On May 11, 1896, a "copper-colored" man with "dark eyes, straight black hair, and high cheek bones" walked into the federal courthouse in San Antonio, Texas, and applied for American citizenship. He was Ricardo Rodriguez, an illiterate thirty-seven-year-old laborer who spoke no English. A native of Guanajuato, Mexico, he had lived in Texas since 1883. By all he accounts was an industrious, law-abiding man with only one stated reason for desiring citizenship: "because he lived here." 1 There to contest Rodriguez's application were the Populist attorney Theodore J. McMinn and the Republican attorney Andrew Jackson Evans. Both men were familiar figures in the courtroom of the presiding judge, Thomas S. Maxey, a Democrat appointed to the bench in 1888 by President Grover Cleveland. Intent upon making a test case of Rodriguez's application, the attorneys filed an amicus brief challenging the application on the grounds that Rodriguez was not white and therefore ineligible for citizenship under American immigration law. The case held enormous implications not only for immigrants but also for thousands of Mexican Americans in Texas and the Southwest. It also would have far-reaching political reverberations, as Mexicanos constituted an important voting constituency of the Democratic party. 2 Two broad categories of scholars have studied In re Rodriguez. One group has been concerned primarily with what the case reveals about the history of race in the United States. The relatively recent recognition that race has no meaningful biological basis and is socially (and legally) constructed has led them to examine the case through new cultural studies and critical race theory. They have considered Rodriguez in the context of the body of immigration laws and jurisprudence of the era, hoping to explain the sources and nature of racism.

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