Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. A leading expert on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is renowned for her award-winning books on U.S. border history and Los Angeles incarceration systems.

Her research centers on the historical entanglement of racial control, migration enforcement, and human caging in America. Hernandez examines how Indigenous conquest, Mexican revolutionary movements, and border policing created enduring systems of imprisonment, with Los Angeles serving as a critical case study for national patterns of criminalization and resistance.

Hernandez's publications reveal a methodological trajectory from border enforcement history (Migra!) to urban incarceration (City of Inmates) and transnational revolution (Bad Mexicans), consistently employing archival recovery to amplify marginalized voices and challenge structural violence through public scholarship.

Honors include the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and top disciplinary awards:

• Bancroft Prize (2023) for Bad Mexicans
• American Book Award (2018, 2023)
• John Hope Franklin Prize (2018)
• Clements Book Award (2010)

She directs the Million Dollar Hoods initiative, which partners with community organizations to document how policing drains $1+ billion annually from Los Angeles neighborhoods, driving policy reforms through data-driven advocacy for resource reallocation.