Hamilakis/New Nomadic, 5. The Materiality of the State of Exception: Components of the Experience of Deportation from the United States

This article draws on the narratives of Mexicans deported from the USA. Between 2012 and 2014, I collected 27 narratives of former deportees in their hometown, a Mexican pueblo here given the pseudonym San Ángel (the names of interviewees have also been changed). San Ángel is in Oaxaca, an impoverished and peripheral region of Lower Mixteca, which has been exporting workforce to the USA over the last six decades. However, due to the increasingly strict immigration and border controls introduced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 economic crisis, a number of migrants have since returned to their hometown as deportees. During my four-month ethnographic fieldwork in San Ángel I collected the life stories of 23 male and 4 female former depor-tees, and analyzed their removal narratives. All of the individuals quoted in the article were unauthorized immigrants in the USA and had crossed the US border without inspection.The material components of the experience of deportation serve to detect the bodies of “unauthorized aliens”.