Hernández, Kelly Lytle

OUR SYNOPSIS: Kelly Lytle Hernández examines incarceration histories around what became Los Angeles to illuminate how settler colonialism, violence, and resistance structure the United States. She argues that “Imprisonment was the first act of governance in Anglo-American Los Angeles” and shows how punishment shaped settler conquest of the region in the decades before California’s 1850 statehood. (35) The imprisonment and forced labor of Indigenous people then built the colonial infrastructure that shaped the region. Native survival was itself a form of resistance that combined with individual actions to undermine state power. For example, a formerly enslaved nurse named Biddy provided both paid and unpaid quality health care to the people incarcerated at the L.A. County Jail in the 1850s. Her empathetic medical labor empowered human resistance to settler-imposed diseases. At the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles city boosters recruited white, heteropatriarchal, middle-class families to define the emerging city’s social and economic relations. By incarcerating people who defied this moral order, state leaders enforced the boundaries of belonging and replaced available income sources for people of color with forced labor. As the city’s Black, Latino and Asian populations grew in the early twentieth century, “Los Angeles became the carceral capital of the United States.” (63) Immigration control developed in tandem with incarceration and imposed cross-border imperialism. By the 1930s, Black residents faced increasing discriminatory violent policing and incarceration that escalated into mid-century social uprisings.