Immigrant Identity Is "Twin Skin" to Linguistic Identity: Tracing the Afterlife of Deportation in Mexico City

In this essay, we think about the articulation of language, migration, and deportation to explore the ways in which deportees and returnees embody or challenge dominant models of knowing, being, and belonging locally and across borders. What affective role does language play in the (re)enactment or re-creation of belonging in a place from which deportees and returnees emigrated as children or teenagers? To answer this question, we draw on two years of research in Mexico City, ethnographic methodologies, and discourse and literary analysis. Our analytic sites are call centers, a cultural space, and the poem "Exile on the Border," by Eduardo Aguilar, El Deportee. We argue that repatriated people do not return "home" but, rather, experience a long process of dislocation in which, through language (English, Spanglish, and Spanish) and other bicultural practices, deportees and returnees reconstitute a feeling of belonging to an immigrant community in Mexico City, often developing affective connections based on the embodied experience of deportation and return. Constituted as displaced subjects in two countries with specific histories of racialization, deportees and returnees challenge the triad of culture, language, territory that marks their expulsion and exclusion in Mexico and the US.