Immigration expert to speak at UWRF March 4

Immigration expert to speak at UW-River Falls March 4 

Feb. 18, 2026 – Kelly Lytle Hernández, a leading immigration expert, will be the featured speaker for the Walker D. and Helen Bryant Wyman Speaker Series at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls Wednesday, March 4, at 4 p.m. Hernández will deliver a talk titled “The Whites-Only Immigration Regime: 1896-1952” in the Kinnickinnic River Theater in the University Center, 501 Wild Rose Ave., River Falls. The event is free and open to the public. 

Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol”  “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles” and “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands”. 

In 2016, she founded the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles and  she led the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA from 2017-2022. For her historical and contemporary work, Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.     

A reception with light refreshments will begin at 3:30 p.m. outside the theater.

For more information, contact Wyman Committee Chair Ryan Fischer at john.ryan.fischer@uwrf.edu.

Photo: Kelly Lytle Hernández. Contributed photo.