Friday Lunch: Marla Ramírez

Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation

This Friday Lunch talk discusses the history of forced and coerced relocations of Mexican Americans from the US to Mexico during the Great Depression, a process commonly referred to as Mexican repatriation, which can be better described as banishment. Xenophobic immigration policies during the Depression were seen as economic recovery solutions, resulting in the expulsion of an estimated 1 million ethnic Mexicans, a startling sixty percent were US citizens of Mexican descent. Through the oral histories of banished women and their families, across three generations, personal collections, and archival research, Professor Marla Ramirez examines the prolonged consequences of banishment. Ramirez argues that banishment was a strategic, bi-national political tool that interrupted Mexican Americans’ right to derivative citizenship, robbing them of transgenerational wealth, drastically slowing upward mobility, and debilitating the mass political power of Mexican Americans.

Please note: A catered lunch will be provided at this Friday Lunch event. Seats are limited and available on a first-come basis. To register, please send an email to rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu with your name, title, or affiliation.

Professor Marla A. Ramírez is a historian of the US-Mexico borderlands with specialization in Mexican repatriation, Mexican American banishment, gendered migrations, and oral history. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book, Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Banished Women tells the history of forced and coerced relocations of Mexican Americans from the US to Mexico during the Great Depression, a process commonly referred to as Mexican repatriation. Banished Women demonstrates that these so-called “repatriation” raids were originally orchestrated to remove Mexican immigrants during the economic crisis. However, these efforts became an avenue to forcibly expel American citizens of Mexican descent, particularly working-class women and children. Ramírez has published articles in the journal of Latino Studies, New Political Science, Aztlán, and Social Justice.