11/19/2023 0 Comments Conquest and rebellionI was angry when I learned that city authorities have destroyed almost all of the LAPD’s historical records. As a historian, was this infuriating or energizing? In fact, your book is the result of a painstaking effort to mine what you call a “rebel archive” because of a lack of official documentation from Los Angeles government archives. Indeed, conquest is a persistent dynamic in our social relations and institutional practices, including incarceration.Īt every telling of conquest, there is also a story of rebellion. Therefore, the need to eliminate Indigenous sovereignties and define belonging within the settler community endures. In the United States, settler occupation of native lands is not over. Why is elimination so endemic to the U.S.? History is rife with the stories of powerful nations engaging in conquest and subjugation of the conquered. By focusing on the western town that built the nation’s largest jail system, City of Inmates unlocks how the dynamics of conquest shaped, and continue to shape, the priorities and tactics of human caging in the United States. In particular, the 19th-century efforts to expand the United States across the North American continent and to build white settler communities on the nation’s western frontier are deeply imprinted in the nation’s police and incarceration practices. And what the American West teaches us about the rise of incarceration in the United States is that conquest matters. Los Angeles opens a window to see untold histories of incarceration, namely those that can best be told from the perspective of the American West. Why is Los Angeles’ particular history so illustrative of this? You reveal that mass incarceration is in fact mass elimination of these non-conforming groups. I tell this tale with six stories that demonstrate how incarceration was used to first clear Tongva and other indigenous populations from the region and then cage up a variety of racially marginalized populations, ranging from the itinerant white males disparaged as “tramps and “hobos” to Chinese immigrants, African Americans and Mexican Immigrants. rule in Los Angeles - the Tongva Basin - incarceration has persistently operated as a means of purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing and otherwise eliminating indigenous communities and racially targeted populations. What I found in the archives is that since the very first days of U.S. So, I began to research how Los Angeles, my hometown, built one of the largest systems of human caging that the world has ever known. It is a history that has never been told. But we know very little about the making and meaning of incarceration in Los Angeles. Therefore, Los Angeles, the City of Angels, is, in fact, the City of Inmates, the punitive capital of the world. In fact, some researchers say no city on Earth jails more people than Los Angeles. Living in Los Angeles, I knew that Los Angeles operates the largest jail system in the United States. After completing it, I wanted to examine another dimension of race and law enforcement. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexican border region and the border patrol’s nearly exclusive focus on policing unauthorized immigration from Mexico. “Migra!” is a story about race and policing in the United States, specifically the the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol,” were there elements that sparked your interest in digging deeper into the prison and jail system of the U.S., and Los Angeles specifically? What launched your interest in telling this story? When you were writing your first book “Migra! A History of the U.S. We talked to Lytle Hernández about how her book, which was released in April, lays a historical foundation for the story of Los Angeles’ systemically discriminatory structure of incarceration. Her new book, “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and The Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles 1771–1965,” concludes just before the Watts Rebellion to reveal the deep roots of the “Age of Mass Incarceration” in the city, the time period since 1965 that has filled Los Angeles’ and the nation’s jails and prisons to bulging and continues to bring police and community relations to a boiling point. For the last several years, UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández has been reaching into Los Angeles history, back before the city was even city or California was even a state, to unearth evidence of how local and national governments, police and jail systems operated as a formalized machine of conquest and elimination targeting native, poor and non-white people.
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