Federico Degetau

Infobox_Congressman
name = Federico Degetau y González


date of birth = birth date|1862|12|5
place of birth = San Juan, Puerto Rico
death_date = Death date and age|1914|2|20|1862|12|5
death_place = Santurce, Puerto Rico
state = Puerto Rico
district = At-large
term_start = January 4, 1901
term_end = January 3, 1905
preceded =
succeeded = Tulio Larrinaga
party = Republican
occupation= attorney
religion= Roman Catholic
alma_mater= Central University of Madrid

Federico Degetau y González (December 5, 1862 – January 20, 1914) was a Puerto Rican politician, lawyer, writer, author, and the first Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico to the United States House of Representatives.

Early years

Degetau was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and attended the common schools and the Central College of Ponce. He completed an academic course at Barcelona, Spain, and was graduated from the law department of the Central University of Madrid. He was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Madrid, Spain. He founded the newspaper "La Isla de Puerto Rico" to communicate the plight of Puerto Rico to the colonial power.

Political career

Degetau returned to Puerto Rico, and was one of the four commissioners sent by Puerto Rico under Luis Muñoz Rivera to ask Spain for autonomy in 1895. The petition was denied but a colonial-civil government was imposed by the U.S. Congress three years later. He settled in San Juan, Puerto Rico and continued the practice of law.

Degetau was a member of the municipal council of San Juan in 1897, and mayor of San Juan in 1898. He was deputy to the Spanish Cortes Generales of 1898. After the Spanish-American War, he was appointed by the military governor General Guy Vernor Henry as the Secretary of the Interior in the first cabinet formed under American rule in Puerto Rico, in 1899. He was appointed by General Henry's successor, General George W. Davis, as a member of the Insular Board of Charities.

Resident Commissioner

Degetau became a member of the Insular Republican Party, which was founded in 1899. He was the first vice president of the municipal council of San Juan in 1899 and 1900, and was president of the Board of Education of San Juan in 1900 and 1901. He was elected as a Puerto Rican Republican to the Resident Commissioner post in 1900, and reelected in 1902. He served from March 4, 1901 until March 3, 1905, in the Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh, and Fifty-eighth Congresses. He was a member of the Committee on Insular Affairs, and submitted a bill to grant United States citizenship to Puerto Rico residents, which failed. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1904, and resumed the practice of law.

United States Supreme Court:"Gonzales v. Williams"

In 1902, the United States Treasury Department issued new immigration guidelines that changed the immigration status of all Puerto Ricans. Isabel Gonzalez a young, pregnant, single Puerto Rican mother, was traveling aboard the S.S. "Philadelphia" when these changes were made and detained as a "alien" and "burden" to the state in Ellis Island. She lost her appeals in the Board hearings and decided to take her case to the Supreme Court.

On August 30, 1902, Federico Degetau 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. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jaeh/27.4/erman.html Journal of American Ethnic History] ]

Once she lost her administrative appeal, Gonzalez switched tactics and 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 groundbreaking case, which became known as "Gonzales v. Williams", was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4 and 7th, 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 Williams and his lawyers, 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. [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] ]

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."

Written works

As an author, he wrote "El secreto de la domadora" in 1886, "Que Quijote!, Cuentos para el camino" in 1894, "Juventud" in 1895, and "La Injuria" in 1893.

Degetau died in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and was interred in the Cemetery of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

ee also

* List of famous Puerto Ricans

References

External links

CongBio|D000196 [http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000196]
* [http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/congress/degetau.html Federico Degetau from the Library of Congress] .