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Abstract
Early activism by groups representing American citizens living abroad was motivated by parents’ concerns about the citizenship status of children born outside the United States. In this essay I discuss a 1971–2 letter-writing campaign which involved American parents speaking on behalf of the rights of their minor children in a way that facilitated a simultaneous looking forward into the child's future, and looking backward to the parent's origins. Thus parents’ representations of the child–citizen positioned them as agents of both nostalgia and futurity within the American family abroad.
Notes
Some critics of this conditional citizenship policy referred to it a ‘Cinderella citizenship’ – a metaphor which casts American citizenship as a magical state of privilege, bestowed temporarily on one who will be returned to a drab life of despair once the clock tolls midnight. In reality, effects on individuals must have varied widely: the loss of American citizenship would have been a hardship for some, an irrelevance for others.
Of course, this was the very cultural anxiety that had prompted the US policy of imposing conditions on the citizenship of children born abroad to one American citizen parent, but not on the citizenship of children born abroad to two American citizen parents.
Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the American Revolution, and Children of the American Revolution are organizations which only admit direct descendents of participants in the American Revolutionary War.
