Marla A. Ramírez. Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation. Harvard University Press, 2025.
A moving portrait of a grim period in American immigration history, when approximately one million ethnic Mexicans—mostly women and children who were US citizens—were forced to relocate across the southern border.
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 oral histories, transnational archival sources, and private collections, Marla A. Ramírez illuminates the lasting effects of coerced mass removal on three generations of ethnic Mexicans.