College of LAS Events

Please join the Department of Latina/Latino Studies for the spring semester installment of the Latina/Latino Studies Speaker Series with Dr. Marla A. Ramírez, Assistant Professor of History and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Ramírez will discuss her recent work Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, 2025). 

Abstract:

From 1921 to 1944, approximately one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States were removed across the border to Mexico. What officials on both sides of the US-Mexico border 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. Mexicans, regardless of legal status, were scapegoated for stealing American jobs and overburdening relief rolls. US officials in collaboration with Mexican officials orchestrated mass removal raids. Though their initial goal was to remove Mexican immigrants, these removals became an avenue for the coerced displacement of working-class Mexican American women and children in the name of economic recovery. The likely to become public charge (LPC) clause of the 1917 Immigration Act and a relic of coverture doctrine, which linked husband and wife into one legal identity in marriage, were used for the mass removals. Relief and employment systems in the US positioned men as wage earners and women as economic dependents, which increased the dependency logic of coverture. As such, Mexican American women and children were systematically at greater risk of removal, given their presumed economic dependency on their Mexican immigrant husbands and fathers. Drawing on oral histories, transnational archival sources, and private collections, Banished Citizens illuminates the lasting effects of coerced mass removal on three generations of ethnic Mexicans.

Short Bio:

Marla A. Ramírez is a historian of the US­­–Mexico borderlands and professor of History and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She investigates how processes of mass immigration removals have imposed notions of illegality on citizens in their own native countries. Specifically, she centers the everyday experiences of women and children in what we refer to  as “mixed-status” families today. She is the author of Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, October 2025).