Lessons From the Peripheries: Coloniality, Belonging, and Resistance Among U.S. Territorial Peoples

ABSTRACT The US territories—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guåhan, and American Sāmoa—remain permanently subordinated under US rule. Governed through legal frameworks of unincorporation, these places are denied full sovereignty while granted limited mobility and partial political recognition. Territorial migrants occupy distinct social, political, and legal positions that often set their experiences apart from their larger panethnic migrant communities, yet their experiences remain underexamined in US sociology. This article draws on interviews with Sāmoans, Puerto Ricans, and Virgin Islanders to examine how colonial legacies shape citizen‐subject belonging and everyday life. I explore how participants navigate structural neglect, legal ambiguity, and cultural displacement, and how they cultivate practices of care, refusal, and political engagement in response. Together, their accounts illuminate how people living at the periphery imagine and enact alternative futures both beyond and within the nation‐state.