Marla Ramírez

Marla Ramírez is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with specialization in oral history, Mexican repatriation, social and legal histories of Mexican migrations, and gendered immigration experiences. She completed a doctoral degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Chicana and Chicano Studies and an emphasis in Feminist Studies.  Her current book project, “Contested Illegality: Mexican Repatriation, Banishment, and Prolonged Consequences Across Three Generations,” examines the history of citizenship and naturalization laws and immigration policies of the Great Depression era, focusing on the unconstitutional banishment of US-citizens of Mexican descent that tore apart thousands of families across the US-Mexico border. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, the San Francisco State University’s Development for Research and Creativity Grant, the Ford Foundation, and the University of California’s Fletcher Jones Fellowship. For more information, see her faculty website.