An intersectional
history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil
rights
Spanning more than
two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the
United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative
history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the
development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz
challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely
taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian
democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and
Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US
history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.
Drawing on rich
narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial
segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a
powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth
century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when
migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every
continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without
Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim
Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating
grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers,
abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around
movements built between people from the United States and people from
Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the
resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx
intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United
States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the
Americas.
Incisive and timely,
this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points
of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways
that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the
United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued
struggle for universal civil rights.
2018 Winner of the
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award