Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican-American Women Who Endured Repatriation

Historian Ramirez debuts with an eye-opening revisitation of a little remembered and ignominious episode in U.S. history—the Hoover administration’s attempt to “cure” the Great Depression by expelling ethnic Mexicans from the Southwest. Many of those caught in the dragnet were U.S. citizens and descendants of families present since the territory was acquired during the Mexican American War. Ramirez unravels the legal and semantic fictions that were created to enable this mass expulsion of over a million people, especially the process the government invented to expel women and children with U.S. citizenship. Central to this project was the now defunct legal doctrine of “coverture” through which “US citizen minors and women were expected to follow the male head of household out of the country.” The male head could be expelled for a variety of reasons, from losing employment to being “liable to become a public charge.” Women who were not expelled outright through coverture were coerced into leaving by immigration officials who falsely promised they could later return. The most chilling aspect of this extraordinary book is the revelation that much of the legal overreach and anti-immigrant zeal of the present moment has very specific precedent in the past. This offers critical and timely insight into America’s long history of scapegoating ethnic minorities for economic woes. (Oct.)