Mexican immigrants and migrants have been crossing back and forth along the U.S. Mexico border for 150 years, and yet exile is most often associated with the political migrations that took place during the Mexican Revolution. This lecture will address the tensions between forced and voluntary exile of Mexican migrants over the years, as well as how we might grapple with notions of exile as they relate to economic and violent displacement. It will also discuss the many meanings of home, especially for migrants forging binational lives and livelihoods. Centrally, it will focus on the affective impacts of exile–the longing and the missing of homes and families on the other side of the border.

Larisa Veloz is a Professor of History at the University of Texas, El Paso, where she teaches the histories of Mexican Migration, Latin America and the Latinx diaspora, and the US-Mexico borderlands. Her book ‘Even the Women are Leaving’: Migrants Making Mexican America, 1890-1965, published in 2023 by University of California Press, explores the histories of Mexican migrant families, focusing on women and gender relations in the first part of the twentieth century. Her current project is based on a set of oral histories/testimonios of Mexican migrant women who came to the United States in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.