Myths about the powers held by the United States are often supported by the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which derives its logic from the interpretation of a document that the US itself developed. Therefore, when pressure is placed on a specific legal precedent, the shallowness of its validity is revealed. Dr. Mónica A. Jiménez accomplishes this kind of scholarly work in her recently published book Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). By tracing the legal logic of what continues to animate the colonial dynamics between the United States and Puerto Rico, Jiménez offers a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that both folds time and space to make clear how late-19th century Supreme Court logics and opinions continue to subjugate the land and people of Puerto Rico to colonial violence.
Split into two sections, the first half of the book details the key case Downes v. Bidwell (1901), while the second half explores how the legal ramifications of Downes continued to haunt the archipelago. The first chapter focuses on the development of Downes and its outcome, which argued that territories of the United States were not allowed to access certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The ambiguous legal foundation for this decision was established in 1900 after Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States when the US Supreme Court established the territorial incorporation doctrine, effectively creating the legal category of “unincorporated territory." Chapter two probes the white supremacist U.S. legal landscape to offer a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that shows the reader how U.S. settler colonialism and empire-making are dependent on the reuse and recycling of legal precedents and tactics that disenfranchised and dispossessed racially marginalized communities. By excavating the legal opinions handed down during the Marshal Trilolgy and Dred Scott v. Sandford – a collection of Supreme Court cases that defined 19th-century legal policy for Native Americans and African Americans, respectively – Jiménez makes clear that “It is not a coincidence that the most shameful cases in the United States’ legal history of race should serve as direct precedents to a decision that continues to serve as the basis for Puerto Rico’s exclusion more than one hundred years after it was handed down” (9).
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