City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Kelly Lytle Hernández

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, Social Justice, Academic, Grad School

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 15, 2017

About the author

Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. A 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! and City of Inmates. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

[Charles Heath]

After only two books, Lytle Hernández is one of my favorite historians. City of Inmates chronicles two centuries of selective incarceration (and elimination) of targeted populations in Los Angeles. Since LAPD destroyed (yes, destroyed) most of its archives and made unavailable what remained, LH must depend upon a "rebel archive," that is, to reclaim from history: Hernández closes cases and voices of dissent and the continued efforts to resist the growth of structures of elimination. The prose is clear and simple, at times sounding like a professor (which she is) giving a class to undergrads: quite pleasing!

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe i'm too rwg-pilled but this doesn't hit as hard round 2...

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you live in Los Angeles, read this book. If you live somewhere else, read this book. A brilliantly written need-to-know history of race, immigration, and incarceration.

[Nanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me realize that I should probably read more about history and why things are the way they are. It also made me really angry.

[Ellie Clennon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got pretty intense when it comes to legal and congressional jargon at points, but this is a book I think every white American should read. Quite nauseating to read, but eye opening and important.

[max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hernández tells the story of LA as the “City of Inmates,” home to the largest imprisoned population in the U.S., which in turn has the largest prison system in the world. This book is not focused on the usual flashpoints — Nixon’s and Reagan’s “war on drugs” or Clinton’s 1994 crime bill — of recent mass incarceration. This is the story of how incarceration is/was baked into the construction of the United States.

The book is extremely well-written, with engaging storytelling, strong archival research, and an important argument linking settler colonialism with incarceration and deportation. Her ultimate conclusion? Incarceration is elimination, punishing and disappearing Native and racialized people.

Every chapter felt resonant right now, and this is necessary reading imo, especially if you live in LA. I will say, a form of incarceration that was mentioned in passing but could and should have been its own chapter, was the internment of Japanese people.

The book ends on L.A.’s rebel archive, which “…documents how the criminalized, policed, caged, deported, and kin of the killed have always fought back. They jimmied open the cages of conquest and stole away. They nursed the incarcerated. They took the settlers to court. They passed plans of revolution. They sang love songs. They charged the U.S. government with genocide. And they set the city on fire. After the Watts Rebellion, the city’s police forces tried to smother the embers of revolt with a frontlash of mass incarceration and hyperincarceration, but it did not work.”

The series of thoughts, analyses, and actions directly from people on the ground battling incarceration today bring this historical text into the urgency of the present moment. And published in 2017, this work continues and feels so urgent as the Supreme Court ruled on the side of racial profiling, and federal agents kidnap people on the basis of their skin color and fight anyone who dissents.

[Leah Montange · Rating 5 out of 5]

-elimination and settler colonialism
-early history of immigration detention in the US

[Lucía González · Rating 5 out of 5]

the type of history book that actually everyone shld read

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upsetting & informative, just how I like my books to be!

[Catherine La Prairie · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the American political history has a chronology that extends back to settler colonialism >>>

[Marian P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dijon Kizzee. Andres Guardado. Samuel Faulkner. These men were all killed by the LAPD or LASD, two of whom have been killed in the past three months in Los Angeles County. In her pathbreaking, outstanding history City of Inmates, UCLA African American historian and Mac Arthur fellow Kelly Lytle Hernandez shows us Los Angeles’s ugly history of incarceration has spanned two centuries and recounts the horrific story of Samuel Faulkner along the way.

Samuel Faulkner was the first Black man killed by the LAPD but it wasn’t a year ago or even a decade or two ago. It occurred on April 27, 1927 on East 51st Street when he went to check on his sister, Clara Harris, who resided in a house on the same lot where Samuel lived with his parents. Apparently, the LAPD conducted a liquor raid on Harris’s house, finding nothing, but shooting Faulkner who had entered through his sister’s bedroom window. Once you realize that police shootings, violence, and that the wanton, excessive incarceration of Black men and women have been occurring since the Black community originated in South Central Los Angeles it makes your blood boil. The presence of an LA branch of the NAACP resulted in a trial, and ultimate acquittal, of the officer who shot Faulkner. To say that this book blew my mind is a gross understatement.

Lytle Hernandez shows how Los Angeles has become the “carceral capital of the world” that has been shaped by a longstanding history of settler colonialism. Beginning with exclusion of Tongva-Gabrielinos in the early 19th century, colonists set out to build a “new, permanent racially reproductive and racially exclusive society.” That model has continued from the 1820s to the present. Laws banning vagrancy and public drunkenness combined to reduce Indigenous populations. Jailed Gabrielinos were routinely auctioned to white Angelenos, resulting in several decades of forced servitude. The enforcement of these laws worked to winnow down the Gabrielino population.

Two insightful chapters illuminate Mexican/Mexican American experiences from the 1900s-1930s. Revolutionary Mexican journalist Ricardo Flores Magon agitated against Porfirio Diaz and was eventually imprisoned in LA under the Neutrality Act with the aid of the Mexican government. It is a fascinating chapter on the intersection of politics, censorship, and imprisonment. The author lays bare the caging of undocumented immigrants in a penetrating chapter on Mexicans in the 1920s-30s. Despite several decades of regular Mexican migration dating back to the 1880s with the development of large-scale agriculture and widespread peasant displacement under the Porfirato, the U.S. border patrol itself did not come into existence until 1927. Then, following that move, the history of the caging of Mexican immigrants began. According to Lytle Hernandez, in 1929, a federal law imposed made “unlawful entry” into the U.S. punishable by one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. The taxing of the federal prison system led to new prisons, including La Tuna Detention Farm in El Paso and Terminal Island in Los Angeles.

Where does this information leave us in 2020? Still, Black men are being shot and killed by the LAPD. Still, undocumented immigrants are being caged and forcibly sterilized (sadly forcibly sterilization of Latinas is not new just read research by Virginia Espino or Laura Briggs). This book will educate you on how long BIPOC have been locked up. It is a painful reminder of the way that jails have historically served as a tool of excluding, erasing, and purging targeted populations from urban landscapes. The book is highly recommended for everyone interested in #Black Lives Matter, the history of incarceration, and the history of the LAPD, in particular. When you think of those killed by the police also remember Samuel Faulkner. Read. This. Book.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an Angeleno it was hard to digest certain parts of this book. The parallels between the past and present day were all-too clear and upsetting. It's enlightening, truly, even though it may cause some despair. Abolition is the only way forward. I do wish it went more into detail with the 70s - 90s but glad it ended on a contemporary note.

[William Adam Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for my grad class Public History Lab. Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells the history of how Los Angeles became the world's largest penal city in the world. That's right, more people are locked up in prisons in and around Los Angeles than anywhere in the world. Her books shows in exacting detail how that came to happen. Hernandez also tells the history of US Government policy on incarceration, especially towards people of color.

The first chapter talks about how the early Native communities in and around Los Angeles lost control of their land to the Spanish settlers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After California became part of the United States, and did not belong to Spain or Mexico, the growing community had a problem with white "hobos" who came to the area looking for seasonal work, but did not necessarily want to settle down, get married, and take on stable work. These men were also rounded up and thrown into prison, at least temporarily. Chapter Three deals with the fight by the white community to keep the Chinese from migrating into California in the late 1800's. This led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, followed by the Geary Act, which required people of Chinese ancestry to prove they had come to America before the Exclusion Act of '82 or risk deportation.

Hernandez spends two chapters discussing border problems with Mexico. First, she tells the story of Ricardo Flores Magon, who I have to admit, I did not know about. He led a large group of Mexicans who came to live in America, that sought to overthrow the Diaz government in Mexico at the start of the 1900's. This eventually led to the Mexican Revolution and the toppling of Diaz. Chapter Five deals with the immigration of Mexicans into the American Southwest during the 1920's-1930's as they seek work and are encouraged by the agribusiness companies to do so on a temporary basis, with the idea that they will return to Mexico when the work season is over. The Nativists in America seek to pass strict border laws to keep them out.

Chapter six introduces the reader to the story of Samuel Faulkner, an African American, who was killed by the Los Angeles Police in 1927. Through his story as a model, Hernandez examines the relationship between the Los Angeles police and the black community from the 1920's up until the start of the Watts Riots of 1965. Hernandez ends her book with the Rebel Archive, where she tells the modern story of six people or groups that are committed to rebelling against this idea that incarcerating people, especially people of color, is not the way to go about running a community. Hernandez is a fantastic historian, and she writes plainly, but effectively about a complex topic. She has brought to life some important people who have been overlooked in American history. She is great at using micro history, such as her stories about Pedro Gonzalez, Samuel Faulkner, and Ricardo Flores Magon to explain movements of macro history. She has written a book about the Mexican Revolution called "Bad Mexicans" that I would one day also like to read.

[AMAO · Rating 5 out of 5]

City of Inmates
Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965
by Kelly Lytle Hernández
Pub. February 15, 2017

:-/ Just when you think Racist White Folks has facilitated, perpetuated, instituted every evil imagianable...

City of Inmates explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles.

In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back.

They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city.

With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

so fucking good!!! city of inmates is so incredibly well researched and written to be compelling and easy to understand. despite tackling almost 200 years of incarceration in los angeles, the central thesis remains clear and never feels muddled. city of inmates' grounding in settler colonialism was the framework that i was missing & needing from 'an african american & latinx history of the united states'. by naming the origins of incarceration to be about the disappearing & banishment of indigenous peoples from the area in order to build a settler state, it makes it easier to understand how & why incarceration shifts to "manage" any group of people seen as a threat to that state, whether they be chinese people, white itinerant men, mexican rebels, or poor black residents confined to central avenue. understanding all of these shifts makes me feel re-committed to "love, study, struggle" and understanding how incarceration might shift in the future & what needs to be done to abolish the prison industrial complex.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, accessible comparative study examining the history of incarceration in Los Angeles, tracing its practice through a chronological series of stories beginning with colonization in the late 18th century to the Watts Rebellion in 1965. In doing so, Lytle Hernández demonstrates the leading role that Los Angeles played in the emergence of the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States, but more centrally to argue that incarceration is a key component of settler colonialism in what became Los Angeles. Incarceration is one tool in the service of the “eliminatory logic” of settler colonialism, leading Lytle Hernández to define incarceration as “elimination.” Throughout the book, it can be seen how the law, its targeted enforcement, and resultant incarceration were used by Anglo-American settlers to preserve their racist fantasy of an “Aryan City of the Sun.”

[Braden Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredible work of scholarship and vital history of the role incarceration has played in the settler colonial project that has been carried out in the Los Angeles region in particular and the Mexican border region generally over the past 500 years. The histories in this book have been buried by state police forces and prison institutions, but Hernández has brought them to life through a deep dive into the historical record of newspapers, court documents, letters, and other first hand accounts of the struggle for survival against a vision of Los Angeles as a homogenized paradise for white settlers. This book is a must-read call to action for anyone with an interest in justice.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that changed my worldview and will stay with me for a long time. Hernández's thesis—that a key facet of settler colonialism in L.A. was/is incarceration, and that both have the end goal of eliminating "undesirable" populations—is devastating and convincing. Mining "rebel archives," she documents key phases of incarceration, beginning with the Spanish conquest of the Tongva. For every injustice, there's a story of an activist or resistor serving as a reminder that those histories have been hidden as well. This book should be required reading (it also happens to be fascinating and pleasurable reading, despite all the horrors) for every Angeleno.

[Math Erao · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible and horrifying read detailing the rise of mass incarceration in Los Angeles and its parallels across the country, along with the deep ties the police and prisons have to white supremacy and the genocide of so many communities and peoples throughout the city’s and nation’s history. The structure of the book and the stories within are fascinating and mirror so much of what’s still happening in this country. This is essential for Angelenos but also anyone interested in how we got where we are today.

[Brinda Gurumoorthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked that I was learning about the rise of mass incarceration in LA but also learning about so many other things (indigenous populations in the area, the Mexican revolution, etc.). Also the writing is clear and packs in a lot of ideas without feeling dense. I just didn't want her to stop at 1965, especially because she includes remarks from many current activists at the end and they feel kind of randomly thrown in after the last chapter. I would have loved a chapter about LA during the Reagan/Clinton/Bush administrations.

[Alexander Ballesteros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly written and succinct history of the carceral history of Los Angeles. The colonization of the original inhabitants and criminalization of Native Americans, anti-Chinese legislation, anti-Mexican sentiments, the criminalization of white transitory/homeless population, and the west coast equivalent to Jim Crow segregation. Dr Hernández is an amazing author who weaves more narrative storytelling with historical facts, figures, and statistics. She is quickly becoming a new favorite author of mine.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A haunting and evocative look at the origins of the U.S. modern carceral system along with its recurring use as a tool of oppressing vulnerable populations. These tools and practices that were condemned in those times but continue to prevail in the modern area. Kelly Lytle Hernandez presents her arguments from a historically-intersectional vantage point and this book pairs well with Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol

[amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really clear example of 1) integrating a theoretical approach (settler colonialism) and a domain (mass incarceration) in which it's not often applied; and 2) relating historical evidence and analysis to contemporary events through the reproduction of present-day testimonies. Finding so many writing lessons in this book.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

historian lives matter! this is a great read for anyone interested in trying to understand anti-immigrant, anti-native and anti-black violences as intersecting and collaborative — or anyone interested in revisiting their existing understandings of anti-blackness, homophobia, etc through the lens of settler colonialism.

[Mallory Kantowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative read around the horrifying reality of white supremacy in the US and LA’s long history of police brutality. Super detailed through the 1800s and early 1900s but I wish it went into more detail through modern history. It ended at the 1965 Watts Riots but felt like it barely scratched the surface!

[Ian Cressman]

I don't remember too much specifically from this book at this point, but I remember it being quite well done and interesting. It's sourcing/methodology was quite cool too; there's like a "rebel archive" at there end where Hernández talks directly to people or borrows directly from primary sources to allow readers to see how she moves through this subject as a historian.

[Clare Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible and engaging look at the history of jails and prisons in the U.S. through the lens of Los Angeles, the most incarcerated city in the U.S. Important read for all. These systems have been f*cked up from the beginning.

[Herley Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening history of how Los Angeles became the carceral capital of the world. Kelly Lytle Hernández is part of the growing movement to change that. After reading this and hearing her speak on several occasions I'm with her.

[Josiah Solis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating, but beautifully narrated history of mass incarceration told from the archives of Los Angeles —the city that incarcerates the most people in America, which incarcerates the most people on earth.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew there was a lot of horrible racist behavior in the past, but this book opened my eyes to how much worse reality was than I even imagined. An important read for anyone interested in the criminal justice system