The research Marla Ramírez does on immigration is deeply personal. The assistant professor in immigration history’s interest started with her own journey to U.S. legal permanent residency, which took more than 20 years. She must remain a legal permanent resident for five years before becoming eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. Now, her life’s work is specializing in the mass Mexican removals during the Great Depression known as repatriations to unearth the gender history of banished U.S. citizen women of Mexican descent through an oral history methodology across three family generations. She’s working on a book about her findings called Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. We sat down with the author to ask her about her research:
What inspired you to get into this research and write your book?
I didn't know the history of removed U.S. citizens of Mexican descent until I started doing research on immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border. I came to the story kind of by chance. I was doing research for my master's thesis for which I interviewed undocumented immigrant youth. I wanted to understand their experiences and what led some undocumented immigrants to go the college route and others to go the labor market route. What factors and support networks — or lack thereof — motivated decisions either way?
One of the questions I ask [in my research] is, “How do you identify yourself?” And one of the participants said, “I’m a U.S. citizen, but not legally recognized as one.” [I thought maybe] they came to the U.S. at a very young age, and they grew up in the United States, so they see themselves as U.S. citizens in the cultural sense of the word, but legally, obviously they are not U.S. citizens if they are undocumented. But then I said, “Can you say more, what do you mean by that?”
The interviewee responded, “Well my paternal grandmother is a U.S. citizen, she was born here, but she was kicked out during the Great Depression. Thus, my father was born in Mexico, and I was born in Mexico as well. We have a direct descendant of a U.S. citizen, but we haven’t been able to open an immigration case, because she passed away when she was really young. And now I’m undocumented here.”
That blew my mind.
I said, “Wait a minute, your grandmother is a U.S. citizen, and you’re undocumented? How is that happening? Why is that legal?” So as all these questions came up, I threw away my interview guide and began a completely new line of questioning. That was the beginning of my research for my current book project, which sent me to find other survivors who shared a similar history and into archives in the US and Mexico.
How do stories like these factor into your research?
The book I'm writing now and the articles that I have published are more grounded in the historical aspect, so looking at the Great Depression period. But for the book, the last part of it is an epilogue where I bring this historical narrative into the present to make connections about how past policies and discourses around immigration have politically and socially survived and are replicated — not only against Mexicans, but against different ethnic and racial groups over time.
Was it challenging to find more people to share their stories?
There's no record keeping that tracks people who came back or stayed in Mexico after their banishment. So that was a very big challenge for me to be able to locate these communities. Knowing that, I started doing research on the archival material that was available in the United States and Mexico, and I found an immense amount of documentation of this historical moment by both governments at the local and federal levels. I had enough to write a book and articles based on the archival materials I had located.
There were also some oral histories that were conducted and archived in California and Michigan with repatriated Mexicans. A lot of people who had been removed during the Great Depression had perished when I began my research. Nonetheless, I was interested in understanding if there were other people who were living as undocumented immigrants in the US, but their mothers or grandmothers were US citizens. I wanted to examine the prolonged consequences of banishment. To do so, I needed to find survivors and their descendants.
I continued my search for banished families within my networks to no avail. Then finally in February 26, 2012, a repatriation plaque installation ceremony was organized in Los Angeles, California as part of SB 670, the 2006 Apology Act, under which California formally apologized for their involvement in the mass removals of Mexican Americans during the Depression. I decided to attend the event in hopes of finding people to interview there. So I went, and I was a grad student at the time, very young. Armed with my audio recorder, video recorder, a pen, and a notepad, I attended this event. All my hopes and aspirations of being able to understand this history better lied in the stories held by banished survivors and their families. To my fortune there were banished survivors and their adult children at this event.
They were really generous to open their homes and their stories to me. My book is now constructed around their histories and lived experiences. Each main chapter zooms into one individual family across three generations. I interviewed U.S. citizens who were banished in the 1930s, their children, and their grandchildren to understand the prolonged consequences of what I refer to as “banishment,” the coerced relocation of US citizens of Mexican descent to their ethnic country of origin, not their native country.
What else aided your research?
I also have my own immigration experience and immigration history in the United States. My parents left Mexico when I was a child. My father left first, because of the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, he came to the US in 1995. And then my mom, my four sisters, and I followed in 1996. I arrived in the US at the age of 12 and have lived here since. I was undocumented for many years. Having that immigrant experience has helped me understand the stories of the communities I work with. As I told them, we share some of the struggles with the immigration system, with the delays and bureaucratic processes. This isn’t common sense to everyday people who don't have to deal with the bureaucratic and oppressive system of US immigration and citizenship. It made me relate and understand the communities that I’ve worked with in a different light, because I know this experience first-hand.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity