The Solidarity of Citizenship: Marriage, Statelessness, and the Puerto Rican Nation in Laura Meneses’s Path to the United Nations

Abstract This article traces Laura Meneses’s anticolonial activism in defense of Puerto Rico’s independence through her shifting citizenship and hemispheric residences. Born a Peruvian citizen in 1894, Meneses became a U.S. citizen in 1922 upon marrying pro-independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos, but she became stateless in 1948 when the U.S. government revoked her citizenship. In response, Meneses fashioned her marriage and her solidarity networks toward oppositional imaginings of citizenship. She redirected the patriarchal logic of marriage law that made her a U.S. citizen to assert Puerto Rican national identity and citizenship. She also joined a solidarity network of Latin American exiles who identified as “citizens of the revolution” and practiced power-sharing. These strategies culminated when Cuba made Meneses a citizen and UN delegate in 1961, empowered to challenge U.S. colonialism at the United Nations despite Puerto Rico’s exclusion as a member nation.