“This is my fourth book, and my first book party,” author Kelly Lytle Hernández told the crowd on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2026 at a pre-release celebration at the Wende Museum, co-sponsored by the Village Well. The warm laughter from the crowd was followed by an exclamation of “What took you so long?”
History is an active enterprise. Sitting for an interview with New York Times writer Jean Guerrero, Hernández read from the text and offered her thoughts on the metaphor of a machine, and how to dismantle it.
Hernández, a local resident whose academic career at UCLA has included a MacArthur Fellowship, holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History. She is also the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. In addition, she directs the Million Dollar Hoods project, which she co-founded in 2016. That project uses Los Angeles Police Department data to determine the financial and human cost of over-policing and mass incarceration in Los Angeles.
Racist by Design – Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control offers meticulous research and insightful connections into how we got here, and how it could change.
Tracing U.S. immigration law from the Haitian revolution, when slave owners passed laws to keep free Blacks from the Caribbean out of the U.S., she brings the thread all the way up through ICE raids and mass deportations. Much of the current immigration system, based on both an invented fear of immigrants and need for capital to control labor “has subsequently allowed racial discrimination to persist into the present.”
Calling it a ‘whites-only’ system, she illustrates how it’s been made simple, easy and inexpensive for Western Europeans and Canadians to come into the country, and difficult to the point of impossibility for people from the Southern Hemisphere and Mexico.
Her previous titles, Migra! A History of U.S. Border Patrol, City of Inmates, and Bad Mexicans focus on the racist policies that single out some communities for suffering.
Many notable Los Angeles activists were there to applaud the work, and celebrate Hernández for her intellectual accomplishments and her insightful calls for strategizing.
Publishers Weekly called the book “a definitive and forceful call for reform.” It goes on sale September 22, 2026.
Judith Martin-Straw
Photo – Dr. Manuel Pastor with Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernandez at the Wende Museum
