Ancestral Citizenship as Postcolonial Redress: The case of Puerto Rico and Spain

Her aim is to assess whether such laws can serve as instruments of reparative justice. 

Drawing on postcolonial theory and transitional justice frameworks, Padua Soto explores how states invoke memory, identity and legality to address historical wrongs through citizenship. She analyses legislative texts, legal history and academic proposals, particularly a recent initiative that advocates for a reparative nationality law for Puerto Ricans. 

She frames this legal redress as a response to Spain’s loss of Puerto Rico following the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which stripped Puerto Ricans of their Spanish nationality in violation of Spain’s 1876 Constitution and the 1897 Carta Autonómica granted to the island. Unlike other cases of secession or independence, Puerto Ricans were neither consulted nor active participants in the decision to cede sovereignty, highlighting the asymmetry and external imposition of colonial withdrawal. 

She compares this case with other ancestral citizenship laws, such as Spain and Portugal’s restitutions to Sephardic Jews and Italy’s jus sanguinis laws, revealing patterns in how citizenship operates as both a mechanism of inclusion and a form of symbolic redress. Thus, ancestral citizenship can serve as a reparative response to the legacies of historical injustices, offering a means to former colonial powers to symbolically and legally reckon with their past. 

Speaker

Marielys Padua Soto is a Puerto Rican lawyer and migration scholar currently pursuing graduate studies in Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo. With a professional background in humanitarian work across Latin America and the Middle East, she focuses on the intersections of citizenship, colonial legacies, and mobility