Bad Mexicans
We are very happy to publicize Bad Mexicans by author and professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, forthcoming by W. W. Norton & Company on May 10, 2022.
About the book:
Few Americans today know the significance of Ricardo Flores Magón (1874–1922) and the magonistas, a group of agitators who challenged Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in the early twentieth century. But distinguished historian Kelly Lytle Hernández argues their cross-border insurgency, launched from U.S. soil, was a landmark revolt against the U.S. empire and the suffocating power Anglo-Americans held over Mexican lives.
Through protest and armed rebellion, the magonistas ignited the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which upended North America. Their story reads like a thriller, with the rebels evading an international manhunt amid a swirl of love affairs, betrayals, and dramatic battlefield raids. Pursued by the nascent FBI, the rebels wrote in secret code and organized thousands of workers to their cause. Lytle Hernandez documents how the magonista uprising, and the failed Anglo-American campaign to stop them, proved foundational to the history of race, immigration, and violence in the United States.
About the author:
Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and is the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is completing a new book on the magonista movement, which helped to spark the outbreak of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and she is the Principal Investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-drive research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her leadership of Million Dollar Hoods, Professor Lytle Hernandez has won numerous awards, including the 2018 Local Hero Award from KCET/PBS, a 2018 Freedom Now! Award from the Los Angeles Community Action Network, and the 2019 Catalyst Award from the South L.A. parent/student advocacy organization, CADRE. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernandez has been named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
