Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University
About
Marla Andrea Ramírez holds a PhD in Chicana and Chicano studies with a doctoral emphasis in feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Currently, she is a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Her research examines Great Depression era immigration policies focusing on the experiences of repatriation and banishment that tore apart Mexican and Mexican American families throughout the United States. Her study uses oral histories across multiple generations to recover and rewrite the history of forced exclusion. In addition to oral histories, this study mines the families’ archives and uses institutional archival records. Dr. Ramírez’s findings indicate that while the United States has recovered from the perils of the Great Depression, participating families continue to experience prolonged social and legal effects that extend across three generations. This study has been in part funded by the UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship/Fletcher Jones Fellowship, the UC Santa Barbara’s Chicano Studies Institute Grant for Dissertation Research, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the Ford Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Fellowship, UC Berkeley’s Summer Oral History Institute, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Dr. Ramírez is thrilled to start an assistant professor appointment in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University in fall 2016.
Current Work:
Dr. Ramírez is currently working on a book manuscript, Transgenerational Illegality: Three Generations of Exclusion through Mexican Repatriation and the Politics of Immigration Law, 1920-2005. It examines early twentieth-century immigration policies focusing on the experience of repatriation that tore apart Mexican and Mexican American families throughout the United States. The legal, social, and cultural ramifications of forced expulsion on descendants of banished US citizens are largely absent in Chicana/o-Latina/o historiographies and immigration legal studies. Dr. Ramírez's work takes an innovative approach in that it focuses on the prolonged consequences of immigration policies on surviving banished US citizens and their descendants.
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. 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. Records from institutional archives are also used to contextualize the primary research and to reconstruct and reinterpret the immigration policies of the time.
Research Area(s):
- Latin American and Latina/o Studies
- History
- Historical Sociology
