REI Colloquium: Banished Citizens

From 1921 to 1944, approximately one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States were removed across the border to Mexico. What officials called "repatriation" was in fact banishment: 60 percent of those expelled were US citizens, mainly working-class women and children whose husbands and fathers were Mexican immigrants. Drawing on transnational archival sources, oral histories, and private collections, Banished Citizens illuminates the lasting effects of coerced mass removal on three generations of ethnic Mexicans. Ramírez argues that banishment served interests on both sides of the border. In the United States, the government accused ethnic Mexicans of dependence on social services to justify removal, thereby scapegoating them for post-World War I and Depression-era economic woes. In Mexico, meanwhile, officials welcomed returnees for their potential to bolster the labor force. In the process, all Mexicans in the United States—citizens and undocumented immigrants alike—were cast as financially burdensome and culturally foreign. Shedding particular light on the experiences of banished women expelled under claims of their likelihood to become a public charge and links to the outdated coverture doctrine, Ramírez demonstrates that US-citizen women and children were targeted as a strategy to banish entire mixed-status families. Nonetheless, banished women courageously and resiliently fought for decades to reclaim their US citizenship and return to their native country. Nevertheless, banishment often interrupted their ability to pass on US citizenship to their children, robbed their families of generational wealth, and drastically slowed upward mobility. Today, their descendants continue to confront and resist the impact of these injustices-and are breaking the silence to ensure that this history is not forgotten.

About the Speaker:

Marla A. Ramirez is an Associate Professor of History and Chicanx & Latinx Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. You can find her biography here: https://history.wisc.edu/people/ramirez-marla-a/

This is an accessible event. If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact IGS at [email protected] with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.