Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History, University of California, Los Angeles
Hitchcock Grant Lectures
November 5, 2026 — 4:00 pmBanatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall — UC Berkeley Campus
Co-sponsors - Ethnic Studies, the American Cultures Center, Department of History, African American Studies, Berkeley Center for New Media, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Latinx Research Center, and Institute for Societal Issues (ISSI)
Register to attend
Register to attend this lecture. Though the lecture will be not be live streamed, it will be recorded and available for viewing on this page following the event.
About the lecture
Award winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández will be presenting her work, Racist by Design. In it she reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcers built the American immigration system to encourage white immigrants while targeting nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. The goal, often explicitly stated by the system’s architects, was to create a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the American economy.
Lytle Hernández calls Racist by Design “an act of sabotage”, a book that will expose the blueprints of the system, so it can be dismantled.
About Kelly Lytle Hernández
Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. Her major publications are 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 (W. W. Norton, 2022). Her forthcoming book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2026. In 2016, Professor Lytle Hernández established Million Dollar Hoods (MDH), a university-based but community-driven research initiative that maps the fiscal and human costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She served as the MDH director until 2024 and now serves as the initiative’s principal advisor. Professor Lytle Hernández is currently a principal investigator for two additional research collaborations: Mapping Deportations, which maps the history of mass deportation from the United States, and Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration, which preserves a historic cache of LAPD files and documents the impact of policing on LA residents since the 1970s. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández’s scholarship has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and she is currently an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Meet and mingle before the lecture on November 5 from 3:00 – 4:00 pm at Kvamme Atrium (outside of Banatao Auditorium). Please join us!