My research examines early twentieth-century immigration policies focusing on the experience of "repatriation" that tore apart Mexican and Mexican American families throughout the United States. It considers this historical moment as the "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 challenges much of the literature that refers to these banishments as "repatriations", obscuring the systematic racist and exclusionist immigration policies. The legal, social, and cultural ramifications of banishment on second and third generation descendants of U.S. citizens are largely absent in Chicana/o-Latina/o historiographies and immigration legal studies. My work takes an innovative approach in that it focuses on the prolonged consequences of immigration policies on surviving banished U.S. citizens and their descendants and the link to today's growing legally mixed-status households across the United States. My study demonstrates that U.S. immigration policies continue to ignore the long and complex Mexico-U.S. immigration relations, failing to create adequate paths to legalization for old and new generations of Mexican immigrants.

This study centers on the experiences of banishment of three extended families and uses their oral histories across multiple generations to recover and rewrite the history of forced exclusion. The families are composed of surviving U.S. citizens who were banished during the early twentieth century and/or who are descendants of those survivors who have returned to the United States, some as undocumented immigrants. The participating families include the Yanez family, residing in Anaheim, California; the Molina family, spread throughout California, Alabama, and Mexico; and the Robles family, living in Pasadena, California. To allow for personal accounts as well as communal- or family-based interpretations, each family member is interviewed individually and then the entire family is interviewed collectively, providing for a multiplicity of insights and richly texture points of views.

In addition to oral histories, this study mines the families' archives, which are composed of photographs, letters, and legal records detailing the experiences of banishment over the course of the twentieth century. Institutional records, including legal histories, archival materials, and demographic data housed at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and the regional branches in Los Angeles, California, as well as El Paso, Texas are used to contextualize the primary research and to reconstruct and reinterpret the immigration policies of the time.

My study indicates that these families experienced repatriation in very unique ways, but with a common sense of contempt that extends across family generations, and continue to face real legal and social collateral consequences. My findings demonstrate that an almost 90-year-old unofficial, later becoming official, policy continues to classify direct descendents of banished U.S. citizens as "illegal" immigrants in their parents and grandparents' home country. Banishment has resulted in what I term, a transgenerational illegality, which has been nearly impossible to shake. These findings are crucial at a time where immigration remains central to national debates. The twenty original oral histories collected for this study demonstrate that, despite the subjugation of these families, the descendants found ways to challenge their "illegal" status, giving rise to the concept of a contested illegality..