Family Archives and Oral History: Rethinking the Mexican Repatriation Drives during the Great Depression

Historian Vicky Ruiz estimates that during 1931-34 approximately one-third of the Mexicans in the United States were repatriated (1998). Balderrama and Rodríguez (1995) collected statistics from both U.S. and Mexican governmental agencies estimating that during the decade of the 1930s, repatriations accounted for one million Mexicans. A startling sixty percent were U.S. citizens. This paper examines the prolonged consequences of immigration policy on banished people and their descendants. This study pays close attention to the historical moment of banishment of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent to foreground the difference between repatriation (which implies that the person is not a citizen of a given country) and banishment (referring to citizens who are banned from their home country). This discursive difference highlights the systematic racial exclusionist policies. The oral histories conducted, paired with archival research, and legal analyses provide much needed information about prolonged ramifications.

This paper complicates the Great Depression’s chapter in U.S. history by documenting the oral histories of banished people and their prolonged consequences. Participants discussed here include a surviving banished U.S. citizen, Sara Marie Villegas Robles as well as Sara Marie's daughter, Guillermina, and granddaughter, Sara Veronica. Archival sources from the national immigration archives and family archives along with the oral histories result in reach text that helps us better understand the relationship between Mexican “threat” narratives and the racialization of the immigration system from a historical perspective. Ultimately, the Villegas Robles family’s oral histories paired with archival sources provide much needed information about the racial and class systematic exclusions of that time and prolonged legal and social ramifications on three family generations. More specifically, their experiences give light to the ethnic and class exclusions of the 1930s, the barriers of family separation that led to transnational families/motherhood, gendered migrations, and the prolonged consequences they continue to bare.