Conclusion

Summary

During and after World War I, the territorial nonincorporation doctrine displaced the constitutional commitment to citizenship, rights, and statehood. Puerto Ricans discovered that their place of origin trumped their new citizenship. Stateside, they were Americans but strangers, in one newspaper’s words. In Puerto Rico, they gained few rights and little self-government. Federal officials were the ones who celebrated citizenship – as a sop to anticolonial islanders. Fights to win citizenship, and the citizenship already secured, also shaped the public projects of the Puerto Rican journalist Domingo Collazo and the island labor leader Santiago Iglesias. Each now emphasized politics. By the time of his death, Collazo was the Democratic political boss for Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Iglesias sought entrée for Puerto Ricans workers into federal wartime bureaucracies that regulated the labor supply. Afterward, he won election as the island’s representative in Washington. The Supreme Court unequivocally proclaimed the ascendance of the territorial nonincorporation doctrine only in 1922, in Balzac v. Porto Rico. The decision did not clarify the rights that accompanied incorporation, an ambiguity that persists today.