1 Introduction

The opening quote is from Emma Sanchez, a deported mother and member of Dreamers Moms USA-Tijuana,Footnote 1 who made the statement in a short documentary created by Aljazeera in 2016. Dreamers Moms is a civil society organisation consisting of deported migrant mothers living in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. This organisation was founded in May 2014 by Yolanda Varona, a Mexican migrant mother who, after living 16 years in the U.S., was deported to Mexico in December 2010, leaving behind two teenagers—ages 15 and 18—in California.

Initially, Dreamers Moms (DM hereafter) provided a space where deported women could find emotional support. As time passed, it became an organisation that provides legal and psychological support for deported mothers living in Tijuana and newly deported mothers. The organisation welcomes any mother who has been deported from the U.S. regardless of her country of origin, ethnicity, age, or migration history. After their deportation, most of these women settle in Tijuana to remain close to their families, as most of their children remain in the U.S. Therefore, the likelihood that their children will visit them is higher if these mothers live closer to where their families live. Yet, visits to these families are possible only if their children or other family members are either American citizens or authorized migrants, which in either case would allow them to legally return to the U.S.

This chapter examines the origins of DM and its transformation into a civil society organisation. It also looks at the members’ individual and collective actions to achieve DM’s main goals—supporting deported mothers in legally reuniting with their families in the U.S. and making visible the impact that family separation due to deportation has on migrant families. These actions are part of what scholars have begun referring to as constructive resistance, in which people seek “to build, organize and construct the social relations and society they want, rather than attempts to tear down and destroy what they object to and confront” (Sørensen & Wiksell, 2020: 254). In this sense, the main argument in this chapter is that DM, as the opening quote vividly illustrates, does not seek to transform or change the world, but engage in a form of constructive resistance. Their actions, which include vigils, peaceful protests, talks at universities, interviews with both national and international media outlets, and participation in local artistic projects. Appeal to the literature on maternal activism and, in particular, to Orozco Mendoza’s (2019) concept of “maternal acts of public disclosures”. While maternal activism refers to the use of the identity of motherhood to call attention to the state for violent acts, maternal acts of public disclosures expose the mothers’ personal stories to question the state’s direct role in the production of violence and its negligence and abandonment. Both—maternal activism and maternal acts of public disclosures—are part of the repertoire that these women utilise to exercise a kind of constructive resistance, which seeks to achieve two goals: first, to fight against being stripped of their humanity and dignity as they were violently expelled from the U.S. and, second, to avoid the invisibility and otherization of their subjectivity once they become deported mothers. Thus, the guiding questions for this chapter are: What explains the creation of DM, and why do deported mothers join the organisation? More importantly, what are these women resisting and what are they creating in that process? How and why do they resist? What can these women’s maternal public disclosures teach us about constructive resistance? Finally, and related to the theme of this volume, what could DM teach us about the intersection between everyday experiences, border politics, and exclusion?

Throughout our examination of DM’s maternal acts of public disclosure, we expand the literature on resistance in general (Vinthagen & Lilja, 2007; Piñeros Shields, 2018); in particular, utilizing these acts as a showcase, we contribute to the incipient literature on constructive resistance (Sørensen & Wiksell, 2020; Lilja, 2020; Sørensen, 2016). Our work also contributes to the literature on the intersection of deportation and maternal activism. Thus, drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tijuana, Mexico that began in January 2019, this study advances the understanding of the interplay between deportation, maternal activism, and constructive resistance.

What follows is the research context, Tijuana. Subsequently, we introduce the theoretical foundations outlining how DM’s collective mobilisation can be understood through the lens of maternal activism and how this activism speaks to the intersectional identity of deported mothers and how such an identity is at the core of the maternal acts that these women engage in as part of a form of constructive resistance. We then describe the year-long ethnographic work and how we adapted in response to the pandemic. In the empirical section, we articulate three key preliminary findings and their implications. We conclude this chapter by discussing the significance of this study.

2 Research Context

Known as the farthest west corner of Latin America, Tijuana, Mexico is the most populated and most transited border city on the U.S.-Mexico border. By 2010, Tijuana’s population reached 1,210,820 residents (Chávez, 2016). As a border city, Tijuana has a history marked by two main phenomena: migration and the transborder lives of its inhabitants. One turning point in the migration history of Tijuana took place in the 1940s with the implementation of the Bracero Program (1942–1964). This was a binational program between the Mexican and U.S. governments to recruit Mexican labourers to work in the U.S. as farm workers. During this guest worker program, nearly two million Mexican men, known as braceros, worked in U.S. agricultural fields. Many of these workers brought their families to border cities to establish their homes closer to their places of work (Zenteno, 1995). This led to the beginning of a dynamic transborder life between Tijuana and border counties in Southern California.

By 1965, the bracero program had been cancelled by the U.S. government. As a measure to accommodate the thousands of Braceros who would be returning to Mexico after losing their jobs in the U.S., the Mexican government launched the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), which created an export-processing area that helped maintain the economic vitality of Tijuana (París Pombo & Montes, 2021). Between the 1970s and mid-1990s, the strong demand for workers in the American economy and recurrent economic crises in Mexico gave rise to a continuous increase in the recruitment of irregular Mexican migrants in the U.S. Tijuana was the main border crossing point into the U.S., and California was the destination for most Mexican and Central American migrants (París Pombo et al., 2017).

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government began to secure its southern border by implementing a series of operations seeking to deter people from surreptitiously entering its territory. However, this did not have the desired effect; people not only continued crossing but did so at the risk of losing their lives, as they were pushed eastward, where they faced inhospitable and isolated regions. Simultaneously, the number of deportations to Mexico dramatically increased after 1996, when the U.S. Congress passed several laws expanding the power of federal agencies to detain and deport non-citizens (Hagan et al., 2008). During the Obama administration (2008–2016), around 280,000 Mexican citizens were deported each year. The number of removals decreased at the beginning of the Trump administration, with nearly 185,000 removals of Mexican citizens in 2017 and 218,000 in 2018 (Guo & Baugh, 2019). More than 90% of deported Latin American migrant people arrived at Mexico’s northern border cities (París Pombo & Montes, 2021), where they either waited with the hope of returning to the U.S., returned to their communities of origin, or settled so that they could be close to their families left behind in the U.S., engaging in what García and Martin (2019) refers to as arreglos familiares transfronterizos (transborder family arrangements), a series of economic and social arrangements seeking to maintain family bonds despite physical separation due to deportation.

Life is not easy for deported people who stay in Tijuana. They experience systematic harassment by local police, as well as arbitrary arrests, extortion, and robbery (París Pombo & Montes, 2021). In their study of the stigmatization of deportees in Tijuana, Albicker and Velasco (2016) argue that this process of stigmatization has served as fertilizer for the anti-immigrant sentiment that, in recent years, has increased and led to an ideology of transborder criminalization. For these authors, the anti-immigrant discourse “has a particular vitality in the (Mexican) border region due to the intensity of transborder interactions, as well as the density of infrastructure and institutions associated with border control as part of the local national security policies of the United States” (Albicker & Velasco, 2016: 123). This kind of xenophobic discourse found its high point in November of 2018 with the arrival, in Tijuana, of thousands of Central American asylum seekers. Exacerbated by the xenophobic and nativist sentiments that prevailed in the U.S. during the Trump administration (2016–2020), the local media outlets and social media in Tijuana disseminated a discourse that warned local people about the dangers that deportees posed to public safety, depicting them as dangerous and “undesired, distrustful, and criminal” (París Pombo & Montes, 2021:231).

Despite the anti-migrant and anti-deportee climate, multiple civil society organizations (CSOs) provide services to deported individuals or migrants in transit who stay in Tijuana. Most of these organizations have established temporary or long-term alliances with Mexican and U.S. political organizations, and they receive funds and donations from both sides of the border. Most shelters are part of Catholic or Protestant missions and have an assistance-oriented approach (París Pombo & Montes, 2021). Other CSOs, founded in the last 10 years, have a more radical and less institutionalised profile. They promote demonstrations, host political and cultural events, participate in social networks, and articulate demands together with other social movements for human rights (París & Müller, 2016). DM is part of this robust network of CSOs. Thus, considering this anti-migrant and anti-deportee environment in Tijuana, not only does DM seek to achieve its own goals—supporting deported mothers in legally reuniting with their families in the U.S. and making visible the impact of family separation—but, more importantly, alongside the dozens of CSOs working in Tijuana, DM’s work helps to deconstruct prejudices and stereotypes against deported people, helping to prevent the invisibility and otherization of deported people’s subjectivity.

3 Expanding the Literature: Resistance, Deportation and Maternal Activism

To understand the experiences of more than 300,000 deported mothers, particularly those who engage in activism to legally reunite with their children in the U.S., we draw on the maternal activism literature and focus on constructive resistance (Sørensen, 2016; Lilja, 2020, 2021; Sørensen & Wiksell, 2020) to make sense of DM’s activism as deported mothers residing in their own country with the expectation to reunite with their children in the country that expelled them.

Social movements in Latin America have used the identity of motherhood to mobilise their demands. Maternal activism, as it is called, emphasises the identity of motherhood, as a morally superior and virtuous identity, to call attention to the state, whether to demand the location of their disappeared children under dictatorial regimes (e.g., Blaustein & Patillo, 1985; Navarro, 1989; Bejarano, 2002; Maier & Lebon, 2010) or to point a finger at a state that fails to protect its citizens (e.g., Wright, 2005, 2009; Staudt, 2008). In all these cases, the mothers did not participate in party politics but felt compelled to take to the streets to make visible their claims against the state.

One way that these women take to the streets is by engaging in what Orozco Mendoza (2019) calls “maternal acts of public disclosures”. In her analysis of Las Madres de Chihuahua, Orozco Mendoza contends that these acts “expose the mothers’ personal stories to enable a critical view of the state’s role in the production of disposable life through a combination of neglect, criminalization, and abandonment” (2019: 214). Hence, acts of public disclosure show the piercing pain of physically losing a child by turning mothers’ bodies into walking billboards to interpellate the state and the citizenry (Taylor, 2001). In this sense, the literature on maternal activism helps create an understanding of motherhood as a political identity within the nation-state where women reside. In the case of DM, not only does the analytical lens of maternal acts of public disclosure help us understand the kind of maternal activism that these women display but more importantly, these acts transcend geographical borders as they make claims to the U.S., which is the state that expelled them.

Similar to other social organizations that draw on motherhood as the central identity for mobilization in Latin America, DM operates within the mothers’ country of origin, but differs from other groups with regard to two contextual elements: the experience of forced removal and social stigma. First, deportees experience being deracinated from their homes despite being back in their homeland; they experience estrangement even if they understand the language and the rules (Bohem, 2012; Golash-Boza, 2015; Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). Second, a stigma is associated with deportation and follows individuals long after they have been removed from a given country (Cautin, 2015; Guarnizo, 1994; Gerlash, 2018). The stigma, according to De Genova (2018), stems from a link to criminality and, therefore, danger (e.g., Brotherton & Barrios, 2009), which in turn motivates deported individuals to avoid visibility out of shame. Their shame is exacerbated when they lose their social role (Schuster & Majidi, 2015; Brotherton & Barrios, 2009). Hence, deportees exhibit a low profile so that they remain socially undetected. Accordingly, while the existing literature indicates that, for the deportee, visibility is something to avoid, the deportee’s identity as a mother, which is socially valued to the extent that it is used to make claims to the state, is an identity to rally. In this context in which deported mothers embrace contradictory identities, i.e., as deportees and mothers, how can we understand DM’s work?

Let us turn to the literature on migration and resistance produced on both sides of the Atlantic. It focuses on mobilization by unauthorized migrants in the context of the securitization of borders. This work highlights the collaborations across borders, focusing on what Stierl (2019) calls “migrant resistance,” but also how distinct social identities might help to forge coalitions across groups (e.g., Escudero, 2020). Immigrant activists demand freedom of movement and visibility in places where they are rendered invisible, as many of them lack immigration status and are subject to being deported. However, what about those who were unauthorised migrants and whose identities revolved around their gender roles as mothers?

To explain DM’s work, we draw on the literature of resistance, specifically on constructive resistance, as it “…occurs when people start to build the society they desire independently of structures of power… To be considered ‘constructive resistance’, they necessarily have to be both constructive and provide a form of resistance… Resistance can be either an implicit or explicitly outspoken critique of structures of power or patriarchy… The construction element can be either concrete or symbolic, and ranges from initiatives that aim to inspire others to actions that partly replace or lead to the collapse of the dominant way of behaving and thinking…” (Sørensen, 2016: 57). Another important characteristic of constructive resistance is that it may refer to attempts to build the social relations and society those resisting want rather than destroy the state (Sørensen & Wiksell, 2019).

We build on these bodies of literature and extend them in two ways. First, this activism unites two polarised social identities: the tainted and disposable deportee and the morally valued mother seeking legal reunification with her children in the country that deported her. These opposing identities, when merged in activism, will help us extend the concept of intersectional identity. Second, DM’s activism is conducted outside the geographical limits of the US state and creates a transnational forum to appeal to civil society at large in the U.S. Its goal is to make the injustice of the U.S. deportation regime visible. In doing so, DM constructs new social relations and a new narrative.

4 Methods and Data

The Deported Mothers project, an ongoing collaborative ethnographic research project, explores the effects of deportation on Latina mothers, their family structures, and the resulting activism of those seeking legal reunification in the U.S. For our strategic positionality and reflexivity during the recruitment, in-person, and virtual portions of our field work and analysis, we draw on what Reyes (2018) calls an “ethnographic toolkit”. As feminist ethnographers, we make women’s experiences visible, including the way DM navigates dynamics of power in its activism as a group of deported mothers (Davis & Craven, 2016). The ethnographic methods we employ do not view deported mothers as passively accepting their experience of removal from the U.S., but as actively constructing their own strategies to legally reunite with their families. To do so, we conducted open-ended interviews, participant observation, and analysis of digital and printed material produced by and about the organisation. In this chapter, we examine DM’s repertoire of collective mobilisation, which has developed over the years as the group promotes its goal of legal family reunification in the U.S.

The explorative ethnographic fieldwork began in January 2019. In this chapter, we focus our analysis on the actions of DM through the experiences of two mothers, Yolanda Varona and Emma Sánchez. These cases show their activist work with respect to reuniting with their families in the U.S., as Sánchez was able to do in December 2018. Thus, we focused our analysis on their activism, paying particular attention to the message conveyed, the venue where it happened, and the content of the message. Ultimately, we pay attention to their resistance and what they constructed in their activism.

We conducted seven in-person, in-depth interviews and five follow-up online interviews. All interviews were conducted in Spanish. With permission from the interviewees, the interviews were voice-recorded and later transcribed verbatim. Each interview lasted 1 to 2 h. The questions involved four topics: (a) demographic information; (b) migration history within Mexico, crossing the border, and deportation and relocation to Tijuana; (c) family in Mexico and in the U.S. and perceptions of their own motherhood; and (d) the role the organisation plays in their lives. We supplemented our data by conducting four semi-structured interviews with staff members working at organisations that serve the migrant community in Tijuana. During our initial collaborative fieldwork in January 2020, we accompanied women to their activist work, whether it was meeting at the restaurant La Antigüita, the de facto space for meetings, running activities such as Three Kings Day, or visiting a deportee refuge for women. Additionally, we spent time at core places where women carry out acts of public disclosure, such as the San Ysidro checkpoint and Playas de Tijuana. The third source of data consists of the organisation’s Facebook account and 199 news media reports that include short documentaries on, and interviews with, DM. We also drew on the women’s own photo albums of their activism, which is closely connected to their lives. This digital database was shared by Varona, who saved all this material since the founding of the organisation.

Our analytical strategy followed women’s trajectories from their first migration, which in all cases was internal migration in Mexico, until their time in Tijuana as deported mothers. We read the interviews separately and conducted open coding. Next, we developed a coding schema and proceeded to work on focused coding together. Our individual memos provided contextual information that helped us interpret the interviews and the conversations we had with DM members. Here, we focus on three forms of activism: (a) Taking the border with vigils: The San Ysidro border, the busiest checkpoint along the Mexico-U.S. border, represents a classic case of an act of public disclosure; (b) Shifting from personal to political, e.g., weddings and feeding migrants; and (c) Making visible their intersectional identity afforded by news media reports.

5 Analysis of Maternal Acts of Public Disclosure as a Form of Constructive Resistance

In the theoretical section, we argued that the acts displayed by DM are part of an ample repertoire of what Orozco Mendoza (2019) refers to as “maternal acts of public disclosures” through which these women engage in a form of constructive resistance. Rather than trying to change the world order and, particularly, the unjust U.S. migration policy, these women, by performing these acts, seek to achieve two goals: to fight against being stripped of their humanity and dignity as they were violently expelled from the U.S. due to their deportation; and to avoid the invisibility and otherization of their subjectivity once they become deported mothers. In this sense, the act of creating DM as a civil organisation was the initial step to engaging in the production of maternal acts of public disclosure. In this physical place, these women realize their intersectional identity as deported mothers, identify their cause, and, more importantly, engage in a form of constructive resistance. Therefore, the support system that these women create in this collective space is one of the reasons why other deported women, like Emma Sánchez, whose quote opens this chapter, join this organisation.

In the following sections, we discuss acts displayed by DM, in which the embodiment of members’ intersectional identity as deportees and mothers is at the core of their maternal acts of public disclosure.

5.1 Taking the Border with Vigils

In May 2014, Yolanda Varona, the founder of DM, held the first vigil at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in Tijuana. This was a symbolic location for many reasons. First, it is the busiest port of entry along the Mexico-U.S. border; furthermore, all members of the organisation had been deported through this port. Many stayed in Tijuana to be close to their children; some, upon deportation to their towns of origin, moved to Tijuana for this very reason. Vigils take place on Sundays, when more visitors are returning to the U.S. after having spent the weekend with family in Mexico. Members of DM stand alongside the cars that wait to cross the border. Mothers engage in conversation with the drivers, taking advantage of the time that the drivers need to wait.

Initially, members called these acts “vigils” to highlight the importance of staying alert at the border and peacefully waiting to be seen by those going to the U.S. They took this action to be at the most iconic place representing their situation, which also allowed them to let people entering the U.S. know that they were separated from their families by deportation. In engaging in public space, Varona was cognizant of not disturbing the public order: “We don’t want to be seen as rebellious. We want to follow the rules” (Interview on January 6, 2020). Ultimately, the goal has been to be visible in the city of transit, to be recognized by others, and to be identified as peaceful demonstrators by U.S. citizens (or authorized residents) commuting back to the U.S.

The first vigil took place soon after DM was founded in May 2014. Varona and a few other women (and a couple of men) stood by the car lanes near the checkpoint. They held homemade banners and signs. They also pinned vibrant pink heart-shaped symbols to their chests, as if their hearts were outside their bodies. Some held signs that read, “Have you seen my son?” Varona shared with us that the phrase was meant to get the attention of the drivers lined up to cross the border in order to then share members’ stories of family separation. She and the other members certainly captured the attention of those at the border; unintentionally, they also captured the attention of radio and television news outlets. Interest from journalists was unexpected but welcomed. Varona described this unexpected result:

I was carrying a sign with the question: ‘Have you seen my son?’ We thought it was just to get people’s attention. All of a sudden, I turned and saw many people waiting in line to cross the border. I don’t know how, but I approached them and shared my experience as a deported mother and that I hadn’t seen my children for four years. I told my story, showing all the pain that I was feeling at that moment. I didn’t know that my story was reaching the hearts of those listening to me; I didn’t plan that, but it happened. Apparently, at that point, the U.S. migration and customs officers thought I wanted to cross the border or cause trouble. Therefore, the officers closed the border for a few minutes. This attracted the attention of journalists who happened to be there. Shortly thereafter, I realised I had mics and cameras in front of me. That was my first interview as the founder of Dreamers Moms (Interview in January 2020).

The journalists took DM’s contact information and started calling the organisation to learn more about members’ stories. According to Varona, that vigil was one of the first moments when DM became visible in Tijuana. Ever since, she has painstakingly recorded the contact information of every reporter with whom she has interacted.

As vigils continued, mothers included other messages on their signs, such as: “No more fear, no more hiding”. They also directly addressed the stigma of deported people, which assumes criminality. They carried signs reading, “Workers are not criminals”, “Mothers are not criminals”, and “Migration is not a crime”. In doing so, they used their bodies as walking billboards. By doing this, members of DM not only made their presence visible, but also reclaimed their dignity and humanity.

Vigils were the first public acts in which DM members disclosed their status as deported people, as mothers, and as being separated from their children due to U.S. immigration laws. Vigils are a low-budget activity; members craft a concrete written message. One thing that started at that time was wearing a vibrant pink t-shirt with a white dove (peace), monarch butterflies (migration), and diplomas and graduation caps (studious children); DM members have worn this at every public event since. Vigils have provided visibility locally (and transnationally, given their location) while showing that DM embraces members’ intersecting identities as deported individuals and as mothers. Thus, DM members are humanizing those who have been, by force, removed from the U.S.

5.2 Shifting from Personal to Political

“The personal is political” is a phrase popularised by the feminist movement in the 1970s in the U.S. While DM members do not use this phrase in their praxis, they embody it in their activism. They determined that several personal events made them political, such as weddings at the Mexico-U.S. border or meeting at Friendship Park located at the US-Mexican border during Mother’s Day. We chose one of these events to represent the intentionality of their acts: the religious wedding of a DM member, Emma Sánchez.

Sánchez became a DM member in 2015. She migrated to the U.S. in the early 2000s without documentation. At that time, her mother was working in Southern California. Shortly after migrating, Sánchez met her husband, a U.S. Marine veteran, and soon they had three children. In the hopes of regularising Sánchez’s papers, her husband filed a petition to regularise her immigration status. After her husband completed the long and tedious process, Sánchez received notification that she had to go to the U.S. immigration office in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Expecting that the appointment meant that she would become a green-card holder, the family made plans to celebrate. The result was the opposite of what they had dreamed: Sánchez was barred from entering the U.S. for 10 years. In that time of disorientation, Sánchez’s father travelled from Guadalajara to Ciudad Juárez to be with her and help with her three toddlers, as her husband had to return to work in Southern California. This outcome changed Sánchez’s and her family’s lives for the next 12 years.

The description Sánchez shared with us about her religious wedding follows:

My wedding was on July 17, 2015. My wedding had activist meaning. It all started in a meeting with my fellow Dreamers Moms. We were sharing our stories with visitors from the U.S., and I mentioned my dream of having a religious wedding in Guadalajara with my family and friends. My deportation had truncated my dream. When my godmother [Yolanda Varona, founder of DM] heard that, she said if I wanted to have it, I should tell her and the group when and where, and they would support me. At first, I thought she was kidding, but very soon I realised she was serious about the offer. At this point, I said I wanted to have my wedding in July, by the [border] wall. My godmother was not that convinced because there had been another wedding before [of a deported couple]. I knew my wedding was not going to be the first to be celebrated right next to the wall. Still, I wanted to celebrate it there. I wanted my husband to wear his Marine uniform…I wanted to send a message to the world. We got married by the Friendship Park in Playas de Tijuana. We had Father Delmond officiating our wedding [in Spanish], and Pastor Fanestri translated it into English [for] the American side. My three children brought the rings. My father came from Guadalajara to walk [me down the aisle] and give me to my husband at the altar. We refashioned the open space as if it were a church. At the end of the wedding, many news media outlets approached us because they wanted to hear our story. The following day, my phone didn’t stop ringing, with journalists wanting to interview me (Interview on June 24, 2020).

The above vignette shows a new phase in DM activism. What started as a personal dream of having a religious wedding became a political act of public disclosure. We analyse at least three moments: the decision, the preparation, and the actual wedding. For the first two moments, we rely on Sánchez’s and other DM chronicles of the events. For the third moment, we rely on Sánchez’s narrative and the photos she posted on her Facebook account.

As Sánchez shared in the above quote, the reference to having the wedding by the wall indicates that both she and her godmother knew that the wedding would be symbolic of their cause. Though neither Sánchez nor Varona had a clear idea of what they wanted to convey with the celebration, they knew it would have a public purpose.

As the days passed, Sánchez formed an idea of what she wanted her celebration to convey. First, the location was important for various reasons. She wanted her father and siblings in Mexico to attend as well as her mother, who lives in Southern California and could stand on the other side of the wall. Sánchez’s wedding enabled her immediate family to be united in more ways than just the religious celebration. It also allowed her to unite her extended family, which was divided by the wall. Once the location was chosen, the celebration itself was carefully designed.

Sánchez was determined to have a traditional wedding and from the outside, it appeared to be just that. However, each element was planned. For example, she was determined to have her husband wear his Marine uniform. Because he had been discharged from the Marines many years previously, his uniform no longer fit, but Sánchez had him obtain a new one. She wanted a white dress and formal attire for her children. To defray the cost of the wedding, she sold a second-hand car her husband had bought for her. DM members helped decorate the area around the obelisk in Playas de Tijuana, which is itself a U.S.-Mexico boundary monument. At the end of the wedding, a radio journalist approached her and asked why they had celebrated the wedding at that particular location. Without thinking twice, she said, “The wall separates families but never the sentiment”. After narrating her wedding story, Sánchez took a minute and said:

We are the perfect poster family despite deportation. We are a mixed-race couple; we profess different religions; we have been separated for nine years; and yet we are still together. Our children are good kids with excellent grades (Interview on June 24, 2020).

Sánchez indicated that she, her family, and deported mothers deserved to be reunited with their families in the U.S. and “to be back home”, as Varona says.

When viewing pictures on Sánchez’s Facebook account, at first glance, one might perceive it as a regular wedding. She wore a traditional white wedding gown, and her husband wore his Marine uniform. Their children wore matching white shirts and black slacks. Nevertheless, the photos show the wall as the backdrop of their lives. Yet, despite their separation, they are united. Sánchez’s mother was on the other side of the wall but was able to touch Sánchez’s pinkie finger through the mesh covering the U.S. side of the wall and gave her blessing to Sánchez. Additionally, there are photos of the guests, showing the bride and groom surrounded by friends and family. One photo includes two details that highlight the symbolism: Varona, the godmother and founder of DM, was wearing the organisation’s fuchsia t-shirt, and everyone in the photo, on both sides of the wall, were carrying signs with the message #YESTOFRIENDSHIP. This example is evidence that the most personal aspect of these people’s lives is also political.

In the end, the wedding, as an act of public disclosure, highlights several aspects of DM’s resistance to being othered by the U.S. immigration system and by society. DM members show that they are united despite the border wall that divides their families and negatively shapes their lives after deportation. The wedding, as a rite of passage, is as important to them as it is to anyone who wants to have a family. In other words, this act shows the human side of these women. Put together, these elements show how women resist the invisibility of being deported and make evident the costs of deportation to their families.

5.3 Engaging with News Media

How do DM’s constructive resistance practices occupy space in the media? We claim that DM uses distinct media formats—interviews, short documentaries, reports, and so on—to shed light on their activism and struggle to elucidate the injustice of family separation due to deportation. By so doing, DM members seek the viewer’s empathy with the mothers’ and their children’s pain of separation. Further, the visual aesthetic in many of these works bring viewers into the emotional intimacy of these women’s lives. Rather than rendering these mothers as victims who suffer alone, all these written and visual works elucidate the agency of the DM members who transform their pain into a source of activism to embrace their intersectional identity as both mothers and deportees.

The growing interest in the intersection of deportation and families at the Mexico-U.S. border has attracted the attention of both national and international media. This has allowed DM to shift its public disclosure from a physical public space to a virtual space. As previously mentioned, DM has centred its mobilisation on denouncing the family separation resulting from the U.S. deportation regime. Specifically, DM has developed a concrete and persuasive theme for its struggle: family reunification and legal re-entrance into the U.S. for those who qualify. DM’s work has attracted media attention from countries as far as China, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and many journalists have gone to Tijuana to interview them. While DM has little control of the narrative that the news media outlets use, it does exert some autonomy in the way it posts material on social media. To maintain momentum, DM utilises the material produced about the group to spread its message beyond the Tijuana-San Diego area. In doing so, these media formats further amplify their being mothers and deportees, or their intersectional identity.

Worth noting is that 40% of the titles in the 199-news-report database refer to both identities: mothers and deportees. To date, 64 YouTube releases have been created by diverse users including international news outlets. DM has posted these reports on its social media platforms. Four works in particular have been reposted frequently and were referenced in our interviews and conversations with DM members.Footnote 2 The four YouTube reports were released between 2016 and 2019, and the media outlets are the University of Southern California, Aljazeera News, The Pear, and Now This (part of the Group Nine Media conglomerate).

The visual reports follow similar sequence, and we have identified three moments. They all start with the face and words of one mother. Second, the camera shadows the women’s lives in intimate spaces, whether it is their kitchens or their bedrooms when they are communicating with their children over a video platform. The viewers witness the pain that separation from their children has inflicted on these mothers. Third, the viewers see the deported mothers’ activism in strategic locations in Tijuana, such as the San Ysidro Port of Entry or in Playas de Tijuana, where the wall is located. Not only does this sequence reveal how heart-wrenching the mothers’ plight is, but the reports, like those presented here, shed light on DM members’ intersectional identity as mothers and deportees. We analyse each moment as follows.

First moment. This section presents the setting and the individuals, zooming out to provide the context.

The first image is Tijuana accompanied by acoustic guitars strumming a Mexican rhythm. For the first 22 seconds of the documentary, we see the symbols of the border: a close-up of the wall and the barbed wire that tops it. The camera zooms out to show how the wall blends into the landscape of the San Diego-Tijuana border. We briefly see Sánchez waiting in Tijuana and her husband driving from San Diego to Tijuana. Sánchez then relates her family separation, while images show her following her daily routine (The Pear 2016).

Second moment. The reports provide viewers with access to the intimacy of the mothers’ emotional lives by showing close-ups of the mothers’ eyes, family photos, and how their children experience the separation. The following excerpt illustrates this point:

In the background, one can see Sánchez’s family portrait with her husband and three children. Her voice cracks with emotion while she describes how difficult it has been for her and her children to be separated due to her deportation. While she narrates different events of her ten years of waiting in Tijuana, she shares family pictures, putting names and faces to her experience. The report introduces Alex, Sánchez’s 14-year-old son at the time, talking about how difficult it was for him to take care of his younger siblings while she was in Tijuana. Sánchez highlights how her children are good kids and outstanding students. She talks about her motivation to do the work she does at DM. Her motivation is to return to the U.S. with her family (USC 2016).

The camera zooms in. Varona is sitting on her bed facing a small table where her computer and cell phone are. It is dark and we can only see her face illuminated by the screen of her laptop. She is calling her children on Skype using her cell phone, which sits on her laptop. Her children answer, and we learn that two of her children now have children of their own. The call is short, and she wishes them good night. During the call Varona is smiling and blowing kisses to her children and grandchildren. It is after she hangs up that we see and feel her pain. She wipes her teary eyes and covers her face with her hands (Aljazeera 2016).

Third moment. While the above excerpts of the mothers’ lives show the sorrow of the injustice of living apart from their children, the reports end with these mothers as DM members. Here, we see the mothers wearing their vibrant pink t-shirts bearing the organisation’s phrase: Have you seen my kids? Here, we realise that they have been wearing this all along, as if their activism promoting family reunification in the U.S. is part and parcel of their being mothers. In other words, their identities as deportees and mothers are interlocked and, therefore, impossible to separate. The following fragment shows their activism as mothers and deportees:

Wearing the vibrant pink DM t-shirt, each mother poignantly recounted [her] deportation and how difficult the separation from [her] children has been. There are several close-ups into their eyes, as though they want … to make us feel their pain. Each woman shows photos to introduce [her] children’s histories. Varona and Monserrat were victims of domestic violence, while Sánchez, although married to a U.S. veteran citizen, was denied return to the U.S. when she and her family went to the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico to fix her migration status. From the painful deportation experience of these three mothers, the video narrative shifts by introducing how DM was created. Varona describes how DM provides a space for deported mothers arriving in Tijuana where they can share their stories and find support. The video ends by highlighting [not only] how DM has become an organisation where these three women found support and transformed their own lives, but also how this organisation today can provide legal and emotional support to other migrant women who have been deported to Mexic[o] and feel disoriented due to family separation (Now This 2018).

Finally, DM has strategically utilised media attention and coverage of family separation caused by deportation to efficiently and widely disseminate the organisation’s aim and members’ struggle to legally reunite with their loved ones in the U.S. The usefulness of media outlets in amplifying the cultural resonance of discourse in a society is crystal clear to Varona. In a Facebook post from January 28, 2020, concerning an interview about a Mexican migrant who was deported after more than 30 years of living in the U.S. despite being the mother of a U.S. Army officer, Varona commented, “You reporters help us raise awareness about the dire consequences of family separations”. We add that the media attention and the reports about DM also validate their intersectional identities as mothers and deportees. This validation, in turn, humanizes them as casualties of the dramatic repercussions of deportation for families and the need to end this brutal policy.

The repertoire of “maternal acts of public disclosure” presented above demonstrates DM engaging in a form of constructive resistance that makes members visible, humanizes mothers’ reality as a result of deportation, and finds ways to reconstruct social relations with family members, with other organisations in Tijuana, and with U.S. civil society.

6 Conclusions

Throughout this research, we examined the work of DM. For this chapter, we analysed three types of maternal acts of public disclosure (Orozco Mendoza, 2019) to illustrate how these women engage in a form of constructive resistance. Building on Sørensen and Wiksell’s (2020) work, we define, in this study, the form of constructive resistance displayed by DM as one that does not seek to change or transform the world; rather, it is based on small concrete and symbolic acts that aim to achieve two goals: to fight against being stripped of their humanity and dignity as they were violently expelled from the U.S. and to avoid the invisibility and otherization of their subjectivity once they became deported mothers.

In analysing DM’s maternal acts of public disclosure at different stages of this organisation, we observe progress in the form and content of its messages, which allows members to articulate more concise and persuasive discursive strategies against family separation. By looking at the interplay between deportation, maternal activism, and constructive resistance, this study contributes to these literatures in the following ways.

First, DM, as a civil organisation, provided a space and place where these women began a process of individual recognition of their status as deported mothers, which later allowed them to collectively realize that many other women have gone through the same experience. In this context, the collective awareness of their intersectional identity as deportees and mothers allowed these women to create a different set of social relations in which solidarity and dignity prevail over the dehumanization, stigmatization, and invisibility of their subjectivities. Thus, members of DM reclaim their humanity and fight against becoming mere numbers and losing themselves in the anonymity of the U.S. deportation machine (Goodman, 2020), which at its core displays an anti-immigrant discourse and legal structure excluding certain racialized groups of people. Thus, the repertoire of maternal acts of public disclosure displayed by DM shows us the praxis of a form of constructive resistance through which these women resist the U.S. migration apparatus that violently expelled them and separated them from their families.

Second, one of the contributions of the literature on constructive resistance is that there is no need for people to engage in big mobilizations to inspire others to engage in small acts that create a more just world. In the case of DM, although this applies, what one can learn from its type of constructive resistance is that members’ maternal acts would not be possible if not for the creation of alliances to support their cause. As a border city with dozens of civil society organisations focusing on supporting migrants, deportees, and asylum seekers, Tijuana is an ideal place to build alliances not only locally but also internationally. DM has been able to build alliances with local groups that fight for similar causes and that operate in Tijuana. These alliances have become crucial to displaying maternal acts such as vigils at strategic points including the Port of Entry in San Ysidro. Working with other organisations and displaying their maternal acts at these locations have helped these women catch the attention of local, national, and international news agencies. DM utilises such attention as a sounding board for its cause. As Yolanda Varona says, “The media are the best sounding board for our cause to cross [national] borders”.

Finally, and related to the theme of this volume, what could DM teach us about the intersection between everyday experiences, border politics, and exclusions? Our work contributes to this discussion in two ways. First, the maternal acts displayed by DM allow us to see the consequences and impacts that the exclusionary border policies regarding the U.S. and Mexico border have on the bodies of those marked as “other”. More importantly, DM shows us the capacity to resist of a group of deported women and their capacity to construct a different set of social relations for themselves and their families. Second, the maternal acts of public disclosure, in particular, show us that DM not only resists the U.S. migration policy but also, by displaying such maternal acts in Mexico, resists members’ exclusion due to their gender, class, and stigmatization as deportees in their own country of origin.