Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution

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Christina Duffy Burnett, Burke Marshall
Duke University Press, 2001 M07 20 - 422 pages
In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship.
More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five “unincorporated” U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these “marginal” regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large.
This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories.

Contributors. José Julián Álvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José Trías Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner

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Contents

The Doctrine of Territorial Incorporation Invented and Reinvented
1
I History and Expansion
37
Some Common Ground
39
The Role of EthnoJuridical Discourse in the SpanishAmerican War
48
The Insular Cases and the Metaphor of Incorporation
82
The Unincorporated Territory as a Category of Domination
104
II Expansion and Constitution
119
Installing the Insular Cases into the Canon of Constitutional Law
121
III Constitution and Membership
207
Partial Membership and Liberal Political Theory
209
The Insular Cases and Other Oddities
226
Puerto Ricos American Century
241
One Hundred Years of Puerto Ricos Sovereignty Imbroglio
251
IV Membership and Recognition
287
The Role of English in the Great State of Puerto Rico
289
Puerto Rican National Identity and United States Pluralism
315

Conquest Race and the Insular Cases
140
Extended Republicanism versus Hyperextended Expansionism
167
Constitutionalism and Individual Rights in the Territories
182
Puerto Rican Separatism and United States Federalism
349
The Bitter Roots of Puerto Rican Citizenship
373
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