Event Date
Kelly Lytle Hernandez
History, UCLA
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is associate professor in the UCLA Department of History and director of the UCLA Department of History’s Public History Initiative. Her research interests are in twentieth-century U.S. history with a concentration upon race, migration, and police and prison systems in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her new book, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) is 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. Her current research focuses upon exploring the social world of incarceration in Los Angeles between 1876 and 1965.
Professor Lytle Hernandez will discuss the criminalization of unlawful entry in the U.S. and its effects on the rate of imprisonment for Mexicans.