Gendering deportation, policy violence, and Latino/a family precarity

Abstract

This paper develops a gender lens to analyze the effects of US deportation policy on immigrant families from Latin America. Whereas most research on deportation focuses on the deportees, we concentrate on their families who remain in the United States. We draw on our qualitative study of 125 families in Los Angeles, California, who have been separated from a close relative because of deportation. Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (Latino Stud 11(3):271–292, 2013) describe deportation as a “gendered racial removal system” because men from Mexico and Central America make up the vast majority of migrants who have been detained and deported by the US government since the mid-1990s. We argue that this gendered racial system disproportionately burdens Latina immigrants in the United States, and also that forced separation leads to changing gender practices and relations within these families.