Furthermore, the Treaty was signed without any formal legal guarantees that all Mexican citizens would be treated as citizens under U.S. law. Under the Constitution of 1824, all Mexicans, regardless of their race, had gained recognition as citizens, yet the United States, under the Naturalization Act of 1790, only recognized "white persons" as eligible for citizenship through naturalization. The Treaty thus legally classified Mexicans as "white" in order to allow them U.S. citizenship, yet this was applied only to the Spanish Mexican elite, mestizos, and assimilated indigenous peoples. Without explicit legal protection, all unassimilated and autonomous Native Americans in the new territories were thereby subjected to prior United States' case law relating to "Indian" tribes.