Deportation, Race and Gender: Intersecting Disciplinary Regimes and Latinx Immigrant Families

This paper explores deportation as a gendered and racial system of discipline - one that has different gendered effects on Latinx families and individuals. Drawing on data from interviews and surveys with people who have had a... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores deportation as a gendered and racial system of discipline - one that has different gendered effects on Latinx families and individuals. Drawing on data from interviews and surveys with people who have had a close family member deported, we look at how U.S. deportation policy is transforming gendered identities and relations within transnational Latino/a migrant families and communities. Deportation acts in and through a variety of intersecting neoliberal projects -- the production of economic and political violence in migrant sending locales, the illegalization of human mobility, the structure of the U.S. labor market, and the criminal injustice and immigrant detention systems. In our analysis, we draw on and chart a new path from the feminist scholarship on gender and migration. This scholarship developed in the 1980s and 1990s in response to historic shifts in the demographics of immigration, especially from Latin America to the United States. Prior to the 1980s, the vast majority of Latin American migrants, especially Mexicans, were male laborers who supported family members in their homeland. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the numbers of women and children in migration flows increased sharply, due to the militarization of the border, changing logics of global labor markets, and new conditions of violence in sending countries. Scholars began theorizing the experiences of women migrants and changing gendered dynamics within heteropatriarchal families that resulted from women’s increased migration and wage labor in the U.S. Over the past decade, we have witnessed another historic shift in migration through the exile of millions of deported immigrants from the United States. The majority of deportees are men from Mexico and Latin America, who leave behind female partners and children. This constitutes a reversal of previous migration patterns, and has led to new forms of family fracturing, household restructuring, and transnational survival strategies. Deportation policy raises urgent questions about how gendered dynamics in migrant and mixed-status households are shifting, how these changes affect women and young adult children in particular, and what this means for our understandings of migration, immigration law and policy, and gender identities and relations.