Contested Citizenship: National Identity and the Mexican Immigration Debates of the 1920s

Abstract

CITIZENSHIP AND ITS meaning was hotly contested from before the Civil War through the 1920s. Both formal citizenship rights and popular understandings of the meaning of citizenship were in flux as the nation struggled over the terms of inclusion of blacks and immigrants and debated women's suffrage. In this period, the language of citizen ship was expressed through four other identificatory concepts?race, gender, class, and nationality. As new groups vied for citizenship, the definition of the incidents of citizenship they were fighting for also shifted. Definitions of citizenship wax and wane, depending on political issues and the identities of those challenging citizenship boundaries to gain inclusion. It has alternately been defined by the vote, by racial and cultural fitness, by patriotism and/or military service, and by property ownership or contribution to the economy. While early in the nation's history, class defined citizenship, race replaced it as the fulcrum of the definition when property qualifications for white men were dropped beginning in the Jacksonian era and the vote became the badge of citi zenship. The vote remained a key component of full and meaningful citizenship, as all citizens did not securely possess it even after the Fourteenth Amendment (some would say, not until 1965). For instance, nine years after the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Supreme Court denied its application to women in Minor v. Happersett (21 Wall 162, 1875). Women did not win the right to vote until 1920, when, due to the salience of male wartime service, the franchise no longer served as the chief defining element of citizenship. In turn, white women used the language of the rising eugenics movement and the threat of immigration from racially questionable others to make claims for their own inclu