Repatriadas and Rights Claims: Mexican and Tejana Women in Repatriation-Era Texas

A December 1936 article in The Social Service Review considered how case workers should engage in massive Mexican repatriation campaigns. The authors stated that Mexicans had a disadvantage when assimilating in the United States, “because of their strangeness to customs and conditions in this country.” Yet, the authors issued a plea to keep immigration policies from adversely affecting hetero-patriarchal families by arguing against familial separation. In many cases, families without a patriarch were referred to repatriate on the grounds that unaccompanied women and children were likely to become public charges. In the context of repatriation during the Great Depression, Mexican women were commonly villified, sexualized, and racialized in government discourse to legitimize border monitoring and sexual profiling. This research explores how Mexican women in the United States, both in hetero-normative families and outside of conceptions of proper womanhood, strategically deployed narratives and engaged with respectability politics to forge rights claims during repatriation campaigns.

This project draws from letters that Mexican women submitted to the Texas governor’s office and Mexico’s consulate. As state policy shaped women’s experiences, this research interrogates how the United States government treated Mexican women as both racialized and gendered subjects, seeing as repatriation policies institutionalized both of these subject positions. Mexican women's bodies were suspect to examination and deportation despite the fact that many anxieties about Mexicans were separate from concerns about homosexual object-desire. As a result, this research considers how Mexican women represented themselves, or even subverted language, in opposition to the notions of deviance, unfit domesticity, and racialized hypersexualization that shaped their experiences as transnational, juridical subjects. Rather, if the American public imaginary understood Mexican women as parasitic and reproductive threats to American society, my work analyzes how self-representation functioned as a tool to resist the racialized and gendered contours of immigration policy.

If accepted, my poster will include visual sources such as letters authored by Mexican and Mexican American women making rights claims; images of Works Progress Administration work orders created in response to women seeking work; and other contextual images such as maps that show Border Patrol offices and Mexican Consulate locations in relation to one another.