The full show transcript is available on our website: https://history.wisc.edu/ask-a-historian/
Where did the idea of citizenship come from, and how has the United States government used the category of citizenship to target people for mistreatment and exclusion?
To answer these questions submitted by a listener, Professor Marla Ramírez explains the origins of the concept of citizenship in the United States and how access to U.S. citizenship has been—from the nation’s founding—contingent on race, class, and gender.
She also shares the history and generational consequences of Mexican American banishment during the Great Depression, when the U.S. government forcibly removed the U.S.-citizen families of Mexican laborers from the United States. As Marla explains, these Mexican Americans’ citizenship was “invalidated or ignored or not valued equally as [that of] other U.S. citizens during this time.”
Timestamps:
02:10 The origins of citizenship in the West and in the United States
11:03 Mexican Americans banishment during the Great Depression
24:42 How the history of banishment sheds light on ongoing immigration debates
27:52 How race, class, and gender continue to shape access to U.S. citizenship today
Episode links:
Marla A. Ramírez is Assistant Professor of History and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. https://history.wisc.edu/people/ramirez-marla-a/
Marla’s recent publications on the history of immigration and citizenship include:
Our music is "Pamgaea" by Kevin MacLeod. Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4193-pamgaea CC BY 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Please send us your questions for a historian: outreach@history.wisc.edu