Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the “Gift” of U.S. Citizenship

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Bruyneel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Citizenship Status ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
The Gift

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), which unilaterally made United States citizens of all indigenous people living in the United States. This new law made citizens of approximately 125,000 of the 300,000 indigenous people in the country (the remainder were already U.S. citizens). Usually, people who have been excluded from American political life see the codi- fication of their citizenship status as an unambiguously positive political development. In the case of indigenous people and U.S. citizenship, however, one cannot find such clear and certain statements. All indigenous people certainly did not look at U.S. citizenship in the same light; in fact, very few saw it as unambiguously positive. This study demonstrates that the indigenous people who engaged the debate over U.S. citizenship came to define themselves, in various ways, as “ambivalent Americans,” neither fully inside nor fully outside the political, legal, and cultural boundaries of the United States. This effort to define a form of ambivalent American-ness reflects a significant tradition in indigenous politics, which involves indigenous political actors working back and forth across the boundaries of American political life to secure rights, resources, and/or sovereignty for the indigenous people they represent.

On the Prospects of D. Trump and Trumpism during the Presidency of J. Biden

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (12) ◽  
pp. 141-151
Author(s):  
K. Gadzhiev
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Natural Result ◽  
Democratic Parties ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

The article attempts to analyze some factors that, in the author’s opinion, may more or less significantly affect the fate and prospects of D. Trump and his legacy – a set of ideas, program guidelines, forms, methods, means of restructuring the socio-political life and the power system of the United States, which became known under the collective name “Trumpism”. The main attention is focused on substantiating the thesis that the victory of D. Trump, who in the context of the political realities of the United States could be regarded as an outsider, in the presidential elections in November 2016, was not a historical accident, but a natural result of deep shifts in infrastructures of the American society. After analyzing the objective and subjective factors of the struggle for power and the right to choose the paths and prospects of the socio-historical development of the United States between Trumpism and the political platform of J. Biden, the leader of the Democrats, it was concluded that all possible attempts to neutralize and push the Trump legacy to the periphery of social and political life appear to be insolvent. The author sees the essence of the problem in the fact that in the presidential elections of both 2016 and 2020 it was a question of voting for/against not just specific candidates from the Republican and Democratic Parties, but under conditions of a deep crisis, in support of or against the program of social and political development of the country. In the 2020 elections, D. Trump and J. Biden were viewed by the majority of voters as symbols of defenders and opponents of the dominant political, intellectual, media establishment, as well as the so-called “Washington swamp” and a “deep state”. Since the factors that prompted 74 million Americans to vote for Trump have not disappeared, the Democrats led by J. Biden will have to rule America with these realities in mind.

Winning the Argument and Moving the Fight: The Legacy of a Grassroots Humanitarian

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Winning Strategy ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Trade Offs

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison

Specters of Belonging

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Mexican Migrant ◽  
Transnational Citizenship

In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.

What is Happening in the United States? How Social Classes Influence the Political Life of the Country and its Health and Quality of Life

2021 ◽  
pp. 002073142199484
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race And Gender

This article analyses the political changes that have been occurring in the United States (including the elections for the presidency of the country) and their consequences for the health and quality of life of the population. A major thesis of this article is that there is a need to analyse, besides race and gender, other categories of power - such as social class - in order to understand what happens in the country. While the class structure of the United States is similar to that of major Western European countries, the political context is very different. The U.S. political context has resulted in the very limited power of its working class, which explains the scarcity of labor, political and social rights in the country, such as universal access to health care.

Enunciations of Transnational Citizenship

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-55
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Discrimination ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Political Ethnography ◽  
Transnational Citizenship ◽  
The Moment

Chapter 2 examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States. This chapter treats naturalization—the so-called political baptism of migrants—as the first stage of the migrant political life cycle insofar as this is the moment where migrants contest state scripts of singular loyalty. Drawing on a political ethnography of the naturalization process and the citizenship classroom, this chapter captures Mexican migrants’ mythologies of citizenship as they collectively expose the central contradictions of U.S. citizenship and constitutionalism. The bureaucratic arbitrariness and institutional discrimination that Mexican migrants perceive throughout the naturalization process infuse their mythologies of citizenship and inform their alternative enunciations of transnational political membership and belonging. When naturalization is sought in response to an antimigrant context, the so-called political baptism of Mexican migrants may in effect mark the political birth of transnational citizens.

Cultural and Institutional Factors Affecting Political Contention over Moral Issues

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Tatalovich ◽  
Mildred Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Institutional Factors ◽  
The Political ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Political Contention

AbstractAbortion and same-sex marriage are moral issues that remain highly contentious in the political life of the United States compared to other countries. This level of contention is explained through comparison with Canada. Contrasts in culture and institutions shaping issues and the political avenues that allow their enactment account for differences in the tenor of politics in the two countries.

scholarly journals Judicial Supremacy, Judicial Power, and the Finality of Constitutional Rulings

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 1067-1081
Author(s):  
Scott E. Lemieux
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Functions ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Judicial Supremacy ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Constitutional Meaning

It is widely assumed that the Supreme Court of the United States has established supremacy over contested constitutional questions, with the power to make final determinations of constitutional meaning. Since the 1960s, most scholars have assumed that legislatures and courts are engaged in a power struggle in which countermajoritarian courts can assert their will over majoritarian legislatures. More recently, a new generation of scholarship has demonstrated that judicial power often expands as a result of the willful empowerment of the judiciary by actors in other branches. Most scholars working with the latter framework, however, do not dispute that the United States has a regime of judicial supremacy—they simply see the political empowerment of courts as an explanation for why judicial supremacy has emerged despite the initially weak position of the judiciary. I argue that the insights of the political empowerment literature should be pressed further. It makes little sense to use the general label “judicial supremacy” for a system in which judicial power remains dependent on choices made by other political actors. Examining several cases that are generally seen as canonical examples of assertions of judicial supremacy, I find that courts were unable to settle constitutional debates, and in addition often either were unable to achieve their policy aims or did not actually require other political actors to do anything. The logic of new empirical findings about the sources of judicial power should compel scholars to question whether aggressive assertions of supremacy in judicial opinions are in fact accurate descriptions of how judicial power functions in the United States.

scholarly journals Federalism as Protagonist or as Nemesis for Nigeria’S Political Development

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Babatunde Oyedeji
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Developing Countries ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Federal System ◽  
Indirect Rule

Despite the plethora of findings and feelings surrounding federalism and the acerbity of the cynical discomfort at the negative nuances about the ideology, the federal system has produced stable and settled societies in Canada, Australia, the United States of America, India, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, Brazil, Malaysia and Mexico. Nevertheless, the frequent conclusion is its inherent attraction to ‘inevitability of instability’ generally in Africa and specifically in Nigeria. This typology seems to apply to developing countries more than others, in any case, at least nineteen countries containing some 40% of the world’s population. This puts and acute pressure on Nigeria, the surviving big federal country in Africa. It can be asked, did the British leave meaningful alternatives to federalism whilst ruling Nigeria between 1900 and 1914 and 1960? Can’t it not be deduced that federalism was indeed a natural product of decisions and phenomena like the Indirect Rule, the political activism on the part of Southern Nigerian politicians. Was the complex nature of Nigeria’s federalism a product of residual colonialist autocracy? The paper aims at delving into variants contributing to the sticky challenge and complexities of the Nigerian federation. It would be expository and analytical as it examines the advantages and attractions prior to the shortcomings and deficiencies of federalism. There would be references to the applicability of these deductions to the Nigerian example.

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