Marla A. Ramirez

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to host Marla A. Ramírez, in celebration of her book Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation. She will be joined in conversation with Cindy I-Fen Cheng.

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own Bookstore.

About the book

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.

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.

A wrenching account of expulsion and its afterlives, Banished Citizens illuminates the continuing social, legal, and economic consequences of a removal campaign still barely acknowledged in either Mexico or the United States.

Marla A. Ramírez is a historian of the US­­–Mexico borderlands and Assistant Professor of History and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She investigates how processes of mass immigration removals have imposed notions of illegality on citizens in their own native countries. Specifically, she centers the everyday experiences of women and children in what we refer to as “mixed-status” families today. She is the author of Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, October 2025).