A century later, the Institute for Puerto Rican Studies at the University of Connecticut is underway with an analysis of the cases of 288 Puerto Rico residents, who, in 1917, rejected naturalization as U.S. citizens under the Jones Act.
In an interview with El Nuevo Día, Charles Venator-Santiago, director of the Institute and professor of Political Science, said, "We are trying to find all the documentation that explains the legal status of these 288 Puerto Ricans."
The project originated as a master's thesis by Héctor Iván Arroyo, a student at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR).
Arroyo is one of the collaborators on the study, which Venator Santiago leads and includes two other researchers. Their target completion date is set for next May.
The examination draws on the list of individuals who rejected U.S. citizenship that Arroyo obtained from the Puerto Rico General Archive, as well as on cases documented by federal courts in the Puerto Rican archipelago.
Those who chose to retain their Puerto Rican citizenship, as recognized under the Foraker Act of 1900, or their Spanish Citizenship, were required to fill out a form before a federal court.
"They were forced to declare that they did not want U.S. citizenship," Venator-Santiago said.
In one of the documents, Rosendo Acosta González, a 32-year-old native of Sabana Grande, stated before the district court of Mayagüez in May 1917 that he was declaring his intention of "not being a citizen of the United States as provided by the act of Congress conferring citizenship of the United States upon citizens of Puerto Rico and certain natives permanently residing in said island."
"All the documentation we are finding is at the Puerto Rico General Archive and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). However, NARA began transferring those documents a few years ago to FamilySearch and Ancestry," Venator-Santiago explained.
So far, they have completed the histories of around 50 of the 288 individuals who rejected U.S. citizenship. Whether out of a desire to participate in the political process or for work-related reasons, close to a third of those people later applied for U.S. naturalization, according to the data the Institute's researchers have examined.
They have also supplemented the information from U.S. and Puerto Rican historical archives with data from the federal Census." We're building a database that can share all that information," the professor said.
The analysis takes into account the complications and constitutional backdrop of Puerto Rico's colonial-territorial relationship with the United States, which began with the U.S. invasion on July 25, 1898, and two years of full military control.
It took until April 12, 1900, for Congress to regulate its relationship with the territory through the Foraker Act, which established the first civilian government and recognized Puerto Rican citizenship.
In 1901, in the first major legal controversy over the meaning of the relationship between the two countries, Downes v. Bidwell, which established the jurisprudence of the Insular Cases, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Puerto Rico belongs to, but is not part of, the United States.
That ruling also established that Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory, one not on a path toward becoming a state of the Union.
Venator Santiago explained that, prior to the Jones Act's collective naturalization of Puerto Ricans, there were other naturalization laws that must be taken into account to understand the process the original 288 opponents of U.S. citizenship had to navigate.
"From 1898 to 1906, Puerto Ricans were governed as Puerto Rican citizens. But in 1906, Congress passed a specific immigration law that allowed Puerto Rican and Filipino citizens to naturalize under immigration laws, which had different requirements than the citizenship laws passed by Congress," he explained.
For example, until 1934, a Puerto Rican woman could not pass U.S. citizenship on to her children. Only fathers who were U.S. citizens could do so.
Six years later, in 1940, Congress passed a law establishing that anyone born in Puerto Rico is a U.S. citizen by birth. "Starting in 1941, anyone born in Puerto Rico is born on U.S. territory," Venator-Santiago said.
To a great extent, Congress's decisions on U.S. citizenship have shaped the entire debate over a potential change in the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. That debate has been reflected in recent legislation and in the contradictions that came to light when independence leader Juan Mari Bras renounced that citizenship in 1994, and, three years later, the Puerto Rican Supreme Court recognized his right to vote and work in the Puerto Rican archipelago.
The research by the Institute for Puerto Rican Studies at the University of Connecticut will be published on the organization's website, which already documents, among other things, over 150 bills that have been introduced in Congress regarding Puerto Rico's political status, none of which have lifted the island out of the political limbo it's currently in.
Venator-Santiago hopes the work they are carrying out can also be published as a book.
