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University of California Press

About the Book

The first decades of the twentieth century were crucial for the development of Mexican circular family migration, a process shaped by family and community networks as much as it was fashioned by labor markets and economic conditions. Even the Women Are Leaving explores bidirectional migration across the US-Mexico border from 1890 to 1965 and centers the experiences of Mexican women and families. Highlighting migrant voices and testimonies, Larisa L. Veloz depicts the long history of family and female migration across the border and elucidates the personal experiences of early twentieth-century border crossings, family separations, and reunifications. This book offers a fresh analysis of the ways that female migrants navigated evolving immigration restrictions and constructed binational lives through the eras of the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Bracero Program.

About the Author

Larisa L. Veloz is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Figures and Maps 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction 

PART I 
THE FIRST WAVE: SEEING WORK AND FAMILY ACROSS OPEN BORDERS

1 • “And They Go Silently:” Pioneering Family Migrations, 1890–1920 
2 • From Revolution to Exodus: Going North in Times of Conflict, 1915–1929 

PART II 
RETURN FLOW: FORCING REPATRIATION, KEEPING COMMUNITY

3 • The Great Depression and The Great Return: Coming Home, 1929–1936 
4 • Good Presidents, Bad Husbands, and Dead Fathers: Trials of Binational Living, 1934–1940 

PART III
THE NEW WAVE: RECRUITING MEN, WOMEN KEEP COMING 

5 • War and a New Migration Order: Nations Seek Braceros, Women Make Families, 1940–1947 
6 • The Era of Policing: Women Beyond Control, 1945–1965 
Epilogue. Fit to Be Migrants: Undocumenting Lives, 1965–1986 

Appendix: Repatriation Train Statistics Tables 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 

Reviews

Even the Women Are Leaving provides a unique, significant, and rich contribution to the larger field of immigration. There are many writings on immigration but few have attempted, as this book does, to incorporate a more full story of family migration. This book is even more rare in retelling the history of migration through the lens of women’s migration experiences.” ⎯Sonia Hernández, author of For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1938

“Larisa Veloz successfully recovers the multiple voices and experiences of Mexican women and children and also families that crossed the US-Mexico border. The intricate and intimate discussion of binational lives and mixed-status families, circular migrations, returns, and deportations are unique contributions. Tremendously timely, Even the Women Are Leaving contextualizes the (sad and cruel) long story of family separation, and the importance of family reunification."⎯Sandra C. Mendiola García, author of Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico

"Even the Women Are Leaving is an important contribution—fabulously illustrative and well researched.”⏤Susie Porter, Professor of History and Gender Studies, University of Utah