Citizenship and Its Exclusions

Ediberto Román is Professor of Law at Florida International University. He is the author of The Other American Colonies: An International and Constitutional Law Examination of the United States' Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Island Conquests, and edits the NYU Press series Citizenship and Migration in the Americas.

Citizenship and Its Exclusions provides an excellent history of citizenship...Roman is an exceptional writer and researcher. - Arthur Rizer (The Federal Lawyer) Roman shows in historical and contemporary terms that members of some groups (women, African Americans, and Latinos, for instance), do not achieve full access to the rights of citizenship . . . The historical and theoretical analysis Roman provides is solid and quite informative. Its condensed nature makesCitizenship andits Exclusionsa lively and accessible introduction to these issues. - Julie Novkov (The Law and Politics Book Review) A timely interrogation of our citizenship tropes. Románs passionately demonstrates that the promise of citizenship has consistently fallen short on both historical and contemporary landscapes.Far from a warrant of inclusion and equality, citizenship has more often been used as cover for caste and subordination.Románs looks to bring citizenship's lofty aspirations to an authentic attainment. - Peter J. Spiro,author of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity after Globalization A rich and impassioned exploration of the persistence of second-class citizenship in the United States. Román vividly portrays the injustices concealed by our discourse of equal citizenship. - Gerald Neuman,J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law, Harvard Law School At a time when members of Congress hector President Obama in a televised address on the issue of citizenship and health care, and when know-nothing restrictionists dominate talk radio and cable news, this is a refreshing, thoughtful, and timely work. Román has broadened his traditional work on Puerto Rico and the American colonies to examine carefully the literal and symbolic meanings of U.S. citizenship. His incisive unbundling of 'the construct of citizenship and the consequences of variegated membership is foundational work that will be widely cited, if not always by judges then surely by a wide array of immigration and other Constitutional scholars. - Michael A. Olivas,author of Colored Men and Hombres Aqui: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican American Lawyering Tracing the tortured history of citizenship, Román deftly illustrates both the legal and the social mechanisms by which entire groups have been denied the full benefits of United States citizenship despite an otherwise functional equivalence to their fellow Americans. It is an uncomfortable but enlightening story. - Stephen H. Legomsky,co-author of Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy

• Preface and Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: The Citizenship Construct 2 The Creation of the Concept: The Classical Period 3 The City-States of the Dark Ages 4 The Movement toward Nascent Nation-States 5 The Philosophical Influence of the Enlightenment 6 The De Jure Subordinates 7 The De Facto Subordinates? 8 A New Vision of Citizenship? Notes Index About the Author