Marla Ramirez's 'Banished Citizens' explores historic expulsion of Mexican Americans. Will it happen again?

7 min Click here to listen to this article Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print 0:00 0:00 1x This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. With her fingers, Guadalupe Espinoza lightly traced the lettering engraved on a slanted monument wedged alongside the courtyard at the LA Plaza de Culturas y Artes. The memorial was installed in 2012 as a way to acknowledge — alongside a formal apology by the California State Legislature and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors — the history of Mexican and Mexican Americans who were forcefully removed from the United States during the Great Depression. “It’s the beginning of helping everyone, starting with the families, learn about what happened to them,” Espinoza said of the monument. “For this to be known and not forgotten or swept under the rug.” The commemorative plaque and apology are also the starting point of a new book by Marla A. Ramirez titled “Banished Citizens.” Released in November 2025, it details how Mexican American women endured the repatriation period, relying primarily on oral family histories. “Banished Citizens” by Marla A. Ramirez explores how U.S-born citizens of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States. (James Carbone / For De Los) Between 1921 to 1944, approximately 1 million individuals of Mexican descent living in the United States were sent to Mexico. They were scapegoats, Ramirez argues, part of a mass removal effort to reduce the country’s relief expenses and unemployment rates. Sixty percent of those expelled were U.S. citizens, mainly working-class women and children in a mixed-status household. Among those removed were individuals such as Espinoza’s mother, Ramona Espinoza (née Garcia) who, despite being born in San Dimas in 1928, boarded a Mexico-bound train alongside her three siblings (all U.S.-born citizens) and their Mexican-born mother, Felicitas Castro, who received a repatriation letter ordering her removal from Los Angeles in 1932. Ramona — who was still alive at the time that Ramirez conducted oral interviews with her for her book — believed her family’s removal came from vaccination records at Los Angeles General Hospital, which denoted the family as “likely to become public charge,” or someone who depended on the government for survival, then a clause for expulsion under the 1917 Immigration Act. “We had to do many years of healing from all the trauma and hardships that [my mother and grandmother] learned to live,” said Espinoza. (James Carbone / For De Los) At times facing housing and food insecurity in northern Mexico, Ramona would eventually find her way back to the U.S. as a seasonal farmworker in the Imperial Valley, helping fill in the worker shortages of World War II. She would not permanently resettle in Los Angeles County until 1948. “We had to do many years of healing from all the trauma and hardships that they learned to live,” Guadalupe said. “Even now, I get very sad when I think of what happened to my mother and my grandmother — sometimes it’s [looking] at a document in my hand, sometimes it’s standing in a place where I know my grandmother brought her children a hundred years ago.” Ramirez — an assistant professor of history and Chicane/x and Latine/x studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — is careful when highlighting the word repatriation in her book, which she argues invokes the act itself as a voluntary return for noncitizen immigrants. Instead, she elects the word banishment to describe the expulsion of U.S. citizens to their ethnic country of origin, despite their legal right to remain in the United States. For her, the word is an apt description of what happened to these families, whose descendants continue to face the repercussions of being “thrown out.” Many banished individuals struggled to legalize their Mexican-born children, others were unable to access formal education. “If we don’t know our history, then we don’t know how to respond to the current moment,” Ramirez said as she conducted interviews between 2012 and 2017. “When I give talks about the book and share the family features I write about, the question is, how do you see this being replicated today?” “My God. Really? 90 some years and we’re back to square one,” said Chabelo Villegas, right, of the Trump administration’s attempts to change birthright citizenship. (James Carbone / For De Los) Now with the landmark case of Trump vs. Barbara before the Supreme Court, which will likely be decided in late June, the topic of birthright citizenship is especially salient. “My God. Really? 90 some years and we’re back to square one,” said Jose Isabel “Chabelo” Villegas, whose mother Sara Marie Robles was banished in 1932 as a 4-year-old girl. “Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not about the number of people in this country … it’s, ‘We wanna clear it as many non-white as possible.’” Holding Ramir

Marla Ramirez's 'Banished Citizens' explores historic expulsion of Mexican Americans. Will it happen again?

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