The history of immigration in the United States is one of bans, quotas, restrictions, and exclusions. Immigrants have negotiated inconsistent and discriminatory definitions of authorized and unauthorized belonging and targeted restrictions on citizenship since the nation’s founding. This symposium brings together scholars who will illuminate the historical experiences of Asian American, Latinx, African American, Muslim, Jewish, gendered, and sexualized immigrants from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor in the University of California, Los Angeles Departments of History and African American Studies as well as the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. She is one of the nation’s leading historians of race, policing, immigration, and incarceration in the United States. Her award-winning book, MIGRA! A History of the US Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), explored the making and meaning of the US Border Patrol in the US-Mexico borderlands, arguing that the century-long surge of US immigration law enforcement in the US-Mexico borderlands is a story of race in America. Her most recently published book, City of Inmates: Conquest and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), is an unsettling tale that spans two centuries to unearth the long rise of incarceration as a social institution bent toward disappearing targeted populations from land, life, and society in the United States. She is also the project lead for Million Dollar Hoods, a digital mapping project that documents how much is spent on incarceration in Los Angeles.

Eithne Luibhéid is a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona. She served as the director of the Institute for LGBT Studies from 2007-2011. Her research focuses on the connections among queer lives, state immigration controls, and justice struggles. Luibhéid is the author of Pregnant on Arrival: Making the ‘Illegal’ Immigrant (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Luibhéid’s current book manuscript, “Why Don’t They Just Get in Line? Immigration, Deportability, and Queer Intimacies,” explores how deportability is being extended and resisted through intimate ties between LGBT undocumented migrants and US citizens.

Lara Putnam is UCIS Research Professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes on Latin American and Caribbean history, theories and methods of transnational history, and issues of migration, kinship, and gender. Publications include The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (UNC Press, 2002), Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (UNC Press, 2013), and more than two dozen chapters and articles. Recent honors include the Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize of Association of Caribbean Historians, for “Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean,” Journal of British Studies (2014) and the 32nd Annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lectureship at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica (2016). Putnam is President of the Conference on Latin American History and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.

Free and open to the public.

This LSA Bicentennial Theme Semester event is presented with support from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the University of Michigan Bicentennial Office. Additional support provided by Afroamerican and African Studies; American Culture; Anthropology; Arab and Muslim American Studies; Asian, Pacific Islander American Studies; Bentley Historical Library; Comparative Literature; Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies; English Language and Literature; Frankel Center for Judaic Studies; History; Institute for the Humanities; Latino/a Studies; Latinx Studies Workshop; Office of Research; Rackham Graduate School Dean’s Office; Romance Languages and Literatures; and William L. Clements Library.