Kelly Lytle Hernández

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of history and an expert on the history and politics of immigration and emigration, particularly between the United States and Mexico. 

Lytle Hernández’s research has focused on race, police and prison systems in Los Angeles and throughout the American West and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her book, “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and The Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles 1771–1965,” concludes just before the Watts Rebellion to reveal the deep roots of the “Age of Mass Incarceration” in the city, the time period since 1965 that has filled Los Angeles’ and the nation’s jails and prisons to bulging and continues to bring police and community relations to a boiling point.

Her book “MIGRA!” about the U.S. Border Patrol was the first book to tell the story of how and why the U.S. Border Patrol concentrates its resources upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration despite the many possible targets and strategies of U.S. migration control.