Towards a new history of Black-Latinx solidarity
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
By Paul Ortiz, Beacon Press 2018.
Paperback $16.00. Audiobook $20.00
Paul Ortiz’s book An African American and Latinx History of the United States (2018), is a refreshing work that has opened broader vistas of the possible by recovering a wealthy history of Black and Latinx resistance. I hope to highlight important take-aways for those of us looking for a compass and to convince readers of Punto Rojo to engage with and expand on the history covered in the book. As I will outline below, the book allowed me to discover a proud history of Black-Brown solidarity that shows that we are at our strongest when our struggles are united. The book also provided inspiration to wage this fight in the present and I hope that it can do the same for others.
I came to An African American and Latinx History of the United States with the desire to understand Ortiz’s premise for an American history centered on the combined struggles African Americans and Latinx peoples. In this respect, the book did not disappoint, and like Howard Zinn’s classic, the historical breadth and solidarious ethos of Ortiz’s work is comparable. However, Ortiz’s book goes beyond the bounds of a traditional national history as the title might imply.
Writing through the lens of racial capitalism and from the militant perspective of the Black radical tradition, Ortiz offers his book as a reenvisioning of American history, one that centers the shared resistance of Black and Latinx peoples in the United States and also outside of it. In fact, Paul’s book is ambitious in geographic reach, weaving stories of resistance from the American Revolution, to the Civil War, to Cuba, the US Southwest, Mexico, the streets of Harlem, the factories of Detroit and the fields of Florida and California. Through this variegated terrain, the book recovers a twin history of antislavery, anticolonial, pro-freedom, pro-democracy and pro-working class movements.
Throughout the book, readers will find chapters with an expanded version of American history and examples of transnational, multi-racial solidarity. For example, the book prominently features the work of the Lion of Anacostia, Frederick Douglass, and other African Americans who linked Black struggles with anti-colonial movements in the Caribbean and South America.
In an address given in 1847, celebrating the emancipation of the British West Indies, Ortiz writes that Douglass presented the brief for emancipatory internationalism:
“Neither geographical boundaries, nor national restrictions, ought, or shall prevent me from rejoicing over the triumphs of freedom, no matter where or by whom achieved”. Douglass challenged the notion that it was possible to confine the idea of freedom within the boundaries one nation: “On this question, we are strangers to nationality. Our platform is as broad as humanity. We repudiate, with unutterable loathing and disgust, that narrow spirit which would confine our duties to one quarter of the globe, to the exclusion of another” (40).
Such a statement rings with relevance, and shows the internationalist vision that was needed at a time when the United States remained a bastion of slavery. Meanwhile, newly independent Mexico had abolished slavery a decade after independence, becoming a heaven for Blacks escaping slavery.
In the fight against slavery, Douglass and other abolitionists remained staunch anti-imperialists and constantly opposed American expansionism in the West, for they realized that annexation of the west would only strengthen and expand the Southern plantation economy. In 1845, in a speech given in Belfast, Ireland, “Douglass connected the American invasion of Mexico with the oppression of labor, the extension of slavery and the evils of militarism” and as Ortiz writes, “Black and abolitionist journals printed devastating critiques of President James Polk and the war; they denounced the idea that the assault on Mexico was about anything other than preserving and extending slavery” (47).
After the American invasion of Mexico, Black, Cuban and Mexican writers denounced “Manifest Destiny” as a clear expansion of slavery. As Ortiz writes, Mexican writers as far as California wrote in La Voz de Méjico that “Each acre of territory that the South gained, made the price of slaves rise in the market; and consequently this [phenomenon] was duplicated with the acquisition of Texas. From this arose the insatiable desire of the Southern filibusters to take over Cuba and Nicaragua” (50).
By the early 20th Century, capital had established its authority across the United States. However, the new Empire did not go unchallenged from within and Ortiz highlights episodes of multi-racial organizing in the union movement, citing well-known figures as Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, an anarchist of African, Mexican and Indigenous descent. But whether it came to unionization, voting rights or education, white supremacy always sought to undermine African Americans and Latinx workers.
Although the book is rich with detail, it’s impossible to cover such a dense period of labor organizing in one chapter. For those looking for in-depth studies on the turbulent years of American labor, they should look to Robin D. G. Kelly’s Hammer and Hoe (1990) and Justin Akers-Chacón’s Radicals in the Barrio (2018). Similarly, a chapter on the radical sixties is missing altogether from the book. Although we get important references to the period, I was hoping to learn more about solidarity among groups like the Young Lords, the Brown Berets and the Black Panther Party, but I’m sure that the task is as large as it is promising. I hope that a book with a similar vision takes up that period of our American histories.
A personally interesting part of the book was Chapter 7 on Emancipatory Internationalism VS. The American Century. This chapter begins with the enthusiasm of African American and Latin American journalists and activists during the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace of 1945, convened at Chapultepec Castle, in Mexico City. The Chapultepec Conference sought to forge cooperative measures across the hemisphere to consider the maintenance of peace and collective security. The meeting also discussed the methods to develop cooperation to improve the economic and social conditions of the people of the Americas.
While the United States planned to dominate the conference, the Haitian delegation struck a blow to American business as usual and submitted a resolution racial discrimination pointing to the results of the Holocaust. The American delegates were stunned since the resolution was a clear criticism of Southern segregation. As Ortiz writes, “Haiti had once again struck a blow for liberty”. Together with the Mexican hosts, the majority of attendants rallied behind the Haitian resolution and denounced race hatred in the Americas. Taking the lead from the Haitians, Mexican delegates also submitted a resolution against sex discrimination and for the funding of the Inter-American Committee of Women. Not surprisingly, the United States opposed these resolutions and sought undermine these resolutions behind the scenes.
Chapter 7 also has special meaning to me since Carl Hansberry, father of Lorraine Hansberry, was an enthusiastic attendant and reporter at the conference. Towards the end of his life, Carl Hansberry moved to the lakeside village of Acatic, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. His untimely death denied Hansberry senior the chance to find ‘exile’ in Mexico, a colored nation, that was “a place free of the badges of servitude of African Americans” (Perry, 39 2019). After her father’s death, Lorraine visited Acatic as a student and there too she found a refuge, a place to be. As a Mexican-American from Jalisco, this was a surprising detail to learn about the Hansberrys—but one I appreciate deeply because it brings home the importance of writing an African American and Latinx history where we are able to see each other in our lives as allies.
The last chapter of the book begins with the strike of 2006 which became known as a “day without an immigrant” and which Ortiz correctly credits with reviving the American labor movement. Like the general strike of Blacks that struck a deathblow to the Confederacy, Ortiz points to the power of workers when they withhold their labor. However, Ortiz also points to the reaction from the ruling class and white supremacy that we can expect when the working class foes on the offensive. One can see some parallels to the reaction that followed radical reconstruction, to the reaction that followed the 2006 strike—Klan and all—with “Operation Return to Sender“ which ramped up deportations after the strike. With the latest wave of deportations under Obama, Ortiz also shows how persecution of immigrants is related to union busting tactics, especially in the South. Perhaps the weakest point of the book is in this last chapter, where Ortiz focuses on the multiracial effort to elect Obama, but where he does not focus enough attention on Obama’s deportation machine under the failed policy of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”.
Overall, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is an enlightening work and succeeds in its main task of writing an intersectional history of struggle and resistance. It is full of examples of interracial solidarity and it shows that we are at our strongest when our struggles are united against capitalism and the ruling class. For those of us in the trenches, this book can provide inspiration as we forge a new history of Black and Latinx solidarity.
Ortiz, Paul. An African American and Latinx History of the United States. Beacon Press. 2018.
Perry, Imani. Looking for Lorraine. The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. 2018.
Héctor A. Rivera is a queer, socialist, Mexican-American educator in geography. He lives in Los Angeles, Califaztlán.
