275 - Bad Mexicans with Kelly Lytle Hernández

Kelly Lytle Hernández in Cafe con Pam

275 - Bad Mexicans with Kelly Lytle Hernández

Listeners, we're back this week with Kelly Lytle Hernández

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). Bad Mexicans was recently longlisted for the National Book Award. She also leads Million Dollar Hoods, a big data research initiative documenting the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.

During this episode we talked about:

  • 04:15 - Being from a border town and how it informed her work

  • 05:34 - Growing up pre- operation gatekeeping

  • 09:36 - Conversation with her father

  • 15:57 - Deciding to be a historian and her champions

  • 16:38 - Importance of writing

  • 20:58 - Advice to young students

  • 25:34 - Grad school

  • 27:46 - Going into the archives

  • 30:13 - Her book Bad Mexicans

  • 33:36 - ‘I need this story’

  • 36:19 - Juana Belén Gutierrez de Mendoza

  • 40:13 - History informing the present

  • 41:15 - Standing on the shoulders of incredible women

 

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