An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by ORTIZ, PAUL

• ISBN13: 9780807013106
• ISBN10: 0807013102
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-01-30
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

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

Author Biography

Paul Ortiz is a professor of history and the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. He is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 and coeditor of the oral history Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

INTRODUCTION
“Killed Helping Workers to Organize”
REENVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY

CHAPTER 1
The Haitian Revolution and the Birth of Emancipatory Internationalism, 1770s to 1920s

CHAPTER 2
The Mexican War of Independence and US History
ANTI-IMPERIALISM AS A WAY OF LIFE, 1820s TO 1850s

CHAPTER 3
“To Break the Fetters of Slaves All Over the World”
THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1850s TO 1865

CHAPTER 4
Global Visions of Reconstruction
THE CUBAN SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT, 1860s TO 1880s

CHAPTER 5
Waging War on the Government of American Banks in the Global South, 1890s to 1920s

CHAPTER 6
Forgotten Workers of America
RACIAL CAPITALISM AND THE WORKING CLASS, 1890s TO 1940s

CHAPTER 7
Emancipatory Internationalism vs. the American Century, 1945 to 1960s

CHAPTER 8
El Gran Paro Estadounidense
THE REBIRTH OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS, 1970s TO THE PRESENT

EPILOGUE
A New Origin Narrative of American History

Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index