Ellis Island policy dictated that "unmarried pregnant women were always detained for further investigation" and that single women were only released if family members came to claim them. [http://opiniojuris.org/author/christina-duffy-burnett/ “They say I am not an American…”: The Noncitizen National and the Law of American Empire by Christina Duffy Burnett] , Retrieved September 3, 2008]

Gonzalez was detained by the Immigration Commissioner at that port as an "alien immigrant", in order that she might be returned to Puerto Rico if it appeared that she was likely to become a public charge. Gonzalez had eleven dollars in cash on her person and her family was to pick her up, however the immigration officials discovered her pregnancy during her early line inspection and a Board of Special Inquiry opened a file (note: her surname was later misspelled as "Gonzales" by immigration officials) on her.

Board hearings

A hearing was held the next day and Gonzalez's uncle, Domingo Collazo, and her brother, Luis González, joined her (her fiance was not permitted to miss his job). During the hearings the family focused on the question of preserving Gonzalez's honor and bringing her to New York. Inspectors weighed proof of legitimate family relations through presumptions that certain kinds of women were inadequate mothers and certain kinds of men were insufficient fathers and husbands. Williams stated:

"It will be a very easy matter to fill up this country rapidly with immigrants upon whom responsibility for the proper bringing up of their offspring sits lightly, but it cannot be claimed that this will enure to the benefit of the American people."

Two days later, without the help from the father of Isabel Gonzalez's expected child, another attempt was made by Gonzalez's brother and by Domingo Collazo's wife, Hermina Collazo. The family insisted that Gonzalez would not be a burden to the State's Welfare system since they had the economic means to support her. When these attempts failed, Collazo used his political and professional connections. In the 1890s Collazo had been active in a radical wing of the Cuban Revolutionary Party that sought an Antillean social revolution to improve the status of workers and people of African descent. He had attended meetings with Antillean activists Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and Rosendo Rodríguez. Collazo swore a habeas corpus petition for Gonzalez. During this time, a friend of Gonzalez related the story to Orrel A. Parker, a lawyer. His partner, Charles E. Le Barbier became interested in the case and filed Collazo's petition with the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York. Seven weeks later, the court issued its opinion. The court ruled that the petitioner was an alien and upheld her exclusion.

United States Supreme Court: "Gonzales v. Williams"

On August 30, 1902, Federico Degetau an expert in international law and the first Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico to the United States House of Representatives [ [http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/congress/degetau.html Federico Degetau from the Library of Congress] ] , unaware of the Gonzalez situation, wrote to the Secretary of State in protest of the new rules that made Puerto Ricans subject to immigration laws. His protest was forwarded to the Treasury Department. Degetau then contacted Le Barbier and Parker, who informed him that they planned to appeal Gonzalez's case to the Supreme Court.

Once she lost her administrative appeal, Gonzalez switched tactics. She decided to appeal and to take her case to the United States Supreme Court, however this time instead of focusing on the "public charge" issue, she decided to take up the issue that all Puerto Ricans were citizens of the United States and as such should not be detained, treated as aliens and denied entry into the United States.

Degetau saw in the case of Isabel Gonzalez, the perfect "test case" because now it would not be about whether immigration inspectors, following guidelines suffused with concepts of race and gender, deemed Isabel Gonzalez and her family desirable. The case now would be about settling the status of all the native islanders who were in existence at the time the Spanish possessions were annexed by the United States. By February 16, 1903, Frederic René Coudert, Jr., an international-law attorney from New York, who launched the "Downes v. Bidwell" case for clients protesting tariffs levied on goods shipped between Puerto Rico and the United States, joined Paul Fuller, Charles E. LeBarbier and Degetau in the Gonzalez case as a collaborator.

The case, which became known as "Gonzales v. Williams", was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4 and 7, 1903 and was presided by Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller. The case sparked the administrative, legal, and media discussions about the status of Puerto Ricans. The colonial administration to issues of immigration and to U.S. doctrines in the treatment of U.S. citizens, chiefly women and people of color (dark skinned), as dependent and unequal were discussed. Gonzalez and her lawyers moved among the legal realms, aided by shared languages of race, gender, and morality, while the U.S. solicitor general Henry M. Hoyt, focused on what he considered were failed parents, rearing children outside moral, economically self-sufficient homes. Gonzalez, who was out on bond, secretly married her fiance and thus became "a citizen of this country through marriage," and acquired the right to remain stateside. She could have ended her appeal, but instead she decided to press her claim that all Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.

On January 4, 1904, the Court determined that under the immigration laws González was not an alien, and therefore could not be denied entry into New York. The court, however declined to declare that she was a U.S. citizen. The question of the citizenship status of the inhabitants of the new island territories, their situation remained confusing, ambiguous, and contested. Puerto Ricans came to be known as something in between: "noncitizen nationals."

Aftermath

Isabel Gonzalez, stayed in New York with her husband and children. She actively pursued the cause of U.S. citizenship for all Puerto Ricans because she believed that if the people of Puerto Rico were deceived out of one honorable status—Spanish citizenship—the United States was obliged to extend Puerto Ricans a new honorable status—U.S. citizenship. She wrote and published letters in the New York Times that the decision and surrounding events of her case revealed that the United States failed to treat Puerto Ricans honorably, breaking promises to them and marking them as inferior to "full-fledged American citizens". [http://opiniojuris.org/author/sam-erman/ Resurrecting Gonzales: Sam Erman Comments by Sam Erman] , Retrieved September 3, 2008] Gonzalez wrote the following:

"Gen. Miles (Nelson A. Miles) went to Porto Rico to save us, and proclaimed to the wide winds his 'liberating' speech." But instead of U.S. citizenship, Puerto Ricans got "the actual [current] incongruous status—'neither Americans nor foreigners,' as it was vouchsafed by the United States Supreme Court apropos of my detention at Ellis Island for the crime of being an 'alien.'"

Federico Degetau traveled to Washington, D.C., as Puerto Rico’s first "Resident Commissioner," or nonvoting representative. He dedicated himself to the struggle to gain U.S. citizenship for all Puerto Ricans.

Frederic René Coudert, Jr. became a member of the State Senate from 1939 to 1946 and was elected as a Republican to the Eightieth and to the five succeeding United States Congresses (January 3, 1947 - January 3, 1959; was not a candidate for the 86th Congress). [ [http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/guidedisplay.pl?index=C000804 COUDERT, Frederic René, Jr., 1898-1972] , Retrieved September 3, 2008]

In 1917, Congress passed the Jones-Shafroth Act which conferred United States citizenship on all citizens of Puerto Rico and allowed conscription (military draft) to be extended to the island. The act, which was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917, also revised the system of the government in Puerto Rico. [ [http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/jonesact.html Jones-Shafroth Act - The Library of Congress] , Retrieved September 3, 2008]

ee also

*List of famous Puerto Ricans

References

External link

* [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=192&invol=1 U.S. Supreme Court]