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
