An African American and Latinx History of the United States Read online

  “An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a gift. Paul Ortiz wields the engaging power of a social historian to bring vividly to life so many Black and Brown fighters for human rights in the Americas. Ambitious, original, and enlightening, Ortiz weaves together the seemingly separate strivings of Latinx and Black peoples into a beautiful tapestry of struggle.”

  —IBRAM X. KENDI,

  National Book Award–winning

  author of Stamped from the Beginning:

  The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

  “Paul Ortiz is a true people’s historian, and his new book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, is essential reading for our times. Ortiz, with graceful prose and a clear, compelling narrative, shows that what is exceptional about America is exactly what those who proclaim American exceptionalism the loudest want to bury: a history of struggle, international in its dimensions, inspiring in its audacity, of Black and Brown people fighting for the right to live with dignity.”

  —GREG GRANDIN,

  author of Empire of Necessity: Slavery,

  Freedom, and Deception in the New World

  “Paul Ortiz’s new book is a crucial read for our current moment. Like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which popularized a radical new approach to history written from ‘the bottom up,’ Ortiz’s multi-faceted work brings together a little-known history of Black and Brown collaborative struggle against white supremacy and imperialism from the very origins of the American Revolution through the ascension of Donald Trump.”

  —DONNA MURCH,

  author of Living for the City

  “An imaginatively conceived, carefully researched, beautifully written, and passionately argued book that places the emancipatory internationalism of Black and Latinx peoples at the center of the national past and present . . . Accessible, engaging, and enlightening.”

  —GEORGE LIPSITZ,

  author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

  “A fierce and masterful work of historical scholarship. Extraordinary in its depth and breadth, this book transforms not only the history we think we know about Black and Latinx freedom struggles but also the very lens through which we understand them. An African American and Latinx History of the United States reveals shared revolutionary imaginations across the Americas linking Mexico and Haiti, Cuba and the US South, and exposes powerful visions of justice, peace, and the promise of abolition in the face of racial capitalism.”

  —GAYE THERESA JOHNSON,

  author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity

  “Paul Ortiz has written an epic, panoramic account of class struggles in the Western Hemisphere. At center stage are the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people who built the ‘new world,’ suffered, survived, and shattered human bondage, resisted imperialism, made revolutions, saved democracy, fought for power and social justice, and found a possible road to freedom—together.”

  —ROBIN D. G. KELLEY,

  author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

  “Paul Ortiz delivers us the history of the United States from the viewpoint of black and brown people, from Crispus Attucks and José Maria Morelos to César Chávez and Martin Luther King, Jr. The result is simultaneously invigorating, embarrassing, and essential to anyone interested in what the revolutionaries of years past can teach us about struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy today.”

  —WILLIAM P. JONES,

  author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom,

  and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights

  “A groundbreaking book about African Americans and Latino/a Americans whose ancestors came from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Paul Ortiz highlights their respective roles in the shaping of the US working class from the days of the International Workers of the World in the 1800s to its rebirth in the present historic moment. He has captured the historic drama of their collective experience in their struggles for social justice, writing from the perspective of an activist scholar engaged in the current issues facing both peoples.”

  —CARLOS MUÑOZ JR.,

  author of Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement

  BOOKS IN THE REVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES

  A Queer History of the United States

  by Michael Bronski

  A Disability History of the United States

  by Kim E. Nielsen

  An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

  by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  For Sheila Payne:

  compañera and sister in struggle

  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 1820s

  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 1890s

  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 WAR ON 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

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I was born in 1964 and it was in fourth grade that I remember the words being used against me for the first time. It was dinnertime at the kitchen table when my new, white, stepfather announced that if I wanted to continue eating meals with the family I would have to “stop eating like a spic, and stop drinking like a nigger.” Until I learned proper table manners I was forbidden to eat with my mother and baby sister. My stepfather referred to incidents where I defied his authority as “Mexican standoffs” and he washed my mouth out with hot sauce as a lesson. He forced me to change my name from Paul Ortiz to Mick MacDonald, MacDonald being his surname. I was taught by the white adults around me that “the Blacks and Mexicans” (the two groups were constantly paired in derision in the discourse of the post–civil rights era) had contributed nothing to the United States. To “real Americans,” we were all thieves. We stole good Americans’ jobs, but at the same time we were terribly lazy. Somehow we had also stolen their country, even though we had no idea how any of this had happened.

  There is a popular academic text on race and ethnicity titled How the Irish Became White, but much of my early childhood years could be called How a Mexican American Boy Became Irish. My mother’s marriage to MacDonald ended in my mother’s second divorce, and I spent my teenage life trying to reclaim my original name as well as my ability to speak in public—in those years I was struck with a severe speech impediment. Racism was a pervasive fact of life for my Chicano and Black peers in San Leandro, California, and Bremerton, Washington—the towns wher
e I spent most of my youth. Racism robbed us of our childhoods, and it destroyed our families.

  I wrote this book because as a scholar I want to ensure that no Latinx or Black children ever again have to be ashamed of who they are and of where they come from. Collectively speaking, African Americans and Latinx people have nothing to apologize for. Every democratic right we enjoy is an achievement that our ancestors fought, suffered, and died for. When I was growing up, their struggle was not part of the curriculum. We were not taught that Mexico abolished slavery long before the United States did. We did not learn that African Americans organized an international solidarity campaign to support the Cuban War of Liberation against Spain. No one seemed to know that Haiti was viewed by many of our ancestors as a beacon of liberty during the grimmest moments of our own independence wars against the Europeans. We were ignorant of the fact that every country in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa has a history of democratic struggle to be proud of. The descendants of these epic movements are today’s reviled “free-loading” immigrants.

  This book is rooted in nearly two decades of university teaching, years of labor and community organizing, and my experiences coming of age as a Chicano in the United States. At Duke University, I offered a seminar titled Black/Latino Histories, Cultures and Politics, as part of a one-year visiting assistant professorship after I finished my history doctorate there in 2000. I had already taught separate courses in African American and Latinx studies as a graduate student. However, Duke students involved in labor organizing, human rights, and health advocacy told me that what they desperately needed was a new kind of course that placed the histories of the Black and Latinx diasporas in dialog. Students were searching for a course of study that addressed the upsurge of immigration by people from Central America and Mexico to North Carolina. Lacking in critical discourse were insights into how these demographic shifts would impact the potential for social change in a state where African Americans had historically been oppressed. Even now, students in my African American and Latinx Histories research seminar at the University of Florida are asking questions about the history of the Americas that cannot be answered using historical frameworks that have been rendered obsolete by the forces of globalization.

  I first learned the craft of social history as an organizer with the United Farm Workers of Washington State. In the midst of the eight-year boycott of Chateau St. Michelle Wines, where vineyard workers were struggling for union representation, I was frequently asked to give workshops about the history of the labor movement, the United Farm Workers, and earlier worker-consumer boycotts and strikes. This taught me the importance of historical research as a tool to pursue the truth on behalf of justice. People depended on me to “get the story right,” to frankly discuss the flaws of the labor movement, and to present American history as a usable narrative, warts and all. This meant trying to explain why agricultural workers in the centuries between Christopher Columbus and Ronald Reagan were generally impoverished while their employers were fabulously rich. Answering this question informs the direction of this text.

  My experiences as a paratrooper and radio operator in the United States Army in the early 1980s formed a crucial part of the intellectual trajectory that led me to write this book. Herman Melville famously said, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” For me, service in the US Special Forces in Central America was an epiphany. In combat zones I learned that the edifying story I had learned about my nation as a guardian and promoter of democracy was false. It took me many more years to explain exactly what was wrong with that history, and how a new and more accurate story might be told.

  INTRODUCTION

  “KILLED HELPING WORKERS TO ORGANIZE”

  REENVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY

  This book draws from the voices and experiences of people from the African and Latinx Diasporas in the Americas to offer a new interpretation of United States history from the American Revolution to the present.

  This is a story about how people across the hemisphere wove together antislavery, anticolonial, pro-freedom, and pro-working-class movements against tremendous obstacles. Historians have often used Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and other European texts to discuss the development of American institutions and culture. How does our interpretation of American history change when we take our cues more from organizers such as Cuba’s José Martí, Jamaica-born Amy Jacques Garvey, and the abolitionist Reverend Henry Highland Garnet—as well as the movements that they were a part of?

  In stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach that involves building a wall between the United States and Mexico, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. “The people of Latin-America ethnologically are very little different from the Afro-American of this country,” a columnist for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, wrote in 1915. “They have Indian blood in their veins; so have we. They have African blood in their veins; so have we. They have European blood in their veins; so have we. It is only a difference in degree.”1 When the United States deployed occupying armies into the Caribbean and Central America, the Chicago Defender demanded an immediate withdrawal: “The United States cannot expect to succeed in establishing friendly relations or gain commercial growth and influence in Latin America until they have rightly and forever settled the race problem in this country, and further the Anglo-Saxon will continue to borrow trouble throughout the world just so long as they exploit their claim of superiority over other groups of dark-skinned people.”2

  In a time of endless war, with democracy in full retreat, I argue that we must chart pathways toward equality for all people by digging deep into the past and rediscovering the ideas of Emancipation Day lecturers, Mexicano newspaper editors, abolitionists, Latin American revolutionaries, and Black anti-imperialists who dreamed of democratic ways of living in the Americas. We have too often forgotten the connections that movement organizers built between people’s movements for freedom in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. The recovery of these truths is more vital than ever as the United States erects barriers to divide humanity from itself in a fit of historical amnesia. In Border Odyssey: Travels Along the U.S./Mexico Divide, Charles D. Thompson Jr. reminds readers, “Stories are the opposite of walls; they demand release, retelling, showing, connecting, each image chipping away at boundaries.”3 An African American and Latinx History of the United States seeks to chip away at the barriers that have been placed in the way of understanding between people, between nations.

  THE PROBLEM OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

  The abolitionist Frederick Douglass sought to reenvision American history as he took to a podium in Boston to explain the origin of the Civil War to an audience of Northerners in 1862. While his audience likely expected him to heap invective against the Confederacy, Douglass came to demand that Northerners take responsibility for their part in the making of the catastrophe. Douglass toiled to change his listeners’ understanding of their history in order to make them realize the damage their politics had wrought. Above all, Douglass had to dismantle what Americans have always treasured most: their innocence, and the sense that their history was so exceptional that they had managed to avoid the problems other nations faced. Douglass began by observing that the Civil War had been ushered in by decades of settler colonialism, corruption, and the promotion of slavery. In a rush to expand slavery’s profits, the United States had transformed the Americas into a gigantic war zone:

  We have bought Florida, waged war with friendly Seminoles, purchased Louisiana, annexed Texas, fought Mexico, trampled on the right of petition, abridged the freedom of debate, paid ten million to Texas upon a fraudulent claim, mobbed the Abolitionists, repealed the Missouri Compromise, winked at the accursed slave trade, helped to extend slavery, given slaveholders a larger share of all the offices and honors than we claimed for ourselves, pai
d their postage, supported the Government, persecuted free negroes, refused to recognize Hayti and Liberia, stained our souls by repeated compromises, borne with Southern bluster, allowed our ships to be robbed of their hardy sailors, defeated a central road to the Pacific, and have descended to the meanness and degradation of negro dogs, and hunted down the panting slave escaping from his tyrant master—all to make the South love us; and yet how stands our relations?4

  In one damning sentence, Douglass placed slavery and imperialism at the center of the nation’s development. He sought to make his listeners recognize that the United States’ egregious behavior vis-à-vis Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa was decisive in the republic’s precipitous collapse. Douglass believed that the United States needed to surrender the image of itself as an exceptional icon of liberty in order to deal with the self-inflicted problems that had driven the country into bloody civil war. He also reminded his Yankee audience that their pursuit of profits at the expense of human rights had had lasting consequences. The Black abolitionist insisted that his nation must abandon its claims to innocence. The problems that Douglass identified—the United States’ propensity to wage self-destructive offensive wars on other nations, avarice, racism, and the suppression of dissent—continue to plague the nation into the twenty-first century. Little wonder that Douglass—the Lion of Anacostia, referring to the area of Washington, DC, where Douglass resided—often faced physical violence in public from enraged spectators who took issue with his incisive attacks on the republic’s most sacred myths.5

  A century later, the editors of El Malcriado, the newspaper published by the Filipino and Chicana/o farmworker movement, otherwise known as the United Farm Worker Organizing Committee (UFWOC), interpreted the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as shedding critical light on US history. The entire April 15, 1968, edition of El Malcriado—literally, “The Troublemaker”—was dedicated to the life of the fallen civil rights leader, who had been gunned down in Memphis earlier that month. The issue’s cover featured a drawing of King leading a protest march with the Memphis sanitation workers’ iconic “I Am a Man” picket sign in the background. The editors titled this special issue “Killed Helping Workers to Organize,” and they printed telegrams of support and solidarity that had been exchanged by UFWOC cofounder César Chávez and King. In one article, “The Man They Killed,” King was presented as a man who “fought against police brutality and the violence which grinds down the lives of our people and all the disinherited.”6