Transforming Aliens: Naturalization Policies in North America. The United States and Mexico in the Nineteenth Century

This article explores, within a comparative framework, the evolution of naturalizaton law in two new North American countries, from independence to the early XX century, when the ((Open Door Era), of immigration policy, which generally welcomed those coming from abroad, came to an end. It hopes to show how naturalization policies became spaces, on the one hand, for the expression of republican ideals of membership and, on the other, for the intervention of political authority -first at the state, then at the federal level in order to regulate the political community.