Scholars of late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish history have increasingly grappled with the ways in which non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sought to negotiate spaces for themselves in Ottoman and Turkish discourses and practices of citizenship. Such studies have crucially moved beyond nationalist narratives reifying boundaries between non-Muslim and Muslim Ottomans, but have nonetheless focused predominately on Ottoman subjects within the empire itself. This paper, drawing on Ottoman, Turkish, Mexican, and American archival sources, oral histories, and the Ladino press, uses the lens of emigration to explore both Ottoman Jewish émigrés’ experiences of subjecthood/citizenship, on the one hand, and transforming Ottoman and Turkish attitudes toward them, on the other. For the Ottoman government, monitoring and controlling émigrés abroad provided the impetus for establishing diplomatic relations with the Latin American countries that were attracting an increasing number of Ottoman subjects. It also served as a critical battlefield in state attempts to perpetuate a common Ottoman affiliation amongst divergent émigré communities. Meanwhile, Turkish attitudes toward these émigrés reveal a deep ambivalence about the relation between these individuals and the new Turkish Republic that was undergirded by a transforming Turkish ‘nation.’ Émigré practices of citizenship were likewise ambivalent, marked by a sense of utilitarianism that often remained distinct from affiliation or loyalty. This paper thus seeks to shed light on how emigration and émigrés are crucial to understanding Ottoman and Turkish practices of citizenship among those who did not emigrate, and the ways in which citizenship, in both its inclusionary and exclusionary functions, bleeds into questions of belonging and minoritization.