Abstract

Deportation does not end with the school-to-prison pipeline American system, but rather shifts it to the Mexican bureaucracy. This article argues that the administrative procedures for accessing higher education function as a punitive technology that fragments and delegitimizes educational trajectories constructed outside the national documentary framework. Drawing on a critical ethnography of deported men in western Mexico, the article demonstrates how the school registration office functions as an internal border that perpetuates the logic of punishment by demanding unattainable documents and invalidating prior studies. The article proposes understanding bureaucracy as a central mechanism of the transnational punitive regime in debates on migration, punishment, and citizenship.

Keywords: punitive bureaucracy, borders, deported homies, biographical mutilation, school-to-prison pipeline

Bureaucracy as a Border: Higher Education, Deportation, and the Liminal Citizenship of Homies in Mexico

Deportation does not end the U.S. school-to-prison pipeline; rather, it shifts the pipeline to the Mexican bureaucracy. This article argues that the paperwork associated with higher education operates as a punitive technology that fragments and invalidates educational trajectories built outside the framework of national documentation. Based on critical ethnographic research with deported men in western Mexico, it shows how university admissions offices function as internal borders that extend the logic of punishment by requiring unattainable documents and refusing to recognize prior studies. The article proposes understanding bureaucracy as a central mechanism of a transnational punitive regime within debates on migration, punishment, and citizenship.

Keywords: Biographical disruption, punitive bureaucracy, deported friends, school-to-prison pipeline, borders.

In contemporary Mexico, forced return does not constitute a reunion with citizenship, but rather a mechanism for bordering an internal mechanism operating at its core. The border no longer appears primarily as a territorial wall, but rather as an administrative technology of classification that determines which trajectories are legible and which are reduced to “defective files” (DeChaine, 2012). When facing the institutional counter, the deportee does not appear as a full citizen, but rather as a documentary problem that the state manages without altering the order that produces it.

This form of violence is systemic. It reflects the logic of a bulimic society (Young, 2007): individuals absorbed by the United States as a labor force and then expelled—vomit—through the criminal justice system. The Mexican state does not interrupt this cycle; it prolongs it. By invalidating the educational and life trajectories built “on the other side,” institutions—in addition to denying a legal proceeding—trigger a sustained process of biographical dispossession that reorganizes the individual’s past according to new criteria of value and belonging.

The central thesis of this paper is that forced return results in a biographical mutilation understood as an ongoing administrative process, not as a one-time event. This is not a failure or a bureaucratic dysfunction, but rather a systematic operation through which unattainable apostilles, arbitrary revalidations, and the annulment of academic credits disrupt the temporal continuity of the returnee’s life. This bureaucracy is not limited to regulating institutional access; rather, it creates a persistent immigration regime in which the individual is legally Mexican but, in practice, a foreigner. This mutilation does not erase the past; it renders it unusable.

This article contributes to the field of deportation studies by showing that higher education—conceived as a mechanism for integration—functions, in the context of forced return, as a central infrastructure for the extension of the transnational punitive regime, in which the validation of knowledge becomes a mechanism of selective exclusion. This rupture is deeply political. Unlike the movement Dreamer, who secured his inclusion through merit, respectability, and moral innocence, the homies Returnees bear the stigma of the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline (Brotherton and Barrios, 2011). They do not seek redemption or full recognition from a state that treats them as surplus. Instead, they employ situated and unequal forms of invisibility, bureaucratic navigation, and mutual support—not as strategies for emancipation, but as pragmatic responses to a hostile institutional environment. They do not claim a place at the center; they learn to inhabit the margins that have been imposed upon them, developing survival strategies under conditions of persistent biographical mutilation.

The school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline

Critical literature has accurately mapped out the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline as a transnational circuit of control (Brotherton and Barrios, 2011; Golash-Boza, 2016). This framework allows us to understand deportation not as an isolated event, but as the culmination of a process of criminalization that begins in the classroom and ends in exile; however, there is an analytical asymmetry in the sociology of migration. While academia has prioritized the “politics of respectability” of the movement Dreamer (Nicholls, 2013) has overshadowed those who do not fit the ideal of the “model student.” This fixation on academic merit has obscured the deeper dimension of forced return: the fact that criminal stigma is used as a justification for administrative exclusion in the country of origin. In this theoretical void, biographical mutilation ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a necessary analytical tool for naming what the focus on “merit” has chosen to ignore.

In the face of this erasure, the literature on transnational resistance must expand. While “organic leadership” from prisons to universities has been explored (Zepeda and Rising, 2023), there is a lack of analysis connecting that prison-based agency to the struggle for space within Mexican universities. My work addresses this gap: I do not seek to document a successful “re-entry,” but rather to analyze how the homies They draw on their capacity for survival to subvert the identity of the “ex-convict.” By demanding access to higher education, these individuals challenge bureaucratic barriers and, at the same time, challenge the hierarchy of humanity imposed by previous academic literature.

Theoretical Framework: Biographical Mutilation

The border is no longer a fixed line on the map; it has become a set of practices of bordering that operate within the state and throughout the lives of individuals. As critical studies of borders have pointed out, the bordering It is no longer limited to territorial control but is deployed through administrative mechanisms that classify, hierarchize, and produce subjects who are legible and illegible to the nation (DeChaine, 2012; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy, 2019). In the case of the homies For deportees, forced return does not imply full reintegration into citizenship, but rather inclusion in a system in which belonging exists without an institutionally recognized life story.

This article argues that the central effect of forced return is a biographical mutilation produced by the interplay between the U.S. criminal justice system and the Mexican bureaucracy. Deportation does not interrupt punishment; it redistributes it. In the United States, the criminal justice system reduces educational, occupational, and community trajectories to a manageable criminal identity (Brotherton and Barrios, 2011). In Mexico, far from being reversed, this reduction is exacerbated by bureaucratic practices that invalidate prior education, disregard certifications, and demand documents that the deportation regime itself makes unattainable.

Biographical mutilation is not a symbolic form of exclusion, but rather a temporal technology of bordering. Following Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2013), the bordering It does not simply expel; it produces gradations of inclusion. In this case, the border manifests as a suspension of biographical time: the subject’s past does not disappear, but it loses its institutional efficacy. Entire segments of life fall outside state time, blocking access to present and future rights. The result is a citizenship that is formally recognized but operationally restricted.

This form of violence is embodied on a daily basis at the counter. What Michel Herzfeld (2020) calls “bureaucratic indifference” should not be understood as administrative dysfunction, but rather as a routine exercise of sovereignty that penalizes transnational trajectories. Through a humanitarian discourse of welcome and reintegration, the state imposes an indefinite wait that manages—without redress—the shattered life story.

In the face of this regime of bordering temporary, the homies They do not seek full integration or moral recognition. As individuals shaped by the intersection of criminalization, deportation, and institutional exclusion, they develop strategies of navigation, invisibility, and mutual support that allow them to inhabit a border that is no longer located in territory, but in the very continuity of social life. The struggle for access to higher education is not merely a demand for social mobility; it is also an attempt to rearticulate time, to piece together a fragmented life story, and to challenge the state’s monopoly over which lives are allowed to move forward.

Methodology: Trench Epistemology

My status as a returnee is not an autobiographical note appended to the analysis, since it is the methodological starting point of this research. Following Dorothy Smith (2005), the study is situated in the standpoint of those who experience governance relationships on a daily basis, understanding knowledge not as a neutral abstraction but as something produced from specific social positions. It is from this perspective—marked by incarceration, deportation, and return—that this institutional ethnography is constructed.

This experience does not grant privileged access to an essential “truth,” but it does direct our attention toward ordinary practices that often go unnoticed in more detached approaches. Where institutional discourses describe administrative friction or bureaucratic misalignment, my analysis focuses on how these interactions produce interruptions, suspensions, and disavowals of life trajectories that materialize in documents, stamps, and service counters. Academic training does not function here as an instrument of detachment, but rather as a tool for tracing how state texts, procedures, and formats orchestrate specific forms of exclusion in everyday life (Smith and Griffith, 2022).

The fieldwork was conducted in accordance with a tradition in critical criminology that prioritizes the situated analysis of punitive institutions and their extensions beyond the formal criminal justice system. Rather than assuming the classic role of the participant observer, the research involved navigating, alongside other participants, the very same bureaucratic, workplace, and administrative channels that structure forced return. From government offices to precarious workplaces, the bordering It was not analyzed as an abstract policy, but rather was conceived as a bodily experience situated in time.

In this process, the concept of “hypercriminalization” proposed by Víctor M. Rios (2011) takes on a transnational dimension. The stigmas produced in neighborhoods, schools, and prisons in the United States do not disappear with deportation; they are reconfigured in Mexico through administrative mechanisms that re-inscribe suspicion and otherness. The appearance, language, and criminal records of returnees become markers that determine their eligibility for institutional services.

The interactions that took place in the field were conceived as spaces for extended dialogue and shared analysis. In line with the work of David Brotherton and Luis Barrios (2011), knowledge was produced relationally, through conversations aimed at understanding how people confront, negotiate, and resist mechanisms of exclusion. Rather than documenting narratives of suffering, the analysis focuses on concrete practices through which participants navigate bureaucracy and challenge the effects of biographical mutilation.

Field notes document what Herzfeld (2020) calls “bureaucratic intimacy”: seemingly minor moments—a refusal, a wait, a rejected document—in which state power becomes tangible. Following Rios (2011), these practices are not interpreted as mere adaptation, but as assertions of dignity in the face of regimes that seek to disrupt the continuity of social life. In this sense, the demand for access to higher education does not appear as a request for assistance, since it is a strategy for rearticulating a fragmented life story and challenging the boundaries imposed by bureaucracy.

The Bureaucratic Machine: Internal Logic and Implementation

The educational profile of the homies cannot be understood outside the logic of the pipeline. Most of the participants in this study arrived in the United States before the age of five; they grew up living in the Espanglish the neighborhood as their native language, and the streets and prison cells as their classrooms. Their educational paths are not linear: although most began middle school in their communities, the need to survive, the violence of street life, and the criminalization that comes from being labeled as gang members made completing high school unfeasible. Thus, a diploma from high school or its equivalent, the ged (General Educational Development), acquired behind bars, becomes their primary—and often only—academic capital. Many of them come from towns in the surrounding areas of Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas, and after being deported, they end up in Guadalajara and Mexico City in search of work and documentation.

It is important to highlight some recent exceptions that illustrate changes in prison policies: Tomás was able to pursue higher education while in prison and earned three associate degrees in Illinois through a prison program; John pursued some higher education in Folsom. In both cases, these achievements reflect changes that have taken place over the past fifteen years, when prisons began offering higher education as a strategy to reduce recidivism. Luis, on the other hand, was unable to study because he was incarcerated in California in the early 1990s, amid a context of constant lockdowns and riots that made formal education impossible. These are not, therefore, “migrant students” in the traditional sense; they are individuals whose only formal connection to the U.S. institutional system was established within the prison-industrial complex, which demonstrates how education—when it exists—is subordinated to the punitive logic of the state.

Upon his return, this diploma earned in prison—a symbol of personal resilience—hits a wall of Mexican bureaucracy. Here, the pipeline It spreads through ritualized indifference (Herzfeld, 2020). For those who tried to enter college a decade ago, the revalidation process became a labyrinth of opacity and arbitrariness.

Exclusion does not always manifest itself as a flat-out refusal, but rather as a systematic wear-down: being shuffled from office to office, facing the indifference of low-level officials who act as gatekeepers, and, on the other hand, the systematic silence in response to phone calls and emails. Although recent reforms have streamlined the process for some, the underlying structure remains: the returnee is legally “eligible,” but politically invisible. The fact that the authority to decide on a person’s life rests in the hands of an untrained bureaucrat reveals that, for the Mexican government, the reintegration of the “deported criminal” is not a legal obligation, but rather an administrative afterthought with no priority.

Alberto recalled his experience: “Well, I decided to go back to school in 2015, and since I had a ged, I was unable to have it recognized as a high school diploma. At that time, the Mexican government did not recognize the ged as a “real” high school […] so I had to attend an open school, Azteca, for a year and a half.

Alberto’s case shows how access to higher education depended as much on written law as on the historical moment, available social capital, and the willingness—or ability—to pay intermediaries. The bureaucracy imposed its own logic, distinct from that of the U.S. system: what in U.S. it was a valid diploma (ged), it had no legal standing in Mexico. However, starting in 2015, with the amendment to Agreement 286, the revalidation process was simplified: it was no longer necessary to have documents apostilled or translated by certified translators. This change was the result of pressure from organizations representing deported individuals in Mexico City. Previously, many were unable to have their documents apostilled because they could not afford translations, notary fees, or return trips to usa uu. This legal victory demonstrated that the resistance of stigmatized individuals can create cracks in seemingly monolithic structures.

Others, like Jesús, were less fortunate. In 2005, his ged Nor was it recognized as a high school diploma, and he was only able to have his middle school diploma validated. His diploma, which was valid in the United States, had no value in Mexico. At the offices of the Ministry of Public Education (Sep) there was no one to listen to or understand their situation. In the words of Loïc Wacquant (2009), what they experienced was “bureaucratic indifference,” which forces them to accept the state’s terms or resign themselves to exclusion.

Before the reforms, others homies They reported that they had hired lawyers and paid bites or accepted the purchase of fake certificates not as exceptional acts, but as informal means of access within a bureaucratic system that systematically blocked paths of return. As they themselves put it, “greasing the wheels” of the administrative machine was not corruption in the strict sense, but rather a strategy to reactivate a biographical period that the state had left in limbo. The payment did not buy a privilege; it bought the possibility that a past already lived might be recounted once more.

These levers, however, they were not distributed equitably. Their use depended on specific forms of social capital to which few homies have access to after deportation. Several participants noted that even approaching potential intermediaries was difficult: the way they dressed, spoke, or moved aroused suspicion and fear, reinforcing their isolation. Thus, the bordering It operated not only through formal channels but also through unequal access to informal networks that allowed people to circumvent them. In this context, revalidation entailed multiple costs: economic, emotional, and temporal. Rather than resolving a bureaucratic formality, these processes deepened biographical mutilation by forcing individuals to negotiate their history through precarious, risky, and morally ambivalent practices. Informality, far from correcting bureaucratic exclusion, became yet another mechanism through which the state delegated and decentralized the work of border control.

This collective pressure led to broader changes: amendments to Agreement 286 in 2017 and reforms to the General Education Law, which sought to simplify and facilitate the integration of individuals who had studied abroad (Garrido de la Calleja and Anderson, 2018). Starting in 2018, the ged and certificates from high school They could be validated as long as the plan’s 40% code matched a Mexican one, eliminating the requirement to repeat high school. Even so, the experiences of Alberto and Jesús show that implementation was uneven, depending on the discretion of local officials. Bureaucracy, far from being merely an administrative mechanism, becomes here a cultural and social barrier—a bordering internal–.

As time went on, the ged It came to be recognized by the Mexican government as equivalent to high school. Henry explained that when he first tried to have it validated in 2010, his application was rejected. In 2022, however, the process was completed in less than a month, without requiring an apostille or an official translation, and without any objections regarding inconsistencies in his name—such as the absence of his mother’s maiden name on his U.S. documents—or the lack of proof of prior schooling. When asked for proof of middle school completion, Henry replied that he had never attended that level, and the validation proceeded without major obstacles. This outcome cannot be explained solely by a regulatory change. On his second attempt, Henry did not go alone: the process took place in the presence of state officials in charge of the credential recognition program in Jalisco. In this context, the law did not function as a stable framework, but rather as a resource activated selectively depending on who accompanied the application.

John’s experience in Mexico City reveals the flip side of this same mechanism. With no intermediaries and no access to management, his case was handled by lower-level staff—secretaries and interns—with little knowledge of current legislation. Unlike Henry, John was required to submit a middle school diploma as an essential prerequisite for validating his high school diploma, even though this requirement violated the regulations. In his case, his educational history was not rearticulated; it was blocked.

This contrast does not reveal a bureaucratic dysfunction or an abstract moral logic, but rather a concrete mechanism for the differential management of life stories. Bureaucracy does not operate as a system that rewards obedience, but as a mechanism that measures the subject’s ability to endure the suspension of their own story. Errors, contradictions, and arbitrary demands do not delegitimize the procedure; they function as tests of resilience that filter out those who can keep their lives on hold long enough for the process to move forward.

Under this system, institutional access does not depend on correctly complying with a rule, but rather on surviving the biographical attrition imposed by the process. Those who have intermediaries, institutional capital, or proximity to administrative power manage to reactivate suspended trajectories. Those who do not are trapped in a suspended temporality in which the past does not disappear, but nor can it become the present. Biographical mutilation is not the result of explicit exclusion, since this is a system that manages time as a form of control and turns waiting into a criterion for belonging.

The legal change not only expanded rights—it opened up a new educational market. Following the reform, U.S. high schools began operating in Mexico to attract returning students whose educational paths had been blocked by local bureaucracy. Luis, for example, received a scholarship from the University of Illinois’ Education Justice Project and used it to enroll in Libereco, a high school registered in the United States and based in Querétaro. After a year and a half of online classes, he received a U.S. diploma and a certificate of equivalency issued by the Sep which officially recognized it in Mexico. Its history was not restored through public channels, but rather outsourced to the transnational education market.

The cases of Henry and Luis illustrate both the potential of the reform and its structural bias. Both had the support of professors, lawyers, and academic networks capable of leveraging the law in their favor. The regulations existed, but they only became effective when mediated by institutional capital. In contrast, others homies who went to the offices of the Sep After 2018, they faced false information, endless red tape, or utter indifference. Some were told—incorrectly—that the ged could not be renewed; others were told that the process would take six months or more, even though the law stipulated otherwise. This discrepancy is not accidental. The reform produced a stratified system of inclusion in which those with economic resources, social capital, or institutional trust can translate the law into biographical continuity, while those who lack them remain invisible to the system. For the latter, the absence of protest or litigation does not signify compliance, but rather exhaustion. The bureaucracy does not openly exclude them; it leaves them waiting until their life story becomes untenable.

Although some homies Those who recently had their high school diplomas revalidated in Jalisco had a positive experience, while others who tried to do so several years ago—or in other states—described the process as cumbersome, exclusionary, and arbitrary. Members of Otros Dreams en Acción (ode), activists for deportees and returnees (d&r), they pointed out that the amendments to Agreement 286 were just the beginning—not the end—of the struggle for the educational integration of d&r. The reason was simple: bureaucrats, time and again, refused to enforce the law (Anderson and Solís, 2014). Thus, the struggle for reaccreditation also became a struggle to compel the state itself to abide by its own rules.

For many homies, the process seemed designed to wear them down and exclude them. Mexican law promised access, but in practice, each step required more proof of “legitimacy.” First the diploma, then the academic transcripts. Many relied on relatives in the United States to obtain documents, but sometimes these relatives were overwhelmed or there was simply no one who could help. The officials who attended to the homies They were relying on outdated versions of the requirements or were not even aware of the legal resources available to them. Faced with frustration and the symbolic and practical impossibility of challenging bureaucratic authority, some resigned themselves to the situation; others simply dropped out of school in Mexico.

The uneven enforcement of the law was clearly evident in the testimonies. A director of the Sep In Jalisco, he put it bluntly: “It’s just my secretary, two interns, and me handling the entire returning migrant population in the western part of the country. It’s impossible, but we do what we can with what we have.” This admission laid bare the institutional precariousness underpinning the revalidation system: despite the creation of laws, programs, and policies aimed at facilitating the integration of returnees, their effective implementation fell to a team of just three people (Jacobo-Suárez, 2020).

The gap between regulatory promises and administrative reality is significant. The cases of Henry and Luis showed how the system could function under ideal conditions of support, information, and direct access to officials with decision-making authority. However, these cases were the exception rather than the rule. For most returnees, the lack of government investment, trained personnel, and operational structures turned the revalidation process into an arbitrary and exhausting one. In this regard, beyond legal reforms, the results—and their limited scope—speak for themselves: the integration of returnees fails not because of the absence of a legal framework, but because of the political decision to sustain it with clearly insufficient resources.

In 2023, John tried to have his high school diploma revalidated at a center for returnees established by deportees who had been educated in Mexico City. The first thing they asked him to do was fill out a one-hour survey. “He didn’t know why the survey was being administered or what it was for,” he told me. After completing the paperwork, he was given a baffling instruction: he had to make his U.S. academic credentials match his Mexican birth certificate—in other words, add his mother’s maiden name to all his documents. He spent months writing emails and calling educational institutions in the United States, trying to get them to change his diplomas, to no avail. When I called him to follow up, he replied, “I told them this in high school and in college, but they’re lost. No one has ever asked to change their name.” The requirement didn’t exist. The misinformation—coming from an organization that was supposed to support him—left him exhausted, anxious, and stuck.

This case illustrates two things. First, how even spaces created in the name of returnees can reproduce dynamics of symbolic exploitation by using the homies as a source of data (surveys, interviews) without actually following up. Second, how bureaucracy becomes a social barrier, generating inconsistent, costly, slow, and dehumanizing processes that rarely take into account the practical difficulties faced by deportees and marginalized individuals. Here, the theory points to a problem that is well known but insufficiently addressed.

As Kevin Johnson (2012: 37) points out, “access to rights has always been shaped by dynamics of privilege and oppression, and certain groups have historically been excluded from both the concept of citizenship and its practical benefits.” In the case of Mexico, the homies Returnees embody this paradox in a unique way: although they are full citizens in legal terms, they are viewed by institutions as outsiders. Their proficiency in another language, their cultural codes, and the very fact that they were deported fuel a persistent suspicion that places them on an internal, perpetually provisional border.

The bordering It does not function here as a one-time act of exclusion, but as a repeated practice that renders the past irrelevant. Every bureaucratic interaction renders one’s prior history irrelevant: the studies completed, the projects envisioned, the accumulated efforts. For most of the homies, earning a high school diploma was not a culmination, but merely a first attempt to resume a life that had been put on hold. With that diploma, they sought to continue the academic and career aspirations they had conceived in the United States, now from Mexico. However, their path to higher education was marked by institutional obstacles that acted as temporary barriers, forcing them to prove, time and again, that their story deserved to be told.

In this process, the bordering contributes directly to biographical mutilation by imposing a system in which the past must be constantly justified, reinterpreted, or dismissed. It is not just a matter of visible barriers, but rather an accumulation of minor denials that disrupt the continuity of social life. Faced with this repeated invalidation, the homies They develop pragmatic survival strategies to navigate a system that does not openly exclude them, but insists on making them start their story from scratch.

Hopes for Higher Education in a World Divided by Borders

If the aspirations for higher education of the homies Since they are formulated in a world crisscrossed by administrative borders that erase the past, it is necessary to return to an earlier moment: the point at which many of them began to reimagine their life stories for the first time. Before facing the counter, that process of reconstruction had already begun in spaces where control was more explicit, yet paradoxically more transparent.

Alberto recalled the final years of his prison sentence as a turning point. After a knife fight, he was transferred to one of the highest-security federal prisons in the United States. There, surrounded by leaders of international criminal organizations, he found himself—in his own words—at the pinnacle of his career as a gang member. The confinement was harsher, quieter, more definitive. It was in that space—in a locked cell, isolated from the noise of daily life—that something began to crack: “Right there in a cell, and I was afraid of all the ‘big shots’ who were there. I’d never been in a situation like that… I was 30, 34 years old. I thought: Is this really me? Is this the rest of my life?” The fear didn’t come solely from his surroundings, but from the feeling of having reached a turning point in his life. Faced with that confinement, Alberto began to read compulsively: grammar books, manuals, any text that would allow him to learn how to teach English. He wasn’t looking for certifications or institutional benefits. He was looking for a way to carve out time within that confinement.

Education did not appear as an abstract promise of rehabilitation, but as an immediate tactic to break the cycle of a trajectory that seemed to be closing in on itself. In a context designed to freeze the future, studying became a way to keep alive the possibility of another life. Following Brotherton (2015), who documents how criminalized individuals reconfigure identity and meaning under regimes of exclusion, education emerges in this case not as redemption, but as a crack through which Alberto began to challenge the meaning of his incarceration.

He wasn't the only one. Several homies, like Tomás, found in teaching English a way to escape the logic of prison life. After earning a certificate from the University of Illinois while serving his sentence, Tomás began to reimagine his identity. Over time, teaching and learning distanced him from his past, while also connecting him with professors and university staff who saw him as more than just a convict. Upon returning to Mexico, that academic capital opened doors for him to work as an English teacher. However, he soon ran into a new hurdle: academic credentials. Although he was competent and bilingual, the market—and particularly the online platforms hiring him from China—required bachelor’s degrees. “If I was making 25,000 pesos a month. At one point in China, I was making 80,000 a month.” That stark difference between pesos and dollars—between a local salary and a global one—was the incentive he needed to finish college.

Unlike Alberto, Tomás avoided the maze of the Mexican degree recognition process after completing his online bachelor’s degree in Illinois. His life, though physically rooted in Michoacán, unfolded in a virtual space that blurred national borders. To employers and educational platforms, he appeared to be a U.S. academic; in practice, he was a homie a deported worker living in a Mexican town. This disassociation allowed him to temporarily circumvent the local bureaucratic barrier, but not to eliminate it. Even with a college degree, the promise of upward mobility remained fragile. The shutdown of the Chinese online education market (Reuters, 2021) forced him to reinvent himself once again, this time through a boot camp programming course offered by Columbia University: “I just took a coding course through Columbia University… I also didn’t tell them I was in Mexico. I think it’s an unwritten rule that it’s for people in the us”. The accumulation of academic capital did not eliminate the boundary; it simply shifted the work of concealment onto the subject itself.

Here a central tension arises: the strategic invisibility. Tomás learned to navigate in and out of his “shell,” concealing his status as a deportee and ex-convict when necessary (Villegas, 2010). This dual position—the valued professional versus the criminalized migrant—has been documented in other contexts (Villegas, 2010; Bybee et al., 2021), but in the case of deported ex-convicts, this takes on a particularly high-risk character, given that criminal stigma intensifies suspicion regarding their membership and their “failed citizenship” (Golash-Boza, 2016). Tomás’s story shows that, even when the homies Even when they manage to accumulate formal credentials, access to higher education and professional mobility remains constrained by a web of bureaucratic and symbolic barriers. Their achievements do not lead to stable recognition; they are continually put to the test, requiring new demonstrations of legitimacy and new forms of concealment.

Among the academics who spent time in prison, Tomás stood out for his account of his incarceration. Rather than emphasizing the daily violence, he described prison as a personal injustice and a place to prepare for his release. This perspective is not unique: as Samuel R. Gross documents et al. (2022), people of color and those labeled as gang members are frequently convicted on flimsy evidence. In her account, prison appears less as a place of atonement than as a space for biographical reorientation, where studying and teaching served as tactics for reclaiming time under punitive conditions. José, on the other hand, viewed education as a strategic means of social mobility, though not always with enthusiasm. In prison, he earned his ged, but he never aspired to earn a college degree until he returned to Mexico. He remembered it clearly: “I was working in logistics over at Centro Sur, and everyone there was talking about college, you know? I didn’t know anything about that, so I decided to enroll. Yeah, I figured I might as well do something. I had the time and, I guess, the support, too. That’s what matters most: having that support.”.

José’s motivation did not stem from an academic calling, but rather from social influence: by surrounding himself with peers who were indeed benefiting from college, he began to see it as a viable path. Furthermore, his return was marked by structural privileges: free housing in Guadalajara—a half-finished house that spanned half a block, a luxury out of reach for most—and a monthly allowance of $500 sent by his family in the United States. That financial support allowed him to study without the pressure of holding down multiple jobs. By 2018, he was already in college studying international business, a field in which he was also working directly in logistics: “loads for tesla ”and Mercedes, Nissan, Ford, Walmart." His goal was clear: to become a manager.

Translational and Local Extractivism in Business and Academia

Luis’s case shows that biographical mutilation is not limited to administrative exclusion but also shapes the daily routines of survival following deportation. Upon arriving in prison in Mexico, he began organizing other deportees from California through physical routines he had learned in U.S. prisons. That discipline—which he interpreted as order and self-control—was viewed by the self-governing authorities as a threat. It was not the violence that caused concern, but rather the capacity of that “chola” praxis to foster loyalty and cohesion. Because he was attracting other inmates, Luis was punished, beaten, and sent to solitary confinement for a year. His testimony speaks volumes: “They rounded all of us up… If you’re going to kill someone, just kill me and get it over with.”.

The punishment did not seek to correct behavior, but rather to neutralize an alternative form of authority. In California, the body functions as a weapon; in the Mexican prison system, where armed power belongs to other actors, what is intolerable is cultural hegemony. Deportation does not erase that culture—it renders it dangerous. Here, biographical mutilation operates as a selective dispossession of embodied knowledge that, in another context, had enabled survival.

After his isolation, Luis was allowed to move about under one specific condition: he was not to organize, but to teach English. For twelve hours a day, he taught classes without pay, in exchange for food, relative protection, and symbolic recognition. Teaching functioned as a regulatory mechanism: it channeled time, created order, and kept agency within acceptable limits. Knowledge was neither a right nor a form of capital, but rather a tolerated mechanism of governance. Upon his release from prison in his forties, Luis did not seek to “rebuild his life,” but rather to sustain a ethos produced as a form of punishment, in which knowledge functioned as both a refuge and a constraint.

That ethos He remained outside prison using a minimal infrastructure: Facebook. A message connected him with a homie a deported person who worked at a call center (call center) in Guadalajara. It was not a job referral, but rather an indication of social acceptability. The call center appears as an ambivalent space: it offers a salary and protection from the cartel and extreme informality, but under constant surveillance and with high employee turnover. It operates as a regime of graduated sovereignty (Ong, 1999): it incorporates the returnee as a bilingual worker while maintaining his criminal past as a latent threat. The very background that makes them employable—the English they learned on the streets and in prison—justifies the constant possibility of exclusion through background checks.

Before he could pursue any educational goals, Luis had to become administratively eligible. Upon arriving in Guadalajara, he moved into a shelter to homies to organize his file: transcripts, certificates, stamps. His biography was once again put on hold, subordinated to the pace of paperwork. Higher education thus appeared not as a right, but as a conditional promise, dependent on the documentary translation of the past. Here, a structural continuity becomes apparent: the university does not suspend the punitive regime; it merely restructures it. There are no bars, but there are filters; there are no guards, but there are service windows. The institutional ecosystem that allows the returnee to survive also keeps him contained, available, and replaceable. The boundary does not disappear; it shifts toward ordinary institutional spaces.

This intermediate space is also a site of extraction. The support networks created by the homies They began to attract researchers who were less interested in accompanying processes than in capturing narratives. The boundary shifted once again: from the state archive to the ethnographic field, where the returnee’s experience runs the risk of becoming academic raw material. This logic was replicated within the university. In Jalisco, a community initiative to support returning migrants only secured funding when an academic with institutional affiliation acted as an intermediary with the university bureaucracy. Once the resources were obtained, control was recentralized. Authority did not stem from situated knowledge or community work, but rather from an authorized signature and access to the budget. When returnees attempted to regain agency, their history of incarceration—irrelevant as long as it remained functional—reemerged as a mark of risk. The past was reactivated to discipline the present (iteso, 2023; HomieLens, 2025).

Navigating the Maze of Higher Education

Alberto’s story shows another path. From washing trucks in Guadalajara to landing a job at a call center, he used his English and the experience he gained in prison to make his way in life. As he himself said: “I didn’t care if I had to sell oranges on the street, Chino; I was done with that lifestyle.” The call center not only provided him with an income; it allowed him to save up to study to become a teacher and later teach at a private school. Juggling two jobs—teaching by day, answering calls by night—created a precarious yet strategic model of financial accumulation. However, another bureaucratic hurdle emerged here: when he tried to certify his teaching credentials with the icelt from Cambridge, the changes made by the National Center for Higher Education Assessment (Ceneval)) They nullified his efforts. What had taken more than a year of study, investment, and discipline became, in his words, “a waste of time.” Once again, the bureaucratic machine prevailed over the knowledge gained on the streets and in prison, forcing him to start over.

Israel offers a third option for navigating the border. His admission to a rehabilitation center was initially a strategy to protect himself from police persecution. However, within that space, a new sphere of action emerged: surrounded by other deportees struggling with depression and addiction, Israel developed a form of embodied knowledge that allowed him to understand, accompany, and provide support through shared experiences of suffering. “I believe that destructive behavior is destructive behavior, and I believe that drug use is nothing more than a way to escape from what one is suffering.” This ability to speak from experience—from the violence he had endured and the accumulated rejection—quickly established him as a leader within the center. Here, the border once again served as a resource. Without formal credentials, Israel became a recognized counselor, traveled to Medellín for training, and turned what he himself called “neighborhood education” into a practical credential. The paradox is clear: the very same trajectories of illegality, incarceration, and deportation that had led to his institutional exclusion became the source of his professional legitimacy.

Israel's history is not a “reinvention,” but rather a way of epistemological smuggling. As knowledge about addiction, discipline, and survival circulated between Colombia, Mexico, and Israel, Israel not only earned credentials but also validated a type of knowledge that academia tends to dismiss. His subsequent admission to a master’s program in Navarra was not the result of routine bureaucratic inclusion, but rather of the capitalization on stigma: the transformation of a life marked by gang activity, prison, and deportation into a certifiable academic asset. In this process, Israel forced the institution to recognize “dirty knowledge” (firsthand experience) that bureaucratic rituals tend to exclude or purge (Herzfeld, 2020).

However, this recognition was deeply contingent. Following the collapse of the funding that supported the rehabilitation centers, Israel was once again pushed back into precarious forms of work, this time in the call center sector. This return should not be interpreted as an individual failure, but rather as an indicator of the structural fragility of institutional inclusion. Israel’s trajectory shows that the acceptance of embodied knowledge is always reversible: it can be celebrated when it proves functional, but quickly discarded when it ceases to be so.

Jesús's case highlights a more subtle and deadly barrier: that of institutional silence. He was the only one who managed to hack admission to the University of Guadalajara, turning the forced repetition of high school into a tactical advantage. His high school GPA of 99.9% and his score of 175 on the entrance exam were not a triumph of the system, but rather a glitch in the system: an “undesirable” individual had slipped into the academic elite purely on the basis of intellectual merit. However, his expulsion did not require anyone to know about his tattoos or his deportation history. Mexican public universities operate under a statutory blindness: by treating all students as “equal”—assuming that everyone has the financial and family support to be a full-time student—they perpetrate a form of invisible violence. Unlike contexts where affirmative action or support for minorities exists (albeit imperfectly), administrative Darwinism reigns supreme here.

The university system did not need to actively discriminate against Jesús; it simply imposed on him the “equality” of a schedule incompatible with survival. The lack of institutional flexibility functioned as an automated class filter. The system absorbed his enrollment statistics (validating its own rhetoric of openness), but its bureaucratic rigidity suffocated the real person. Jesús did not “drop out” due to a lack of ability; he was purged by the economy. His departure demonstrates that, in public universities, the right to education remains tied to the privilege of not having to work to put food on the table.

Discussion: The Anatomy of the Predatory State

We need to move beyond the convenient explanation of “administrative inefficiency.” The bureaucratic maze faced by the homies Deportations are not a technical failure on the part of the Mexican government, but rather a specific form of governance. The denial of school enrollment or the indefinite delay in identity verification do not protect academic standards; rather, they prolong, through administrative means, a punitive logic already at work in the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. What this study documents are not merely barriers to access, but the day-to-day workings of a process of biographical mutilation that is taking place in the present.

This logic operates selectively. The state incorporates the individual where it serves a purpose—for example, as a bilingual worker in precarious sectors such as call centers-, but it fails to acknowledge them when it comes to their educational history, political agency, or intellectual influence. The process is not aimed at reintegration, but rather at containment. The school office functions less as a gateway than as a screening point where punishment is reconfigured and externalized through administrative language.

The life stories of Alberto, Israel, and Jesús should not be interpreted as individual experiences of frustration, but rather as expressions of a structural pattern. Here, the “bureaucratic intimacy” described by Herzfeld (2020) takes on a radicalized form: it is not merely a matter of state rejection; it is also a process of denationalization. de facto enforced through documents, stamps, and silences. An unrecognized diploma or an impossible requirement are not minor errors; they function as technologies of vital suspension that interrupt the temporal continuity of one’s life story and trap the subject in indefinite limbo.

By invalidating credentials, the state invalidates the past. Returnees find themselves trapped in a precarious citizenship: formally Mexican, but treated as outsiders in practice. As Mezzadra and Neil-son (2013) point out, the border ceases to be a territorial boundary and becomes a diffuse practice that is reproduced in ordinary spaces such as the classroom or the public office, delineating who can project themselves as a thinking subject and who must limit themselves to obeying. From this perspective, so-called “educational inclusion” reveals its central contradiction. Based on meritocratic rhetoric, the university system operates as a mechanism of social selection that reproduces exclusion (Gleeson and Gonzales, 2012). Instruments such as Agreement 286 do not function as universal bridges, but rather as filters that only those who already possess prior legal, social, or institutional capital can pass through.

The most acute tension arises when the homie It attempts to shift from the position of object of intervention—the deportee, the gang member, the victim—to that of producer of knowledge. At this juncture, bureaucratic discretion is activated as a defensive mechanism. This obstruction stems not only from the lack of documents but also from the threat that certain presences pose to the epistemic hierarchies that structure the academic institution.

Unlike the narrative Dreamer in the United States—centered on innocence, merit, and the call for inclusion—the homies Returnees do not negotiate their place in moral terms. They do not seek redemption or full recognition. Rather, they develop pragmatic, fragmentary, and uneven responses to a hostile institutional environment. These practices do not constitute an overcoming of the punitive regime, but rather modes of subsistence under conditions of persistent biographical mutilation. This generation does not aspire to integrate seamlessly into a normative notion of Mexican identity that rejects them. They inhabit a structural liminality (Menjívar, 2006) in which ways of life are reorganized within the interstices of the institutional order. The stigma does not disappear; it is reconfigured. The experience of incarceration is not redeemed; it is tolerated to the extent that it proves functional. It is not merely a matter of reintegration; it is a recomposition under imposed conditions.

Conclusion: The Pen as a Tool

What is at stake at the school services window is not merely the validation of a certificate, but the very meaning of citizenship in contemporary Mexico. Bureaucracy appears here not as a neutral apparatus, but rather as a mechanism that classifies life trajectories, establishes hierarchies of belonging, and administers the value of the past. This mechanism, however, does not produce absolute silence. As Luis pointed out, “we have to fight with the pen, not with the sword.” This statement does not imply a reconciliation with the system, but rather a lucid reading of its rules: gaining admission to the university does not mean legitimizing the institutional order, but rather exposing its limits and tensions from within.

The so-called “American Dream in Mexico” that Israel refers to does not express an aspiration; it is a political irony. It reveals that belonging is not granted; it is administered differentially. The homies Returnees embody one of the central failings of the contemporary nation-state: the possibility of persisting as political subjects even when institutions insist on treating them as surplus. In this sense, education ceases to be a promise of social mobility and becomes a precarious form of biographical defense—always conditional, always reversible.

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Ricardo Alfonso Zepeda Orozco He is a researcher at the University Center for Social Sciences and Humanities (cucsh) at the University of Guadalajara. Her work examines migration, higher education, and incarceration across the U.S.-Mexico border from a decolonial and autoethnographic perspective. Drawing on his own experience as a cross-border scholar marked by deportation, community organizing, and collective struggle, his research reimagines education as a space of belonging, resistance, and liberation. Zepeda is a founding member of the Alliance for Human Mobility in Jalisco and co-organizer of the Third International Conference on Education, Migration, and Criminology, with the theme “Bridges, Not Borders: A Binational Call to Action.” His current project, the Transnational Initiative for Access to Higher Education for People Deprived and Formerly Deprived of Liberty, promotes binational collaborations to expand access to higher education for people who are incarcerated or have been deported in Mexico.