May 6, 2025
Letters and Science Magazine
By Alex Russell

Rocío’s story of moving back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico isn’t like any you’ve heard before. It began when her daughter, 15 at the time, ran away with a man who took her from Mexico City to the U.S.

Rocío contacted the Mexican consulate and whoever else she could think of to help find her daughter. Eventually, she decided she had to go north herself. In the years that followed, Rocío’s life would be split between her home in Mexico City and as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S., where her daughter became a permanent resident and started a family of her own.

Rocío always preferred life in Mexico, and in her older age, she no longer feels able to migrate to the United States. She is one of many thousands of people who have returned to Mexico in the last two decades after years living in the U.S. She is also among the 34 women and men sociologist Erin Hamilton and her co-authors interviewed for their book, The Returned: Former U.S. Migrants’ Lives in Mexico City (Russell Sage, 2025).

“You might expect that returning to Mexico would be easy because you speak the language and have citizenship, and in many ways that’s true,” said Hamilton, a professor of sociology in the College of Letters and Science and an affiliate of the UC Davis Global Migration Center. “In other ways, there’s a feeling of loss that’s not widely recognized.”

Disoriented return to Mexico

The women and men whose stories make up The Returned left Mexico in the prime of their lives. They lived for years in the U.S. as non-citizens. Most, like Rocío, were undocumented. Some formed families. For many, the return to Mexico came through either deportation or a different kind of crisis. Once back in Mexico, they all lacked the legal right to re-enter the U.S.

When they began their new lives in Mexico City, the 5th most populous city in the world, they were like strangers in a country that should feel like home. Some were starting from scratch with no contacts to help find a job. Others grew up in the U.S. and were teased for not speaking Spanish well or with an English accent.

A word the authors use to describe this kind of disorientation is “norteado,” a Spanish word with multiple references. On the one hand, it refers to having “gone north,” meaning to the U.S. The word also means disoriented or having lost your way.

“It’s a like an experience of grief,” said Hamilton. “The feeling of loss that comes from knowing that returning to the United States is closed to them. For people who left family behind this was extremely painful. But for everyone there was a profound sense of loss of their immigrant identities and experiences as they tried to reintegrate in Mexico City.”

Hiding life in the U.S.

Some people that Hamilton and her colleagues spoke to had networks of family in rural towns where either they or their parents grew up. But that wasn’t true for everyone. They spoke with one person who had been an employee of the Mexico City government and traveled to the U.S. on a tourist visa to visit his parents and decided to stay after his mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Another person worked for the Mexican military until that job ended and he had the chance to go north for work.

“A lot of people migrated under unplanned circumstances, such as when an opportunity presented itself and they took it and went and made the best of it,” said Hamilton.

Whatever their origin, when back in Mexico City, many felt the need to hide the fact that they had been north . Many locals see a return from the U.S. as a failure, or, worse, as a sign of criminality. Some returned migrants chose to hide work experience in the U.S. to avoid discrimination even though that work experience might qualify them for a better job.

There was also a sense of disconnection, even from friends they had known since childhood. It was hard to communicate what they had gone through as immigrants in the U.S.

On many sides, loss

The Returned is full of stories that illustrate just how much is lost, both by the people who are forced to return to Mexico and the society they leave behind. Even for people who were happy to return to Mexico, there was still a sense of loss. This was how it was for Rocío. The son she brought north when he was young ended up attending school and working as a teenager in the U.S. before he and Rocío left.

She preferred being in Mexico, but when she left the U.S. she could no longer go to visit her daughter and grandchildren. Her family could come to visit her, but she lost the freedom to go north. The loss of this freedom — even if she did not want to return to the United States — was still a loss.

On the other side of the border, the book argues that United States has also lost. “The U.S. is losing people who are unusually courageous, risk-taking, ambitious, hard-working, and bright. We’re also subjecting them to significant harm by reducing their mobility,” said Hamilton. “It’s a real loss for us as a society.”