González case, the perfect "test case" for challenging the new immigration guidelines because now it would not be about whether immigration inspectors, following guidelines suffused with concepts of race and gender, deemed Isabel Gonzalez and her family desirable, but about settling the status of all the native islanders living in Puerto Rico at the time it was annexed by the United States four years earlier. By February 16, 1903, Frederic René Coudert, Jr., an international-law attorney from New York who launched the Downes v. Bidwell case for clients protesting tariffs levied on goods shipped between Puerto Rico and the United States, joined Paul Fuller, Charles E. LeBarbier and Federico Degetau in the Gonzalez case as collaborators. The groundbreaking case, which became known as Gonzales v. Williams, was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4 and 7, 1903 and was presided by Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller. The case sparked the administrative, legal, and media discussions about the status of Puerto Ricans. It also questioned the issues of immigration and U.S. doctrines in the treatment of U.S. citizens, chiefly women and people of color (dark-skinned). González and her lawyers moved among the legal realms, aided by shared languages of race, gender, and morality, while Williams and his lawyers, focused on what he considered were failed parents, rearing children outside moral, economically self-sufficient homes. González, who was out on bond, secretly married her fiancé and thus became "a citizen of this country through marriage," and acquired the right to remain stateside. She could have ended her appeal but instead she decided to press her claim that all Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens. On January 4, 1904, the Court determined that under the immigration laws González was not an alien, and therefore could not be denied entry into New York. The court, however, declined to declare that she was a U.S. citizen. The question of the citizenship status of the inhabitants of the new island territories remained confusing, ambiguous, and contested. Puerto Ricans, instead, came to be known as something in between: "noncitizen nationals." Literary work As an author, he wrote El secreto de la domadora in 1885, El fondo del aljibe in 1886, ¡Qué Quijote!, Cuentos para el camino in 1894, Juventud in 1895, and La Injuria in 1893. Death Degetau died in Santurce, Puerto Rico, at the age of 51, and was interred in the Santa María Magdalena de