1Between 1901 and 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court undertook a series of decisions known as the Insular Cases that gave legal sanction to the United States’ colonization of the islands of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War. What emerged from these legal cases was the designation of these new island “possessions” as neither foreign countries nor part of the United States; following this logic, the islands “belonged to” the United States, but without having been “incorporated” into the United States. To accommodate the in-between status of these overseas territories, the Supreme Court created a new legal and political category called the “unincorporated territory.”

3Whereas the creation of the unincorporated territory marks the beginnings of U.S. global colonial empire at the turn of the century, the emergence of the commonwealth in the mid-twentieth century is viewed as either a symbol of the veiled persistence of U.S. colonialism or an amelioration of the island’s colonial status. For many, the shift of the Philippines and Puerto Rico from unincorporated territories to commonwealths was part of a progressive teleology by which the island governments would assume autonomy over local affairs through the establishment of an elected governorship and the ratification of a constitution. Following this logic, the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935 and the Estado Libre Associado, or Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, in 1952 represented positive developments in the colonial relationship with the U.S., even as the federal government maintained control over key areas such as foreign policy and trade.

4Situated as a stepping-stone, or transitional stage, to either U.S. statehood or national sovereignty, the commonwealth came to be understood strictly in terms of the failure or fulfillment of these goals. In the case of the Philippines, the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 marked the beginning of a ten-year transition period after which the Philippines would become an independent nation and included the creation of the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935 as part of this framework. Today, however, Puerto Rico retains commonwealth status, and debate over the island’s future continues through referendums and plebiscites.

6This essay examines how (neo)colonial subjects of the Philippines and Puerto Rico have engaged the transition from unincorporated territory to the commonwealth. The shift to commonwealth status had the effect of rendering visible U.S. empire at the same time that it presumed to mark its dispersal, or falling away. While the unincorporated territory and commonwealth have largely been contained to analyses of the waxing and waning of U.S. empire, I propose to understand the global and geopolitical landscape in which these categories operate, especially in relation to the historical movement of decolonization of the mid-twentieth century. Examining the U.S. commonwealth in relation to the discourse of decolonization will, I believe, offer perspective on the workings of U.S. empire and American exceptionalism. More specifically, I am interested in how dominant approaches to the commonwealth category have facilitated U.S. nationalist conceptions of the islands and foreclosed other possible conceptions of the islands.

7The juridical invention of the unincorporated territory is directly tied to U.S. colonialism and empire in that it enabled the United States to assert direct rule over the new island possessions and in so doing, to assume the status of a world power akin to European empires. In contrast, the idea of the commonwealth revolves around the notion of a ‘compact.’ The theory of the “compact” holds that the taking of commonwealth status effectively terminates the territory’s “unincorporated” status, replacing it with a bilateral agreement in which the United States Congress no longer holds absolute sovereignty over the island’s affairs. The emergence of the commonwealth represented the realization of a gradual, if partial, transfer of sovereignty from Congress to the inhabitants of the island. Following this logic, the shift from “unincorporated territory” to “commonwealth” could be seen as marking the dissolution of the formal colonial relationship and the advent of a bilateral relationship between the islands and the United States.

Decolonization Without U.S. Empire

10Building on Williams’ efforts to identify and name American imperialism, scholars have focused on demonstrating how American imperialism is central to the making of the nation and its national culture, rather than a temporary and aberrant phase. What still need to be considered is how the commonwealth formation is connected to European empire in the twentieth century through the historical movement of decolonization. Decolonization refers to the growing momentum of anticolonial uprisings and the subsequent break-up of British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and Portuguese empires throughout Asia and Africa in the period following the end of World War II in 1945 and running through the early 1960s. Generally viewed as a phenomenon that centers on Europe and its distant colonies in Asia and Africa, decolonization is often been constructed as being “outside” of the United States and marginal to U.S. history.

12Taking up this notion that decolonization requires an analysis beyond the binary of colony/independent nation, I will situate the U.S. commonwealth in relation to decolonization in order to open up meanings beyond the prevailing nation-based framework. To do so, let me now turn to two fictional examples. The first concerns the status of the Philippines during World War II, as the decade-long transition period from U.S. commonwealth to independence was set awry by the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from 1942-1945. During this time the Commonwealth government of the Philippines, headed by President Manuel L. Quezon, went into exile in Washington D.C, and Filipinos who were already in the United States, having migrated under their status as “U.S. nationals,” found themselves in another type of political limbo, as they were not necessarily U.S. colonial subjects nor were they eligible for U.S. citizenship. This complex history notwithstanding, historical accounts hold that the United States granted independence to the Philippines in 1946.

13Published in 1955, in the midst of decolonization struggles around the world, Bienvenido Santos’ short story “Brown Coterie” offers a meditation on the freedom and future of the Philippines and Filipinos. The story takes place in Washington DC during World War II, as Japanese forces occupied the Philippines. It features a group of Filipino technocrats, including graduate students, scientists, professors, and civil servants, who have organized a party for Clarita, a civil servant whose husband is serving overseas in the U.S. Army. Whereas most representations of World War II and the Philippines focus on the Pacific War and the “liberation” of the Philippines from the Japanese by Filipino and U.S. forces led by General Douglas MacArthur, “Brown Coterie” offers a rare glimpse of the Philippine Commonwealth government and the ambiguous political citizenship of Filipinos in the U.S., as neither subjects on the path to independence nor U.S. citizens. More specifically, it evokes dueling models of informal empire: the United States’ colonial policy of benevolent assimilation, which legitimated the declaration of U.S. sovereignty over the Philippines through an inclusionary racial structure that utilized metaphors of family, evolution, and tutelage into a gradualist and temporally undefined trajectory of Filipino “progress” toward "self-government” and the Empire of Japan’s vision of its role as the leader of an “Asian bloc” and relatedly, the liberator of Asian nations from Western colonialism.

14In contrast to the gradual transition of the Philippines from Commonwealth to sovereign nation outlined by U.S. colonial policy, the story repeatedly foregrounds the uncertainty and ambivalence surrounding the Commonwealth status of the Philippines. One scene offers a glimpse of the headquarters of the Philippine government- in-exile by evoking the “Commonwealth Building” and remarking that is now known as the “Embassy Building.” Santos’ use of irony helps to open up the question of the significance of the Commonwealth period in the Philippines. Since the U.S. colonizers had been ejected from the Philippines and the U.S. designated path for Philippine independence had been interrupted, were Filipinos in the U.S. now to be considered as “foreigners” to the United States, rather than as U.S. nationals? If the Philippines, under Japanese occupation, had ceased to be a commonwealth, was it now an autonomous nation?

Decolonization as a tide of History

16As “Brown Coterie” suggests, the shift from the unincorporated territory to commonwealth was not only a legal event, but also involved Filipino consciousness and self-understanding. By remembering the linear trajectory for Philippine independence underwritten by U.S. colonialism, “Brown Coterie” offers an alternative to dominant historical accounts that fix Philippine independence at the end of World War II, as a direct result of the U.S. “liberation” of the islands from Japan. In these accounts, the United States is figured as benevolently “granting” independence to the Philippines, its valiant ally in the war against Axis Powers. Santos’ story, however, counters the amnesia around the U.S. – Philippines colonial relationship by framing Filipinos specifically as Commonwealth subjects whose lives and futures are intertwined with those of U.S. and Japanese empire.

17For Santos, the Filipino elites in “Brown Coterie” are somewhere between colonial subjects and immigrants. The story brings into view the Philippine Commonwealth as it is being unsettled from the ten-year transition period that is intended to culminate in Philippine sovereignty; in so doing, it reveals the extent to which the idea of the Philippine commonwealth is embedded in a teleological narrative of progress in which the extension of U.S. democratic values and practices to Filipino subjects will lead to Philippine independence.

19The inauguration of the commonwealth in the U.S. context could also be said to have refocused and delimited consideration of U.S. imperialism to the 1890s, the period directly following the Spanish American War, thereby constructing U.S. involvement in empire as but a short period in the larger historical narrative of U.S. democracy. For Shepard, an important outcome of the French discourse of decolonization in Algeria is the narrowing scope within which discussions of France – and French imperialism – might take place. With the forgetting of French Algeria, the invention of decolonization reduced the global scope of the discussion of imperialism in France. This erasure was enabled in part by framings of the colonial conflict between France and Algeria as an unfortunate detour in French history and effectively reaffirmed the definition of French as Europeans, at the moment that France also begins to refer to itself as the “Hexagon”. Effectively speaking, Europe then becomes the space for imagining a larger context for France.

20Within the historiography of the U.S. Commonwealth, the insistence upon a “progressive” teleology from commonwealth to post-colonial independence or modernity produced a set of amnesiac relationships. The figuration of decolonization as a redemptive narrative of progress in the case of the French department of Algeria is, I believe, an apt analogue for conceptualizing the shift of U.S. colonies from unincorporated territories to commonwealths as part of a progressive history of expanding U.S. democracy. As I will explain, such framings of the U.S. Commonwealth facilitate amnesia surrounding the ongoing histories of conflict and negotiation between the United States and its island possessions. Looking at the discursive production of the U.S. commonwealth via its analogous relationship with the French department of Algeria enables us to consider commonwealth status.

Where the “question of colonialism” ends and the “immigrant question” begins

21Shepard’s observation that debates in Europe often construct decolonization as the moment when the “question of colonialism” ends and the “immigrant question” offers a novel approach for thinking about twentieth century representations of U.S. colonies that foreground the immigrant diaspora in the U.S. mainland. Such representations tend to emphasize race and ethnicity in ways that reinforce a U.S. nation-based analytical framework. In so doing, they situate U.S. colonies within nationalist teleologies of progress and distance them from a broader and international discussion of decolonization. In the case of Puerto Rico, conceptions of modernization and development were intertwined with the notion of decolonization. The transition from unincorporated territory to commonwealth was specifically envisioned as a key component in the process by which Puerto Rico would become an emblematic example of industrialization. The 1952 inauguration of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico thus marked the beginning of Puerto Rico’s economic boom and new international visibility as a model for developing nations, many of which were undergoing decolonization.

23Though it is largely known for depicting Puerto Rican “immigrants,” the 1957 musical West Side Story ambivalently remembers the discourse of modernization that underwrote Puerto Rico’s transition from unincorporated territory to commonwealth. The musical is perhaps the most famous text on Puerto Ricans in the United States. It centers on the rivalry between the Sharks and the Jets, respectively Puerto Rican and Polish-American gangs in New York City, and is widely viewed as a classic text on urban race relations. Yet, when read in relation to the contemporaneous movement of decolonization, the musical cannily registers the unstable location of Puerto Rico as “part” of but also “foreign” to the United States. In so doing, it offers a glimpse of the erasure of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the reframing of Puerto Rico through the paradigm of ethnicity in which white European immigration and assimilation into mainstream American society was upheld as the norm for incorporation in the United States.

24The musical posits Puerto Ricans as immigrants, but also creates openings for conceptualizing them as U.S. colonial subjects. What is compelling in these moments is that they recover some of the signature features of the U.S. colonial development policy Operation Bootstrap, of which the establishment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was a part. The omission of Puerto Rico’s mid- economic boom in West Side Story resonates with the imperial amnesia regarding the specificity of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The celebrated musical number “America” depicts Puerto Rico as a pre-modern ruin and the United States as a flourishing marketplace for consumer goods and individual freedom, thus forgetting Puerto Rico’s recent industrialization and the revised “commonwealth” relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. In Leonard Bernstein’s score, Puerto Ricans are depicted as having fled a primitive tropical island besieged by hurricanes, overpopulation, and financial debt for a modern “America” characterized by expanding industry, skyscrapers, middle-class housing, consumer credit, and modern commodities such as TVs and washing machines. “America” is frequently read as a scene that promotes the importance of Puerto Rican assimilation to white American norms, chiefly through Anita, the girlfriend of Shark leader Bernardo, who condemns Puerto Rico’s poverty and exalts the modernity and prosperity of the United States. In response to Anita’s professions of admiration for the United States, the Shark men evoke the racism and poverty to which Puerto Ricans are subject in the continental United States. What is obscured in the musical number is Puerto Rico’s strategic and material value to the United States, as a link between histories of colonization and immigration.

25West Side Story registers the moment at which attention to the island colony of Puerto Rico shifts to concerns about Puerto Rican immigration. Read as a text that is contemporaneous with the historical movement of decolonization, the musical number “America” can also be seen as a mediation on the meanings of freedom under the commonwealth compact. If the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is intended to represent the end of empire, the musical provides us with a glimpse of how Puerto Rican subjects negotiate their citizenship in the context of the changed relationship between the island and the U.S. mainland.

26As I hope to have suggested, decolonization or anticolonial revolution were not the only outcomes of commonwealth status. Indeed, new forms of citizenship emerge from a set of abstract political relationships generated by Puerto Rican and Filipino diasporas that are themselves products of the commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Though it is beyond the immediate scope of this essay, I believe that the island of Guam represents another analogue that produces imperial amnesia. As one of the territories ceded to the U.S. after the Spanish American War and now the largest island in the region of U.S. Micronesia, Guam – along with smaller islands of the Micronesia region such as American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean – is today an unincorporated territory that is not transitioning to commonwealth status or statehood. Guam residents have U.S. citizenship, but limited sovereignty in terms of autonomous government, control of military bases and natural resources, and the administration of currency, trade and foreign policy. Unlike Puerto Rico, Guam does not have its own Constitution that details a government structure and the specific powers of its various institutions. It is not transitioning to commonwealth or statehood, though these paths are debated on the island. Following the United States’ re-taking of Guam from occupying Japanese forces in 1944, the United States government passed the 1950 Organic Act, which established limited self-rule and conferred partial citizenship (without full Constitutional Rights) to Guamanians without altering the island’s status as an unincorporated territory. How might neo-colonies that do not “progress” to the stage of the commonwealth or statehood provide insight on the workings of U.S. imperialism and the historical movement of decolonization?

Conclusion

27A key emphasis in scholarship on U.S. empire has been to demonstrate how central these marginal and distant islands were to U.S. identity and Constitutional law; in doing so, this current of scholarship also demonstrates the significance of U.S. imperialism to the formation of the U.S. nation and legal precedents for the extension of U.S. power. Yet, it seems worth considering how categories such as the unincorporated territory were developed in a global framework, not only in relation to U.S. nationalism. That being the case, the commonwealth can productively be analyzed in relation to twentieth century formations that include the trust territories of the United Nations, the outre-mer, and the French départment of Algeria. What would it mean, for example, for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to be seen not only within a national framework, in relation to its former status as an unincorporated territory, but also as part of an international postwar discourse of the reaffirmation of national sovereignty and the rise of former colonial powers?