Coming together: Care and masculinities among long-time U.S. residents deported to Mexico

• In Event: Back home: Well-being of return migrants in Mexico

Abstract

What are the impacts of social relationships on life after prison and deportation? Deportation produces isolation through family separation and the social stigma post-prison deportees face in local receiving communities. This paper explores the ways that care practices—sharing living spaces, exchanging material goods, and circulating local knowledge and emotional intimacy—enable deportees to carve out narrow spaces of social inclusion and forge ahead with life after forced return migration. It centers the deportation experiences of long-time U.S. residents who migrated from Mexico before age 13. As adults, they were incarcerated in U.S. prisons, designated “criminal aliens,” and expelled back over the northern Mexico border. Many were street or prison gang members in the United States. Deportation is ostensibly a return to one’s “country of origin.” However, for my interlocutors, deportation to Mexico constitutes displacement from home and community. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, on the northern Mexico border, this research demonstrates how deportees’ come together around shared identities and collective memories that enable them to recognize themselves in one another. Deportee care communities reproduce aspects of their lives in the United States, including in prison. Moreover, deportees overcome the regional divisions of U.S. street and prison gang membership and subtly incorporate sympathetic ways of expressing masculinity. Frequently, these gendered solidarity networks—as friends, homies, compa’s, and bros—constitute deportees’ primary material and emotional support as they reconstruct past lifeways and forge new ones after displacement to Mexico.

Author

• Tobin M Hansen, University of Oregon