Caroline Eaton Tracey

CAROLINE TRACEY, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on ”The Soul Will Fly Home of its Own Accord’: Building a Transnational Infrastructure to Address Migrant Death,’ supervised by Dr. Nathan Sayre. Long a migrant-sending country, in recent years Mexico has become one of return. Between 2010 and 2018, 2.6 million Mexicans left the United States, 55% by deportation and 45% by return. In response, a body of deportation scholarship has emerged and, mostly in Mexico, limited scholarship on return migration. Yet both literatures have largely overlooked women deportees and returnees, arguing instead that deportation is a gendered form of surplus labor control. This dissertation, an ethnographic account of women and gender-non-conforming deportee/returnee activism, challenges the idea that non-male deportees are ancillary to deportation and return migration as phenomena and objects of academic study, arguing that these return migrants’ cultural production, community-building, and intimate knowledge of the bureaucracies of the US and Mexico has improved the circumstances of long-term emplacement for all return migrants and their families.