Banished Citizens [CLOTH ]

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

A moving portrait of a grim period in American immigration history, when approximately one million ethnic Mexicansmostly women and children who were US citizenswere 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. Ram?rez illuminates the lasting effects of coerced mass removal on three generations of ethnic Mexicans.

Ram?rez 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 postWorld 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 Statescitizens and undocumented immigrants alikewere cast as financially burdensome and culturally foreign. Shedding particular light on the experiences of banished women, Ram?rez 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 injusticesand are breaking the silence to ensure that this history is not forgotten.

A wrenching account of expulsion and its afterlives, Banished Citizens illuminates the continuing social, legal, and economicl³q