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Contested Citizenship:
National Identity and the Mexican
Immigration Debates of the 1920s
CLARE SHERIDAN
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 citizenship 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 citizenship. 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 inclusion. Organized labor also employed
the themes of racial fitness and patriotism to argue for an expansion
of rights granted to white workers.
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