The Not-Quite States of America Read online

  Em delivered our tacos, wrapped in waxed paper: hard shell, ground beef, shredded cheese, iceberg lettuce, an agreeable greasiness. Classic American bar food. Em lingered as we started to eat, and I asked her if she thought there was generally a strong cultural connection between American Samoa and the states. She nodded vigorously. “Many Samoans spend time living in the states or have relatives there, so they know what’s going on and feel connected. But at the same time, there are unique traditions and culture here. So you get the best of both worlds.”

  She left and then came back and asked, “Do you guys like to go out?”

  “Well, we were thinking about doing karaoke over by the cannery,” I said. In truth, we’d just come from an ill-fated attempt at doing just that. I’d thought it would be oh-so-droll to belt out “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” with an eclectic assortment of cannery workers, not just Samoan but also Chinese and Filipino. But Maren insisted that she had a bad feeling about the bars, with their lack of windows and general rough, foreboding air; outside one, a particularly mangy dog stared us down. Maren had been palpably relieved when it turned out none of the bars were open.

  I was about to relate this story to Em, with much smirking commentary about how my wife was so skittish and I knew this island was totally safe, when Em’s eyes grew large and she took a step back.

  “Don’t go over there! We call that ‘the dark side.’ ”

  Maren was triumphant in that I-love-you-but-I’m-right spousal way: “That’s what I was trying to tell him!”

  Em made air quotes. “Karaoke rooms . . . you know?”

  “Wait . . .” I said. “You mean . . .” I didn’t have to finish the thought. Maren and Em were looking at me like I’d just tried to shove my last bites of taco into my ear. Way to figure things out, dumbass. Days later, another local described one building near the canneries as “the trifecta: they’ve got an illegal mah-jongg parlor on the second floor, karaoke on the ground floor, girls in the basement.”

  A small pile of crumpled, greasy waxed paper slowly grew on the bar in front of us, bathed in a pool of red light. A pair of young Samoan women sat at a nearby booth, the only other customers, and Em excused herself to take their order. When she came back to the bar, we continued talking about American versus Samoan cultures, and I asked her if she felt like she was more one culture or the other.

  She gave a small laugh, like it was a ridiculous question. It was the same muffled chuckle I’d hear in the coming days as I posed the query to many other American Samoans—conservation workers, football coaches, lawyers.

  Their answer was the same as Em’s: “I’m American and I’m Samoan, and I like being both.”

  THE QUESTION of culture was widely debated during the Imperial Moment, tied up as it was with the hot topic of expansion. The newly acquired lands were curiosities, with a steady stream of stories in national magazines like Harper’s and the Atlantic, and numerous widely read travelogues, including Neely’s Color Photos of America’s New Possessions; Pictorial History of America’s New Possessions; The History and Conquest of the Philippines and Our Other Island Possessions; Our Island Empire; and Our New Possessions. The most popular was the two-volume Our Islands and Their People, published around 1902, whose first edition sold four hundred thousand copies. (These travelogues, along with other depictions of the territories in stateside popular media around 1900, are the subject of historian Lanny Thompson’s fascinating book Imperial Archipelago.)

  Overseas expansion was one of the central issues of the 1900 presidential campaign, a rematch of Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who had faced off four years earlier, in part over the possibility of annexing Hawaii. McKinley won in 1896, and in 1900 the Democrats put the issue of expansion near the top of their official platform:

  We declare again that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon the consent of the governed is a tyranny; and that to impose upon any people a government of force is to substitute the methods of imperialism for those of a republic.

  We hold that the Constitution follows the flag . . . We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.

  It was the era of Jim Crow and the Chinese Exclusion Act, and deep-seated racism and xenophobia also informed both sides of the expansion debate. Opposition was in some cases grounded in a belief that the “half-civilized” people of these lands, while more worthy of pity than outright contempt, were simply unfit for inclusion in the nation. The Democrats’ platform also said, “The Filipinos cannot be citizens without endangering our civilization.” For others, though, there was a deeper moral underpinning. One prominent Democratic leader, Richard Croker, offered a succinct, timeless definition of anti-imperialism: “It means opposition to the fashion of shooting down everybody who doesn’t speak English.”

  Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” which he wrote in 1899 and subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” summed up the most xenophobic strains of the pro-expansion crowd. Here’s the first stanza:

  Take up the White Man’s burden, Send forth the best ye breed Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need;

  To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild—Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

  “White Man’s Burden” was a viral hit of its day: “In winged words it circled the earth in a day, and by repetition it became hackneyed in a week,” one commentator said.

  William McKinley won the 1900 presidential election. The United States had chosen the path of empire. The question now was what to do with these new territories: How would they fit with the existing American system?

  Enter the Insular Cases. They quickly made things complicated for the territories. In Downes v. Bidwell, the Supreme Court said, essentially, that not all parts of the Constitution applied to the territories, but didn’t specify which parts did and which did not—that was up to Congress to decide. In the 1922 Insular Case Balzac v. Porto Rico, the Supreme Court ruled that only “fundamental” constitutional rights were in effect in the territories. But what, exactly, is “fundamental”? Broadly speaking, as things currently stand, the courts have upheld the Bill of Rights in the territories, but there are some exceptions: the Sixth Amendment right to a criminal trial by jury, for example, has not been held applicable in local courts in Puerto Rico.

  The most striking legal outlier, however, is found in American Samoa, where residents are left out of one of the most significant markers of being an American: citizenship. If you’re born here, you’re an American national but not a citizen of this or any other country.

  Being a national means you have different, more limited visa eligibility when traveling abroad. If you move to the states, you can’t serve on juries, and you may have a hard time applying for jobs because you’re not a citizen but also don’t have a green card or work visa, and employers don’t know what to do. You also can’t vote in elections—presidential or otherwise—if you move to the states, which means that, although thousands of American Samoans live in Southern California, they don’t have much of a political voice.

  To gain all these rights, you have to become naturalized, like any immigrant, even though you were born in the USA just as surely as any Springsteen-song protagonist. You have to pay nearly $700 and take a civics test (which, incidentally, asks applicants to list their U.S. representative, and if you live in the territories, there are two correct answers: you can name your nonvoting delegate or you can say, “I don’t have one”).

  “To become a citizen, I had to go with my mother to the U.S. embassy in New Zealand,” an American Samoan named Charles Ala’ilima told me.# “So I understood from a young age that this was absurd and unacceptable.”

  Charles is an attorney and now lives in Seattle. He wa
s co-counsel for a group of American Samoans who were, as we spoke, suing the federal government for birthright citizenship; the case, Tuaua v. United States, was making its way through the courts. He was working with the nation’s sole nongovernmental organization dedicated to advocacy for the territories as a whole, the We the People Project, founded in 2013, a one-man operation run by a young lawyer from Guam named Neil Weare.

  I spoke to Charles via Skype shortly before I left for Pago Pago; he popped onto my screen wearing a flannel shirt and slightly wild hair, a sort of grunge-rock intellectual.

  “It boils down to the Fourteenth Amendment,” he told me. “Is this American soil? Because if it is—and it clearly is—then the Fourteenth Amendment applies, and citizenship is a birthright.”

  Here it is, the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.

  Seems straightforward, but this is the Constitution, the true American religious text: there’s always room for interpretation and alternate meanings, every calligraphied stroke parsed for the hidden but singular truth-above-all. The federal government, for one, says that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply in American Samoa, that this isn’t the United States in the sense that the Fourteenth Amendment means the United States, since it’s neither incorporated nor organized. (American Samoa has a local government but no Organic Act.) The USA, in other words, is making this argument: being a citizen is not an innate right of being an American, even one born on American soil.

  Before the Spanish-American War in 1898, American treaties of annexation promised citizenship to the new territories’ residents, excluding American Indians, who had to wait until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. But when the United States claimed Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam after the war, American citizenship was not part of the package for anyone.

  Here, again, the issue came to the Supreme Court, in the 1904 Insular Case Gonzales v. Williams. Isabel González (whose name immigration officials misspelled) was a Puerto Rican woman who intended to move to New York in 1902. When she arrived at Ellis Island, she was detained as an “alien immigrant” who was “likely to become a public charge,” on the grounds that she was unmarried and pregnant. González argued that, since the United States had annexed Puerto Rico, she was an American citizen, not an alien. The Supreme Court didn’t quite know how to rule—clearly, she was American, if nothing else, but was she a citizen? The court decided no. She was a noncitizen national, a designation that had not previously been used in the United States but mirrored the practice of European empires when labeling their colonial subjects. After Gonzales v. Williams, that’s how all residents of the territories were categorized, until, one by one, each territory set up an Organic Act, became organized, and its residents gained citizenship. But in American Samoa, that change has never happened: it’s unorganized, and residents are not, by birth, American citizens.

  Charles Ala’ilima explained all of this with an understandably exasperated tone. He added, in a follow-up email, that “to become a citizen one normally has to leave the territory and reside in the U.S. However, recently, someone was flown to the territory to have [military] service members born in American Samoa take their oath of allegiance before him. It seemed oddly redundant to have a U.S. national who was born owing his allegiance only to the United States having to take an oath of allegiance to the United States.”

  The issue isn’t just a matter of federal government obstruction or neglect. The most vociferous opposition to birthright citizenship comes from an unexpected source: other American Samoans. This includes the governor, the territory’s member of Congress, and many of the all-powerful matais. (Ala’ilima also told me that “our local judges, lawyers, and public office holders, in taking their oath of office, swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution provisions that apply to American Samoa rather than the U.S. Constitution in its entirety.”) It was Professor Ponsa—who had filed an amicus curiae brief in Charles Ala’ilima’s case, providing expert information without taking sides—who first explained this to me, and I sputtered with incredulity when she said it. They . . . they don’t want to be citizens?

  Their argument is that there’s a delicate cultural balance in American Samoa, one that citizenship would disrupt. They embrace the Insular Cases precisely because the laws offer a certain protection of their status as foreign in a domestic sense—it’s a means to insulate themselves from the culture-leveling forces of Americanization, or at least to have some power to curate which of these elements takes hold.

  THERE ARE some aspects of mainland USA culture that American Samoans welcome with open arms. Exhibit A: football. Turns out they’re good at it. Really good.

  Christian missionaries brought rugby here—American Samoans are still good at that sport, too, although it’s more popular in (Western) Samoa, where the cultural gaze is toward its former overseer, New Zealand**—and in the mid-century, as modernization brought American television, local rugby players saw the NFL and thought, I can do that. At the start of the 2015–2016 season, there were twenty-eight NFL players of American Samoan ancestry and more than two hundred in Division I college programs.

  I spoke to the football coach at Samoana High School, Silasila Samelou, in his office—a small, austere room with a desk and a computer—above the open-air gym after he’d finished morning workouts one day. He holds practices multiple times a day, in part to accommodate players’ work schedules. Silasila’s young granddaughter played nearby, and then came to sit on his lap as we spoke, and he patiently switched between answering her questions and mine. His school alone has produced six NFL players, he told me with a wide smile.

  The territory’s seemingly unlikely football legacy has been covered in feature stories by 60 Minutes, ESPN the Magazine, the Washington Post, and many others, the rare time the media has paid any attention to American Samoa. Honestly, it’s an easy story to write, with predictable narrative beats about “bootstrapping their way to football glory.” You talk about how the seafarer history and Warrior Culture created brawny, sure-footed young men who are fierce on the field but also disciplined and soft-spoken, thanks in part to their devout Christianity and the respect for authority ingrained in the matai system. You note certain shoddy facilities (threadbare fields, shipping-container locker rooms), lament the lack of economic opportunity on the island (it’s either the tuna cannery or the NFL—these are your options!). You wryly observe how football prowess stands in contrast to the territory’s ineptitude at soccer—they have their own national team, which was for years FIFA’s lowest-ranked side in the world (and was the subject of the delightful documentary Next Goal Wins, released in 2014).†† And you frame it all with a condescending tone that says, Isn’t it cool how these Native Islanders are playing at being American?

  But, of course, they are American. This was becoming clearer and clearer to me, from aisles of salsa in the grocery store, to the teenagers in basketball jerseys or on their way to football practice with pads in hand, to the dozens of men and women we’d seen carrying U.S. Army duffel bags on our plane from Hawaii. American Samoa has the highest enlistment rate and casualty rate of any state or territory. There are two McDonald’s on the island and packaged foods are so ubiquitous that the territory has one of the highest diabetes rates in the world: 47 percent of the adult population (but only one dialysis clinic). And while Samoan is the default language, pretty much everyone under the age of, say, sixty, will switch over to English without a second thought, and sound exactly like your archetypal West Coast mainlander, in accent, idioms, slang, sarcasm, and every other conversational marker—talking to them, you feel like you’re in the states.

  You can’t define culture merely by tallying data points, of course. Japan has baseball and jazz clubs and Wild West theme parks and impeccably tailored blue jeans, but it’s clearly not part of the United States. You also need the broader societal mesh t
hat holds all these elements together: a collective agreement that these things, specifically and together, form a particular identity and represent particular ideals. And you’ll find that in American Samoa—the sense of being American is deeply ingrained here, at both the personal and community levels. There’s no independence movement to speak of; even the staunchest opponents of citizenship want to maintain the territorial relationship with the United States. In official statements from the governor and even online discussions I read—the comments on any Samoa News website story about citizenship go on for miles—there was a strong tendency for anti-citizenship arguments to be followed, without irony, by “God Bless America.” There is a pride in being American . . . and in being Samoan.

  So what would the Supreme Court, circa 1901, make of American Samoa? Would they see the lavalava or the NFL jersey? Or what about today’s self-appointed Guardians of the Culture, the commentators and politicians who talk about immigrants’ need to assimilate and speak rhapsodically of the “Real America”? That stump-speech fantasyland is, roughly speaking, a place of small, working-class towns with a deep reverence for church, football, military service, and tradition, all of which sounds a lot like American Samoa. Is it the “Real America”?

  For that matter, given that there’s clearly lots of Americanization and globalization in American Samoa, and given the importance of Samoan tradition and history to the fabric of the culture, there was another important question to ask: Is this still the “Real Samoa”?

  The biggest question: Can American Samoa be both “real” America and “real” Samoa at once?