Kelly Lytle Hernández on the hidden history of the magonistas, the intertwined rise of policing

Kelly Lytle Hernández is one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration and mass incarceration. She is a professor of history, African American studies, and urban planning at UCLA, and the author of the books “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol” (2010) and “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965” (2017). In her new book, “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands,” Hernández vividly charts the history of the revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón and the magonistas, whose cross-border rebellion laid the groundwork for the Mexican Revolution that overthrew the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who himself had been a revolutionary. Hernández deftly lays out small and large events,…