Paul Ortiz's An African American and Latinx History of the United States, published in 2018, offers a revolutionary and politically charged narrative that challenges traditional understandings of US history. Spanning more than two hundred years, the book argues that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it.
Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy.” He 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. This book connects the stories of freedom fighters in the Mexican War of Independence to Africans and Indigenous people who challenged slavery in Spanish Florida, as well as Harlemites who railed against the US military occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s.
According to Ortiz, to comprehend where we are and how we got here, we must go outside the confines of the nation-state for answers. This movement-centered approach to history raises up the voices of the people who built democracy across borders and helps us overcome the paralyzing nationalistic myths that have divided people in this hemisphere for too long. There are many in the United States today who believe that there is only one way to be an “American,” but history teaches us that this is not true.
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
Key Themes and Concepts
The book delves into several key themes, revealing the intertwined struggles of African American and Latinx communities in the United States. Here are some of the core concepts explored:
Emancipatory Internationalism
This concept, central to Ortiz's work, implies a series of historical connections between American countries at the hemispheric level. Emancipatory internationalism can be understood then as internationalism made in the Americas. It unites peoples and their histories beyond categories of race, language, or cultural specificities, attending to their diversity. This is in opposition to the predominant historical narrative that places the United States as a champion of Western civilization.
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This concept springs from Ortiz’s reading of the archive, and it is valuable to develop a hemispheric perspective on the continent that serves not only as a radical critique of myths and imaginaries of the Eurocentric West, but also as an invitation to understand our history as that of pluri-ethnic and pluricultural working-class peoples with multiple connections in common, particularly regarding the different movements and social organizations through which they have fought to achieve rights and freedoms both in the United States, and in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
Emancipatory internationalism arises from decades of struggle against slavery, colonialism and the full range of oppressions from which we still suffer. It also accounts for the need for self-determination of peoples as a mechanism for expanding guarantees for the full development of the potential of our societies, and as a way of overcoming the sociopathic mandates of economic entities and white supremacism. Ortiz’s aim emerges from “ordinary people’s capacity to create democracy in action (...) the capacity of workers, immigrants, and marginalized people to organize for social change” (Ortiz, 2018, p. 233).
Racial Capitalism
Ortiz weaves together narratives of struggle within African American, Latinx, and Indigenous working communities, mostly against the oppositional forces of what he calls “racial capitalism.” These include the exploitation of racialized agricultural workers through the establishment of agribusiness based on dispossession of land, and its legitimization when the New Deal politics, in collusion with cohorts of politicians who guaranteed extremely poor conditions for workers, failed the working class. This perpetuated the country's imperialism under the cloak of the military-industrial complex and racial capitalism.
Anti-Imperialism
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. African Americans repeatedly pointed out that slavery and imperialism were fatally intertwined and encoded in the nation’s institutions from the very beginning, with grave consequences for all of the citizens of the Americas.
Chapter Overview
The book is structured into eight chapters, each exploring significant events and periods in US history through the lens of African American and Latinx experiences:
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- The Haitian Revolution and the Birth of Emancipatory Internationalism, 1770s to 1920s: Details how the struggle for African American emancipation was deeply linked to the liberation processes of the Haitian Revolution.
- The Mexican War of Independence and US History: Explores visions of emancipation that flourished in the antebellum era, linking the Mexican War of Independence to the anti-slavery movement in the United States.
- “To Break the Fetters of Slaves All Over the World”: The Internationalization of the Civil War, 1850s to 1865: Describes how the Civil War was viewed by African Americans through an internationalist lens, with anti-slavery struggles unfolding across the hemisphere.
- Global Visions of Reconstruction: The Cuban Solidarity Movement, 1860s to 1880s: Shows how the African American General Strike influenced emancipatory internationalism by connecting the struggle for rights and freedom with similar struggles of oppressed peoples.
- Waging War on the Government of American Banks in the Global South, 1890s to 1920s: Delineates how anti-imperialism took root within US African American communities, defining US corporations' actions in Latin America as imperial culture disguised as foreign policy.
- Forgotten Workers of America: Racial Capitalism and the Working Class, 1890s to 1940s: Describes reconfigurations of racial capitalism during the Great Depression, including the exploitation of racialized agricultural workers.
- Emancipatory Internationalism vs. “Afro Latino scholars and activists slam Gov: Introduces the events of the Chapultepec Conference, seen as the origin of the farmworker and Civil Rights movements.
- The Great American Strike of 2005: Discusses the Great American Strike of 2005 and the role of the Black Lives Matter organization as inheritors of emancipatory internationalism in the US.
Impact and Significance
An African American and Latinx History of the United States offers a vital contribution to American historical discourse. It challenges readers to rethink US history in a more pluralistic, heterogeneous, and democratic way. The book highlights the importance of understanding history from different angles, evidencing the need to understand it beyond a linear narrative.
Ortiz's archival work traces the histories of US African and Latin Americans who, from the margins and borders of the country, built democracy from the different angles of popular movements and organizations as opposed to the nation-state centered mythologies that divide us through superfluous differences.
The book serves as a reminder of the long and powerful track record of people who fought united against white supremacy. It is a solid starting point in exploring the history of the US from a critical perspective focused on the working class and its connections to the rest of the hemisphere.
Reception
The book has garnered significant praise for its insightful analysis and alternative perspective on US history. Here are some notable reviews:
- Kirkus Reviews: “A concise, alternate history of the United States. . . .A sleek, vital history that effectively shows how, ‘from the outset, inequality was enforced with the whip, the gun, and the United States Constitution.’”
- Library Journal: “A challenging and necessary approach to understanding our history. A must-read for those who want a deeper perspective than is offered in the traditional history textbook.”
- Booklist: “A welcome antidote to the poison of current reactionary attitudes toward people of color, their cultures, and place in the US.”
- CHOICE: “Here is a far more inclusive, alternative history-one developed from the bottom up-that does not worship the cult of Europe.”
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