Kelly Lytle Hernandez will present “Caged Birds: The Rebirth of Mexican Imprisonment in the United States” on Wednesday, May 7, at 7 p.m. in the Pioneer Reading Room at Linfield College.
Hernandez, associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, has research interests in 20th-century U.S. history with a concentration upon race, migration and police in prison systems in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. She will present her research on the criminalization of unlawful entry into the U.S. and the boom of Mexican imprisonment along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 1920s and 1930s.
Hernandez is also the director of the UCLA Department of History’s Public History Initiative. Her latest book, “MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol,” 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 on exploring the social world of incarceration in Los Angeles between 1876 and 1965. Hernandez holds a bachelor’s in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego and a Ph.D. in history from UCLA.
This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Jonas A. “Steine” Jonasson Endowed Lecture that honors Jonasson, professor emeritus of history, who was associated with Linfield for more than 60 years before his death in 1997. The endowment is used to bring in distinguished scholars and speakers in the area of history. Jonasson held the unofficial title of Linfield historian and wrote “Bricks Without Straw,” a history of the college. For more information, call 503-883-2306 or email sglasco@linfield.edu.
