Gendered Banishment

Oral history has emerged as an interventional methodology allowing researchers to document evidence of historical events that have often left small traces in institutional archives, usually of historically marginalized communities. This paper examines the author’s collaboration with banished women, their children, and grandchildren to construct a transgenerational, gendered Mexican American banishment archive. The collected primary sources, composed of oral history interviews and private collections, uncovered the untold history of US-citizen women and children who were strategically targeted for removal during the Great Depression’s mass repatriation raids. While repatriation historiography has largely focused on the removal experiences of Mexican men, the narrators in this study provide transgenerational perspectives of banished Mexican American women. Their recollections and the gendered archive we developed in collaboration thus provide a deeper understanding of Mexican American experiences within the subfields of gender and women’s history, memory, archives, public commemoration, and oral history.

Marla A. Ramírez Tahuado is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with specialization in Mexican American banishment, Mexican repatriation, oral history, and gendered migrations. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Ramírez completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Chicana and Chicano Studies with a concentration in US history and a doctoral emphasis on feminist studies. For the 2018-19 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. She previously held an Assistant Professor position at San Francisco State University and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Ramírez’s has published articles in the journal of Latino Studies, New Political Science, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education at UW-Madison, and the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant. Her book, Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation is under contract with Harvard University Press.