For CLS faculty member Marla Ramírez’s, Fall 2025 saw the publication of her highly successful first book and a notable research award from the Department of History.
Her book Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press 2025) promises to change the conversation about the expulsion of as many as a million ethnic Mexicans from the U.S. between 1921 and 1944. Historians have traditionally referred to those removals as “repatriation,” the term used by the U.S. government, but at least 60 percent of those expelled were U.S. citizens. Starting with the simple insight that removal of a U.S. citizen is not repatriation but banishment, Prof. Ramírez offers a powerful new narrative of an epsiode in U.S. Latine history that many scholars in the field thought they knew. Drawing on oral histories, transnational archival sources, and private collections, she highlights the gendered effects of the removals and documents the lingering shadow that banishment cast over generations of expelled families. By highlighting the experiences of banished women, Prof. Ramírez offers an important corrective to the male-centered stories that most histories of the period have emphasized. This Fall, she has given numerous public lectures about the book, both in Madison and elsewhere, and appeared on WPR’s “University of the Air” to discuss it with host Norman Gilliland. Coming as it does during a new wave of mass removals, the book is particularly timely.
At the end of the semester, the CLS Program learned that the History Department had given Prof. Ramírez the Allan Bogue Faculty Research Award, in recognition of her achievement as a researcher.