Harvard
Review by Brian Tanguay
Immigration has been a contentious issue in the United States for a long time, and at numerous points in American history has motivated intense passions that drove political and legal interventions. Our history is replete with periods of heightened xenophobia, racism, nationalism and economic anxiety which stand in stark contrast to the idea of the United States as a melting pot; the world’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free have not always been welcomed, as Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and Jews fleeing Nazi persecution can attest.
Immigrants have always been easy targets and useful scapegoats.
The Immigration Act of 1924 established per country allocations that awarded 82 percent of the world quota to immigrants from Western and Northern European countries, 14 percent to immigrants from Eastern and Southern European countries, and a mere 4 percent to immigrants from the remaining Eastern Hemisphere. The allocations reflect the desire for a particular sort of immigrant. This act placed no restrictions on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, and one result was an increase in immigration from Canada and Mexico.
Despite the absence of restrictions in the 1924 Act, Mexican immigrants were regarded and treated differently. An economist named Roy L. Garis argued that “to admit peons from Mexico… while restricting Europeans and excluding Orientals is not only ridiculous and illogical—it destroys the biological, social, and economic advantages to be secured from the restriction of immigration.” As scholar Marla A. Ramirez notes in her forthcoming book, Banished Citizens, Mexicans were labeled in three broad ways in the 1920s: as a social problem, a biological problem, and a race problem. From 1921 to 1944 — through the post-World War I recovery, the Great Depression, and World War II — approximately one million Mexicans, 60 percent of whom were US citizens of Mexican descent, were deported. Why and how this happened may be one of the most under-researched and reported chapters in American history, far less well known than Operation Wetback, which saw a million Mexicans removed to Mexico in 1954.
Ramirez uncovers this history through the experiences of four families, each of which illustrates an aspect of harm done, parents and children separated, wealth forfeited, and opportunities lost. Relying primarily on oral histories and family documents, Ramirez focuses on the women who bore the brunt of forced removal. This owed, in large part, to the idea of coverture, which regarded married women as under the care and protection of their husbands. Deporting a husband, as the dominant thinking of the time assumed, increased the likelihood that his wife and children would become public charges, a drain on local and state resources. This idea was used to justify the forced deportation of entire families. In their haste to deport as many people as possible, local immigration officials adopted a policy of banish first and fix later. Unsurprisingly, this practice led to egregious violations of civil and Constitutional rights. The women of the Rodriguez, De Anda, Robles, and Espinoza families were American citizens by birthright, and yet they were powerless when immigration officials appeared at their doors.
Citing a 1933 report on US-Mexico border conditions, Ramirez notes “that patrol inspectors would enter houses and make arrests at all times of day and night without warrants.” Schools, churches, and hospitals were not safe havens. Immigration officials often confiscated personal documents, birth and marriage certificates, and without official documentation it was difficult, time-consuming, and costly for deported citizens to petition to return to the US. The De Anda family was in exile in Mexico for twenty-three years; Sara Marie Robles returned after thirty-three years; forty-seven years passed before Trinidad Rodriguez made it back, and she died soon after.
Not only were banished women marginalized in the US, they experienced similar harm in Mexico, as rights and public aid were assigned to male heads of households with the assumption that wives and children would indirectly benefit. Life in Mexico was hard for banished families. Alongside barriers of language and culture, employment and educational opportunities were severely diminished. These women had not been accepted as full-fledged American citizens in the US, and in Mexico they were seen as too American to be accepted as full-fledged Mexicans. “No matter which side of the border they were on” writes Ramirez, “ethnic Mexicans became entangled in a distinctly racialized, gendered, and transnational cycle of displacement and marginalization.”
As we see in the present, the reductive idea that Mexican Americans are low-skilled, disposable immigrant workers is difficult to eradicate from the American imagination. Employers large and small need and want the labor that Mexican immigrants provide, but not at the expense of granting them full political belonging or by respecting their economic and cultural contributions. As the women profiled in Banished Citizens make evident — and as our contemporary experience unfortunately reinforces — citizenship is no guarantee of civil or human rights when the government is determined to carry out mass deportations.
The final chapter documents efforts to recognize and redress the harm done to the families that experienced banishment. Beyond financial reparations and formal apologies, what many families want is for this history to be incorporated in the K-12 public educational system across the nation. That’s an uphill journey in the current climate of fear and imposed orthodoxy, but if we wish to address and heal these injustices in the present, we must be willing to look into the past.
