“Just reading her work is incredible, but, at this historic point I knew that having a conversation with her would offer clarity about this moment, as she has a gift for looking back while also giving us some hope for the future, and some warnings for the future” To hear all episodes and learn more about Lisette Nieves, visit Lisette-Nieves.com
Kelly Lytle Hernández is theChair in History and African American Studies and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. For her historical and contemporary work, in 2029 Kelly was selected as a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of multiple award-winning books, including Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. She is the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.
Lisette Nieves: Hi, everyone. I'm so excited about the next guest that we have on the podcast today. It's Kelly Lytle Hernández. She's the chair of History and African American Studies at UCLA. For her historical and contemporary work in 2019, she was selected as a MacArthur Genius Fellow. She's also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
She is one of the nation's leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration. She is the author of multiple award-winning books, including Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands, and she's the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.
So Kelly, one of the things that I feel really strongly about why I wanted to get to know you is, A, just reading your work is incredible, but two, is the moment we're in. I couldn't imagine having a conversation without you for the clarity that you give about this moment, for the clarity that you give in looking back while also giving us some hope for the future, also some warnings for the future. You do both really well, and so I'd love to know just from you, where are you coming from right now? What were you doing right before this podcast?
Kelly Lytle Hernandéz: Well, to be perfectly honest, I was eating apple pie before I came onto this podcast, but I'm at home in Los Angeles right now, and I'm working on immigration largely these days, immigration enforcement issues, and I'm thinking through how we've got into this moment, and so I need a lot of apple pie to be able to get through my days and to tell those stories.
Nieves: I know those days well. Kelly, tell me a little bit before we go into our conversation, what does self-care look like for you? When I think about what you write about, when I think about the work, when I think about constantly you having to sort through not the best moments of our history but reminders of the worst moments of our history and present day, how do you take care of yourself?
Lytle Hernandéz: That's a great question. I think I'm able to do this work because I am, at the core, a very optimistic person, and so it's hard to bump me off of my center. And my center is, we're going to be all right. The ancestors got us here this far and I'm grateful to them for that work, and we're thinking and working seven generations ahead of what we can make possible for our descendants to come. And so that keeps me whole.
In terms of daily practices, I try to do a slow walk every morning, because the work that we do is very fast, it is very intense. And so I've had the opportunity to do retreats at the Thich Nhat Hanh Center in San Diego and elsewhere, and learned meditation practice, and for me, what's very helpful is a daily slow walk to start my day.
Nieves: If you think of one person, you mentioned counting on our ancestors, and you as a historian, which ancestor do you go to for that kind of light, that guidance, that centering, that anchoring?
Lytle Hernandéz: For me personally, I go to many people, but my aunt Alice is certainly somebody who gives me great strength and great purpose. It's not even a choice that we fight for children, we fight for our neighbors, we fight for ourselves, because this is how we breathe, this is how we get through the world. So I was raised very young, my mother would teach me, service is the rent we pay for living. And my aunt gave me we fight is the rent we pay for a living, both of which are necessary. So those are definitely two ancestors, my aunt and my mother personally that I go to. Now on this broad scale of history, my mind always and my heart goes to Mama Harriet Tubman, and-
Nieves: Me too.
Lytle Hernandéz: You too? Okay.
Nieves: Oh, absolutely.
Lytle Hernandéz: We can do this. I can do that next meeting, that next fight, the next research, the next writing, whatever it is. If Mama Tubman can help get us here, I could do my part to try to help.
Nieves: Absolutely. And every step underestimated, and how she was able to exploit that gap of being underestimated and stand in her power. Okay, great. Well, we're starting with Harriet. We're starting ... Okay. We got a lot to talk about. All right.
So as a historian, you look at the big questions by looking back, but we're at a moment right now that's so anchored in dealing with immigration and challenges today, as we know. I will tell you, maybe I shouldn't say I'm excited about it, but yeah, I am excited to hear about Racist by Design, and because it really ... I know you didn't plan on writing this for this moment, but it really is meant to be for this moment. You look and you think about your next book over 200 years, and you're looking at immigration control in the United States. What questions did you start out with? I'm curious on that. And what do you want the reader to walk away with?
Lytle Hernandéz: Yeah. So Racist by Design is a new book that I have coming out in September, and I started writing it quite a few years ago. Maybe four years ago I was thinking about the main concept at the center of the book. So what I do in Racist by Design is a couple of things. One, as you say, I tell the whole history of US immigration enforcement from the beginning of the Republic to January 19th, 2025. I tell a new origin story about immigration control in US history, and I think the origin story is very important for us to understand some of the dynamics that work. And so the origin story that I tell in this book is that the very first immigration ban adopted by Congress is the 1803 Immigration Act, and what that law does is it penalizes and prohibits free Black migrants from entering it into any state or territory where there's already a law that bans their entry.
Now, by the time of the Civil War, most states and territories in the country had passed at least one law banning Black migration or settlement in the state or territory. There are a lot of reasons for this, but in the South in particular, there was a fear about free Black people coming in and either inciting or inspiring revolt among the enslaved. And this is really important, especially between the period after 1791 when there's a mass revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which is now called Haiti.
Nieves: Oh, yes. Toussaint.
Lytle Hernandéz: So it's with the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. Yes, that's right. At the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, there's an absolute terror in the United States. President Washington, Thomas Jefferson, all those founding fathers are terrified that Haitian freedom fighters are going to come to the United States and incite or fuel a similar uprising among the enslaved in the United States, and so they start passing these migration bans - no free Black people can come in. No free Black people can come in - to keep out African Americans, yes, absolutely, but also, in particular, Haitian revolutionaries.
Lytle Hernandéz: So if you understand the beginning of immigration control in this country as starting with an impulse to protect the institution of chattel slavery by banning Black abolitionists from being able to enter the country, that gives you a whole new perspective on the whole machine or regime that develops following that moment. So in this book, I recount this origin story of immigration control, and then I track it, the story of race and immigration control from the early republic to the present, making the argument that really, by the 1920s, this country had created a whites only immigration regime that targeted non-white immigrants for yes exclusion, but also subordination, guest worker programs, criminalization, and to date, we have amended that regime, but never abolished it. We still have a functioning whites-only immigration system, and that's the system that was in place when Trump enters into his second administration that gets leveraged. He doesn't create it. It's been here for centuries.
Nieves: It has, and I think one of the things that's fascinating, Kelly, is that it also, when you think about the early 20th century, was a deliberate homogenization of whiteness, because that wasn't the case before that. There were different immigration laws depending on which group you were with. But I was doing some reading as well too thinking of the work that you were putting forward too and looking at Supreme Court cases where we had Asians and others all saying that they were white in order to be considered citizens. So this notion of whiteness as we know today and the homogenization of that without ethnicity has been something that has also been, that was happening at that moment. Would you agree with that?
Lytle Hernandéz: That's right. So I think one important thing to remember from a historical point of view in terms of race and immigration is that the country's first naturalization law was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted the right to naturalize, to free white persons. And this is really important because it's highly restrictive, meaning that principally, African American or people of African descent cannot become US citizens following the 1790 Act. But it's also a very expansive law. There's no religious restrictions, there's no sort of educational requirements, there's a very short-term residency requirement, and all Europeans, all Europeans, are eligible to become US citizens.
So it's a very broad umbrella of whiteness that this country is born with, established with according to the 1719 Naturalization Act, and there's a conversation that happens over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries about, not so much who is white, but the so called lesser Europeans, the Catholics coming from Italy, Jews coming from Russia, being regarded by what I would ... The Nordicsis, people who believe, the eugenicists as you're talking about, that the blood of the people coming from Northwestern Europe is the superior blood of the world. Those folks are saying, "You know, we don't want the Italians coming here so much, or we don't want the Russian Jews coming here so much." And so there's a tussle over the brand of whiteness and who counts as the ... Madison Grant, the great eugenicist of the early 20th century talked about par excellence whiteness being the Nordics. So immigration control, immigration debates often revolve around whiteness.
Nieves: Let's talk about ICE today. What are we seeing today? What is the most resonant with the history of today? I'd also love if you could walk through some of the conversation as we have it here, not just about incarceration and enforcement, but forced labor, the link to all of those.
Lytle Hernandéz: Yeah. There's so much to be said. It was funny, when I was finishing writing this book, Racist by Design, I finished it during 2025, and it seemed like every time I was writing a chapter about the past, I would look at my phone and get a news notification about that thing from the past coming roaring back in a way that even myself and other historians couldn't quite have anticipated. So, for example, I was writing a chapter about how, in 1973, the border patrol launched a set of massive raids on Los Angeles in the spring of 1973. Border patrol officers and immigration agents would be in unmarked vans driving into highly Latino neighborhoods or working districts, and jump out of the vans and grab everybody that they could, shove them into the vans, and were taking seven, eight, nine busloads of people down to the border a day.
Nieves: Yeah. What does that sound like? Wow, that's today.
Lytle Hernandéz: That's today. So I'm writing about 1973. In 1973, they grabbed 10,000 people within one month in Los Angeles alone, and then they went to Chicago. What happened here? People were in unmarked cars with masked officers and giant guns and their uniforms, and they were jumping out of these vans and grabbing people off of the streets.
I'll say a couple of things about that. One, the number of captures, of kidnappings in 2025 was nowhere near the size of in 1973. What's important to remember that is because it was the resistance. The resistance that protected our neighbors and our loved ones made it impossible for them to snatch the same number of people that they did before. So we're learning, we're getting better, we're getting tougher, we're getting smarter, we're braver, all of these things.
Nieves: We're leveraging technology, all of it.
Lytle Hernandéz: Leveraging technology, all of that, and that's something important for us to remember. What I also was seeing is that two years after they began snatching people in 1973, the Supreme Court issued this ruling called Brignoni Ponce, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it's a ruling which the Supreme Court said that it is lawful for immigration law enforcement officers to use race as a factor in their operations. And so what we were watching on the streets of Los Angeles and as it moved to Chicago and Charlotte and Minneapolis and beyond, is the use of race as a lawful factor in immigration law enforcement. And what was hard for me in that moment was to watch so many organizers on the street or folks on the street be shocked that the way that immigration enforcement operation unfolds. Now, if you're from the borderlands, you've been seeing this your whole life.
Nieves: Or if you're born and raised in Brooklyn, stop and frisk generation, what else do you need to say? Race was always used.
Lytle Hernandéz: Thank you for the connection.
Nieves: Yes.
Lytle Hernandéz: And this is really important too because the Brignoni-Ponce ruling in 1975, which is about immigration law enforcement, which establishes that race is a lawful factor in enforcement operations, then becomes the basis for establishing racial profiling across federal law enforcement, DEA in particular. So the profile of a drug courier includes a racial dynamic, namely young Black and brown men.
Nieves: Yes.
Lytle Hernandéz: And it becomes legally legitimated by the Brignone-Ponce ruling. So this is the way in which when we fight for each other and our safety and our wellbeing and our freedom, we protect ourselves. That when we fight for immigrant rights, it's actually a fight for not just migrants, but for freedom and wellbeing, racial justice for all of us.
Nieves: Kelly, when I think about your work, I think about what's happening in a context that's much larger right now than immigration. It's this question of who gets to write history, which is not a new argument. That's been something we've seen for a long time. Who is recognized in history, and who is also vilified if they don't go by these rigid boundaries of what we say is sanitized, homogenized, Americanized, whatever language we want to use that's weaponized? How are you functioning right now in that? Are you viewed as this radical, infiltrative scholar who's taking down a system, who's anti-American? How are you being viewed within this ecosystem of academia?
Lytle Hernandéz: Oh, that's a great question, and I have to say the best thing is I've never thought about it. I don't know how I'm being viewed. I can say how I go about ... And I think if I, Toni Morrison taught us that they're trying to keep us busy. White supremacy tries to keep us busy so we can't stay focused. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about how some folks might respond to the work that I'm doing. What I do spend a lot of time maybe thinking about but care-taking is my relationships of accountability. I'm very clear about who I am accountable to. I am accountable to my students, I am accountable to migrants. I am accountable to the undocumented, the imprisoned, the formerly incarcerated, the policed, to the disparaged members of our communities, that is who I am accountable to, and I have to be able to always not just be in relationship, but be able to rationalize and justify my work and my paycheck for and with those communities, so that's what I'm thinking about when I'm writing a story.
The audience that I have in mind is all the folks that I just named, and how is this history ... I write about very hard things, but I don't ever want anyone to feel like it's insurmountable. And so trying to talk about how difficult and really enduring in many ways and strong and powerful these systems are, but there have always been movements, individuals, yes, but also movements that have been able to nick the machine, to make it wobble a little bit, and we're still in process. We haven't found emancipation yet, but we've been able to find spaces in which we can maneuver for ourselves. And so that's what I'm always trying to be very careful with is finding that balance between exposing the blueprints of the immigration system in this case, and also talking about the ways in which we have protected each other and built movements that have found greater power for ourselves.
Nieves: Kelly, when you're thinking through this piece that we both get to share, we both get to sit in front of students every day. Well, not every day. I don't every day, but I get to sit in front of them and you do too. Give me a joy of why you teach, and give me one of those powerful aha moments that fuels you continuing to be the incredible scholar that you are.
Lytle Hernandéz: I started teaching relatively young, and I will always remember a student who came up to me one day after I had given a lecture on California history, and we were talking about Los Angeles and I think some of the public health campaigns that targeted Mexican-American communities in the early 20th century. And this young lady came up to me after class and it was just tears in her eyes.
She was just crying. I said, "What's going on?" She said, "I have felt dirty my whole life, like I could never scrub enough to get it off, and I didn't know why I felt so dirty. But something about the lecture today and the readings we did this week got me to see that I've been told I'm dirty my whole life and my mother was told she was dirty her whole life and my grandmother was told she was dirty her whole life, and that we took that on, but I let it go."
She's like, "I'm clean. I'm beautiful. I'm free." She let it go through the historical understanding of how certain communities get targeted by campaigns, whatever that campaign is. And that to me will always be one of the most impactful moments of teaching me what can be the power of history, how it can liberate us from things that we've interpreted as being personal or familial weaknesses or problems, when actually, they're structures and systems at work. And so that's happened several times over the course of my career, but that was the first, and she taught it to me, to be very careful and intentional with the histories that I tell, because you never know the profound effect it can have on a person.
And I want everyone to come out of my classes, maybe not every single lecture, but out of the class to feel more knowledgeable and that they feel more powerful from that knowledge, and that they have the capacity to do their part in making a better world.
Nieves: I want to thank you for giving us dignity. Me, as a Latina, I'm proud to talk to another brilliant woman of color who is a scholar. I can't wait to get you to New York so we can have you present. We're going to get you-
Lytle Hernandéz: I'm there all the time. Let's do it.
Nieves: Okay, done. What are we waiting for? We're going to make it happen. All right. Kelly, you're the best. Thank you. Appreciate you.
Lytle Hernandéz: It was great talking to you. You take care.
Nieves: Likewise.
Credits: Thank you for listening!
At The Junction, we reflect on the moments that make us — with today’s most impactful leaders. The show was created and hosted by me, Lisette Nieves, and produced by LWC Studios.
This show is available everywhere you listen to podcasts, and on YouTube. I encourage you to share video and audio episodes by linking to them on social media, websites, and by sharing them in your online affinity groups. Our executive editor is Juleyka Lantigua. Michelle Baker is our senior producer. Alyson Rich and Cesar Ventura provided administrative support. CDM Studios is our live recording location. Our theme song is “La Juntura Cultural,” arranged by Randy Seriguchi, Jr. and D'Artanian Woodard, produced by Randy Seriguchi, Jr., and recorded by Farmacy Studio.
For more information and episode transcripts, visit Lisette-Nieves.com. If you’d like to reach out, please email us at Hello@LWCStudios.com.