Returned follows transnational Mexicans as they experience the alienation and unpredictability of deportation, tracing the particular ways that U.S. immigration policies and state removals affect families. Deportation—an emergent global order of social injustice—reaches far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens, also return after deportation or migrate for the first time. The book includes accounts of displacement, struggle, suffering, and profound loss but also of resilience, flexibility, and imaginings of what may come. Returned tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath.
4.5 stars. Only critique I have is this: this book discusses in-depth the challenges of being undocumented in the United States. However, I would have liked a similarly thorough discussion of how children that are U.S. citizens and follow deported parents to Mexico face similar/different challenges to navigating their undocumented existences in Mexico.