Kelly Lytle Hernández launches her new book Racist by Design in conversation with Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero.

The book traces the American immigration system from its origins to the way it works today. Most accounts begin with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. Lytle Hernández starts a full century earlier, with the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, which prompted both the country’s first immigration bans and its first refugee resettlement program. She shows how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of the current system as expressly whites only, and how Congress amended that system during the Civil Rights Movement while leaving many of its rules intact. She calls the book “an act of sabotage,” a blueprint published so the system can be dismantled.

Lytle Hernández and Guerrero will discuss that history and what rebuilding a just immigration system would take.

Village Well Books & Coffee will sell copies on site. A reception with wine and light bites follows the conversation in the garden.

Seating for this free program is first come, first served.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA and a MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of Racist by Design, Bad Mexicans, and other award-winning books on race, immigration, policing, and incarceration. She lives in Los Angeles.

Jean Guerrero is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times and the author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. She previously covered the U.S.-Mexico border as an investigative journalist for KPBS and the PBS News Hour affiliate in San Diego. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Vanity Fair. She lives in Los Angeles.