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This chapter studies the growth in U.S. dual nationality in Mexico, and specifically the phenomenon of strategic cross-border births. This involves middle- and upper-class Mexican parents who travel to the United States to give birth, aiming to secure U.S. citizenship for their children. The families who engage in this practice typically have little interest in emigrating. Instead, they mainly view the United States as a site of high-prestige consumption and wish to provide their children with easy access to tourism, shopping, and education across the border. The American passport is also an insurance policy that allows easy exit at times of insecurity in Mexico. This strategic acquisition of U.S. dual nationality by upper-class Mexicans can be juxtaposed with another recent trend: the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican undocumented immigrants, who take their U.S.-born children with them to Mexico. For the former group, dual nationality is voluntary and practical; for the latter, it is an imposed disadvantage.

This essay is a response to Guillermo Ibarra’s contribution to this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. It argues that Ibarra’s essay can usefully remind readers of the many ways the U.S. and Latin America are connected. While Ibarra highlights the transnational nature of U.S. cities and how Mexican immigrants in the U.S. remain tied to communities in their home country while simultaneously embracing largely positive views of the U.S., Spellacy wants to situate Ibarra’s project in relation to scholarly and artistic works that conceive of the Americas as a space joined by historical ties and the continued traffic of people, ideas, commodities, and culture across national borders. Spellacy asks how a hemispheric understanding of the Americas could help us comprehend the new form of citizenship embraced by Mexican immigrants considered in Ibarra’s essay, and she suggests that it might be fruitful to think across disciplinary divides and consider these questions in relation to scholars working on hemispheric cultural studies. For example, she asks, if citizenship is performed rather than taken for granted, is it not important to consider the role culture plays in this process?

This chapter recounts how President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law (PL) 405 on July 1, 1944, which amended the Nationality Act of 1940 to allow U.S. citizens living in the United States to renounce their citizenship during wartime. Although not stated explicitly, the law was aimed at dissident Nisei. As Manzanar Project Director Ralph Merritt remarked of the statute, “This is the first time in the history of a civilized nation that a government has permitted a citizen, during a state of war, to renounce his citizenship.” Officials had several motives for favoring such a law. Some sought to have renunciants exchanged for U.S. citizens detained in Japan. Indeed, the chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, Samuel Dickstein, suggested that the law's provisions be publicized in the camps, to be followed by notices “calling for volunteers to go to Japan in trade for Americans.”

This introductory chapter presents the rationale of the book. U.S. blacks and Asians have long been variously situated in interrelation in the economic sphere of labor, the political sphere of citizenship, the social sphere of urban space, and the sphere of national culture. Thus, the book argues for the necessity of looking for a history of how struggles for Asian American and African American citizenship have been intersecting and divergent, and of examining how the juridical field of citizenship has consistently and coercively structured struggles and aspirations for national inclusion. By focusing on how Asian Americans and African Americans have engaged with discourses of U.S. citizenship, it becomes clear that the production of racial meanings is a relational process in which differential inclusions and exclusions are endemic to the institution of citizenship itself.

This chapter explores the ways that black elites engaged with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa between 1816 and 1900. During this time, the federal government frequently promoted policies that encouraged black emigration to Liberia. Moreover, the black elite rejected any association with the African continent and worked hard to block policies that sought to stimulate the growth of Liberia. There are, however, several notable cases in which the black elite broke from this pattern and worked to assist the development of Liberia. The conventional wisdom is that the black elite's commitments to a transnational sense of community trumped their concerns about their black U.S. citizenship status. But the archival materials show that members of the black elite entered the foreign policymaking arena in support of Liberia only when they calculated that doing so would shift the national discourse about the capacity of the black race for U.S. citizenship.

This chapter examines Kurihara's journey to Japan. Despite having renounced his U.S. citizenship and declaring himself Japanese, he was never fully comfortable in his adopted land. One of the differences was the “strong pressure on homogenization” in Japan. In order to feel comfortable socially, the Nisei had to assimilate fully into Japanese culture. Those who succeeded in doing so were able to “merge into the Japanese mainstream community and keep their invisibility.” This requirement went against the grain of Kurihara's nature, his self-identity as an individual with freedom to express himself and to live according to his beliefs. Ultimately, Kurihara's two decades in Japan was a mirror image of his much longer life in the United States. In both countries, bounded by circumstances he never successfully transcended, his life was centered primarily on his cultural subgroup.

This chapter highlights the transformations taking place in Guam after the passage of the Organic Act, 1950. The Organic Act, passed by the U.S. Congress without a vote on it by the people of Guam, made Guamanians U.S. citizens, established civilian government, and remains the basic law of the island until the local people approve a constitution of their own. The first few years after passage of the Organic Act produced an intense but progressive governmental transformation on Guam. Prior to the act, the navy administered Guam as a military base with the island’s civil government of minor priority within the military chain of command in the Pacific under CINCPAC in Hawaiʻi. After the act, the island government’s responsibilities expanded with direct civilian links to the Congress and to the executive branch.

Brad Wong narrates his visit to his grandfather's village in Long An, just a few miles outside Taishan in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. He details his feelings and discoveries during his visit, and also tells of how his family moved to the United States and obtained U.S. citizenship. Brad talks about the expectations of his relatives in China, and how he learned that people there have a tradition of their overseas Chinese relatives helping them financially. He details the hardships experienced by all of the people in China, and how the government could not support its citizens.

This chapter traces Kurihara's childhood in Hawaiʻi. Kurihara was born on January 1, 1895, two years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and three years before the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution that resulted in the occupation of the islands as an American territory. Kurihara first attended Kaiulani School in September 1903. Like his classmates, many of whom were also children of immigrants, Kurihara was a U.S. citizen because he was born in Hawaiʻi. According to the Organic Act, which created the Territory of Hawaii, all who had been citizens of the Republic of Hawaii—which meant those born or naturalized in the Hawaiian islands—were “declared to be citizens of the United States.” In race-conscious America in the early twentieth century, however, the meaning of citizenship for racial and ethnic minorities was amorphous. Thus, Kurihara and other Asian Americans were often treated as noncitizens or as “new” Americans.