Great Depression's Mass Banishments: Experiences of Gendered Migrations & Transnational Motherhood

Family storytelling, similarly to many cultures, has been at the core of Mexican families for generations. Banishment, or as generally known “repatriation,” stories have been passed down to children and grandchildren among... [ view full abstract ]

Family storytelling, similarly to many cultures, has been at the core of Mexican families for generations. Banishment, or as generally known “repatriation,” stories have been passed down to children and grandchildren among some families over nearly ninety years since the early 1920-40s banishments of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. The repatriation records in the early twentieth century accounted for one million Mexicans; a startling sixty percent were U.S. citizen children.

Sara Marie Villegas Robles, a U.S. citizen by birth became one of 600,000 U.S. citizens of Mexican descent unconstitutionally banished from her home country. This was a result of the repatriation efforts of the Great Depression era that targeted all Mexicans for removal, regardless of legal status, as a “solution” for the economic crisis of the time. In 1932, Sara, only four-years old, was banished from Pasadena, California along with three other U.S. citizen siblings and her Mexican immigrant parents. The family settled in Zacatecas, Mexico after their banishment, Sara grew up, married and bore eleven children there. She returned to the U.S. until 1965 and emigrated some of her children. The entire process took over twelve years, forcing them to become a transnational family. Additionally, the prolonged immigration processes, high mandated fees, and misguided legal advice pushed her to bring three of her children as undocumented immigrants, leading to their current family’s mixed-legal status.

The experiences of the Villegas Robles family contribute much needed information to existing archival documents and established Latina/o historiographies about the gendered experiences of immigration during the twentieth century, transnational motherhood, and prolonged consequences of banishment across three generations. Ultimately, the archival documents paired with the Villegas Robles’s oral histories of banishment and legal ramifications, coupled with her children and grandchildren’s struggles to belong in her home country constructs what I refer to as an, inherited transgenerational illegality, that has been nearly impossible to annul.

This paper complicates the Great Depression’s chapter in U.S. history by documenting the oral histories of banished people of Mexican descent and the prolonged consequences on three generations. The Villegas Robles family’s oral histories provide much needed information about the gender, ethnic, and class systematic exclusions of that time and the prolonged legal and social ramifications on two generations later.