An African American and Latinx History of the United States (REVISIONING HISTORY)

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

• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)
• A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
• The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy (Cambridge Studies in Stratification Economics: Economics and Social Identity)
• The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean
• Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights Open Media)
• So You Want to Talk About Race
• When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
• Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture
• White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
• The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Politics and Society in Modern America)