Veta Schlimgen

Veta Schlimgen is completing her doctoral degree in history at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation, "From Insular Subjects to Colonial Aliens: Sovereignty, Citizenship and Filipino America from 1900 to 1950," is a history project that is, as she puts it, both "grand and intimate." She analyzes a rarely explored civil status between citizen and alien, the status of "American national" that is used for certain citizens.

Abstract:
Becoming 'American Nationals': Filipino Citizenship in the American Empire

This paper explores Filipino citizenship within the new American empire that was created by U.S. victories in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. More specifically, the paper focuses on the years from 1898 to 1925 in order to examine the unique civil status of "American national" that was assigned to Filipinos. As the paper argues, the invention and application of "American national" status imposed colonial citizenship upon millions of Filipinos (as well as Guamanians, Puerto Ricans, and others).

"American national" was an ambiguous civil standing that emerged on the margins of constitutional law and thus must be located among other unequal forms of U.S. citizenship. In the course of doing so, this paper traces the origins of "national" standing to the nineteenth-century invention of "ward" status for American Indians. Moreover, the paper follows the trajectory of Filipinos' "national" status through a discussion of key markers of citizenship Ð namely, the rights, liberties, and obligations attendant to colonial citizens. Ultimately, the paper suggests that "American national" as a civil status was inalterably fixed between alienage and full citizenship.