Constructing a Rebel Archive: Researching beyond the Limits of the State

Location: Gilman 308

The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism is pleased to host a graduate workshop with award–winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, who holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA.

Hernández will speak about the “rebel archive” she has developed in her research on the long history of revolution and counter-revolution in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The workshop will foreground methodological questions around how to overcome challenges for research posed by state archives. Topics of discussion will include how to read documents of repression against the grain, how to manage archival silences, and how to put together multiple sources from disparate archives to develop a more well-rounded historical and social account.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is the author of Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022). She is the founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Hernández is MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and a member of the Pulitzer Prizes Board.

This workshop is open to JHU PhD students in the humanities and social sciences, as well as undergraduates, faculty, and staff. Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to ricjhu at jhu dot edu.

After this workshop, Hernández will present the 2025 Schouler Lecture in the Department of History, at 4:30pm in Hodson 213.