The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) officially concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico’s loss was significant. The country ceded 55 percent of its territory to the United States, whose landmass expanded to include the present-day states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as well as most of Arizona and Colorado and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
Harvard University Press
This meant between 80,000 and 115,000 Mexican nationals found themselves living in a new country. They were given the options of staying behind the newly drawn border and claiming U.S. citizenship or voluntarily repatriating. A large number remained. Eventually, many headed to California to work on farms and railroads. By the end of the 1920s, Los Angeles was home to the largest population of Mexican nationals outside of Mexico City.
The Wall Street crash of 1929 dramatically altered their fate. With rising unemployment, racist scapegoating became widespread.
As the United States entered the Great Depression (1929-1939), Mexican Americans were accused of being an economic burden. In December 1930, Charles P. Visel, the director of the Los Angeles Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief, proposed a plan to cut public spending: the mass removal of ethnic Mexicans from Los Angeles. Other cities and states across America quickly emulated that model.
“The mass banishment of Mexican American citizens highlights [how] the United States mobilized notions of race and citizenship to redefine itself as a white settler nation,” writes Marla A. Ramírez in her new book, Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation.
Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation
By Marla A. Ramírez
Harvard University Press, 368 pages
Publication date: October 14, 2025
Impeccably researched, the book documents how, between 1921 and 1944, more than one million Mexican Americans were forcibly removed from the United States. They were transported across the border via special trains operated by the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Mexican National Railroad.
Mexican Americans were defined as alien migrants, incapable of assimilating into American society, but 60 percent of them already were U.S. citizens. They owned property, paid their taxes, and had a legal right to remain in the United States. Many of the banished people were later denied reentry at the border, even though many kept records of their U.S. citizenship. Others had their documents confiscated when trying to cross.
Forced removals took place from private homes, workplaces, plazas, and dance halls across the United States. Immigration officials often referred to them as voluntary “deportations” or “repatriation,” but such terms were factually misleading.
The forced removals concluded in 1944, as by then the Bracero Program, a series of agreements between the U.S. and Mexican governments to allow temporary laborers from Mexico to work legally in the United States, had begun. The program mostly benefited employers, giving them easy access to cheap workers, who could be seasonally hired and fired.
Today in LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, in Los Angeles, there is a plaque commemorating Mexican Americans who were forcefully removed from a country they called home. It was unveiled on February 26, 2012, when several Mexican families gathered to accept a formal apology from the California State Legislature and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Ramírez made contact with several surviving members from banished families who attended the ceremony. This book draws on numerous interviews the author subsequently carried out with many of them.
Her book’s publication is aptly timed. Currently, the Trump Administration seeks to carry out what it claims will be the largest deportation project in U.S. history, targeting an estimated eleven million immigrants.
Last March, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced a “self-deportation” campaign that included a mobile app offering immigrants the option to “self-deport” so they can return legally in the future. History suggests that is unlikely to happen.