Researcher ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4465-4354

Graduation Year

2025

Date of Submission

4-2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Chicanx/Latinx Studies

Reader 1

Professor Arely Zimmerman

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2025 Luis A Mendoza

Abstract

This thesis examines how undocumented women, particularly Latinas, experience "transnational legal violence" within the U.S. immigration system. Transnational legal violence extends the framework of legal violence by identifying how immigration policies weaponize absence and distance across national boundaries, forcing women to choose between physical safety and legal recognition. The thesis is guided by a central question: What immigration system are migrant women, specifically Latinas, responding to?

The analysis rooted in the intersections of gender and citizenship reveals how immigration law remains rooted in coverture traditions that historically rendered immigrant women dependent on male U.S. citizens. For these women, deportation presents unique extensions of legal violence: forced return to a country with inadequate gender-based protection, (re)traumatization by the same immigration system offering sanctuary, and continued possibilities for the abuser to continue their violence through transnational social networks.

The transnational legal violence experienced by migrant women highlights how they exist in a state of perpetual liminality—neither fully protected by the law of their origin country nor fully recognized by the law of their desired destination. Their bodies become sites where colonial and patriarchal control merge, creating a cycle of silence, negligence, and gender-based violence. This thesis argues that immigration reform demands the recognition of how the abuser of the Latina body becomes the U.S. nation's power to define, categorize, and exclude the woman's narrative and her need to enter the state for sanctuary.

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