Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation

Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation

Masked as an economic recovery solution, ethnic Mexicans were expelled from the US during the Great Depression through collaborative efforts between immigration and relief officers. An estimated 1 million ethnic Mexicans were removed, a startling sixty percent were US citizens of Mexican descent. These mass removal raids are commonly referred to as Mexican repatriation. I offer an important theoretical corrective: the term “repatriation” disguised the coerced removals of Mexican Americans, which can only be properly understood as banishment. The raids that initially targeted Mexican immigrants, soon became an avenue for expelling Mexican Americans, particularly working-class women and children. My study offers a new gendered and transgenerational perspective of displacement during the Depression. This paper utilizes oral histories of banished women and their families across three generations as well as archival materials to examine the prolonged gendered consequences of banishment.

Marla A. Ramírez is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with specialization in Mexican American banishment, Mexican repatriation, oral history, and gendered migrations. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Ramírez completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Chicana and Chicano Studies with a concentration in US history and a doctoral emphasis on feminist studies. For the 2018-19 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. She previously held an Assistant Professor position at San Francisco State University and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Ramírez’s has published articles in the Journal of Latino Studies, New Political Science, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education at UW-Madison, and the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant. Her book, Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation is under contract with Harvard University Press.