Marla Ramírez

Marla Ramírez is a historian of the US­­–Mexico borderlands. She investigates how processes of mass immigration removals have imposed notions of illegality on citizens in their own native countries. Specifically, she centers the everyday experiences of women and children in families whose members hold varying legal statuses (citizens, legally admitted immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants)—what we refer to as “mixed-status” families today. Her teaching and research interests include Mexican American banishment (generally referred to as “repatriation”), racialized citizenship, gendered migrations across the US–Mexico border, mass immigration removals, the making of illegality, historical methods, and the history of Latinx/es in the United States. Her first book, Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (forthcoming with Harvard University Press, October 2025), examines the mass removals during the interwar period (1921–1944) that expelled approximately one million ethnic Mexicans from the United States, arguing that what officials on both sides of the border called “repatriation” was in fact banishment.