Kelly Lytle Hernández – författare

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and American dissidents—to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who encouraged the plunder of his country by US imperialists such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of U. S. authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime. The US Departments of War, State, Treasury and Justice as well as police, sheriffs and spies, hunted the magonistas across the country. Capturing Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the FBI’s first cases.But the magonistas persevered. They lived in hiding, wrote in secret code and launched armed raids into Mexico until they ignited the world’s first social revolution of the twentieth century.Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of US history. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican-American population, making the magonistas’ story integral to modern American life.

This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force. To tell this story, Kelly Lytle Hernandez dug through a gold mine of lost and unseen records stored in garages, closets, an abandoned factory, and in U.S. and Mexican archives. Focusing on the daily challenges of policing the borderlands and bringing to light unexpected partners and forgotten dynamics, Migra! reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol translated the mandate for comprehensive migration control into a project of policing Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force. To tell this story, Kelly Lytle Hernandez dug through a gold mine of lost and unseen records stored in garages, closets, an abandoned factory, and in U.S. and Mexican archives. Focusing on the daily challenges of policing the borderlands and bringing to light unexpected partners and forgotten dynamics, "Migra!" reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol translated the mandate for comprehensive migration control into a project of policing Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

MacArthur–winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández argues that white supremacy has shaped every aspect of the American immigration regime in this nuanced and powerful new book. She explains how southern states passed some of the nation’s first immigration bans to restrict Black arrival in response to the 1791 Haitian revolution. She shows how the Supreme Court used a quartet of cases about Chinese exclusion to declare immigration law outside the guardrails of the Constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and segregationists of the early twentieth century built much of our modern immigration system, which was explicitly designed to be “whites-only.” And she details how much of the system's racist provisions survived civil rights movement reforms and remain in force today. Just as The Color of Law explained the structural damage of redlining and Stamped from the Beginning examined the deep roots of white supremacy, Racist by Design demonstrates how a complex legal machine, built by generations of lawmakers, continues to target nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal while creating a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the American economy.