Banished Citizens

Historian Marla A. Ramírez will deliver a talk based on her recent book, Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, October 2025). A limited number of free copies will be available for to give away!

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.

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 in order 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, Ramírez depicts the courage and resilience of their efforts to reclaim US citizenship and return home. 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 Presenter
Marla A. Ramírez is a historian of the US­­–Mexico borderlands with specialization in Mexican American banishment, Mexican repatriation, oral history, and gendered migrations. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e 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.

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 teaching and research interests include Mexican American banishment (generally referred to as “repatriation”), racialized citizenship, gendered migrations across the US–Mexico border, mass immigration removals, the making of illegality, historical methods, and the history of Latinx/es in the United States.

This program is made possible by Beyond the Page.