An African American and Latinx History of the United States Page 2
El Malcriado reminded readers that King supported collective struggles against poverty through mass action and union organizing. The farmworkers’ newspaper also emphasized how King linked domestic working-class struggles with international liberation:
It was no accident that Martin Luther King placed himself in the center of the battle against the war in Vietnam. He saw the slaughter of Vietnamese farmworkers as an atrocious abuse of military power. He spoke out against the outrageous use of Black youth and all minority youth as cannon fodder in a war of annihilation. He chose to aim his movement at the war despite the advice of many that such a turn could destroy the movement for human rights.7
This was a twentieth-century version of Frederick Douglass’s thesis that oppression and militarism destroyed the nation’s ability to become truly democratic. Moreover, it was a primer on how poor people made history: they organized themselves. In contrast to the national origin story of heroic Founding Fathers who founded a nation where civil liberties were steadily expanding, El Malcriado’s theory of history took into account the exploitation of agricultural labor that stretched back to the slave labor camps of the early Americas. This bitter knowledge of the way that racial capitalism tyrannized farmworkers across centuries allowed El Malcriado’s editors to connect Black history to the struggles of farmworkers to create a new synthesis of US history. The UFWOC placed its faith in the power of poor people to join together and transform the society from the bottom up. This was the union’s vision of historical progress: “We have a debt to Dr. King, a debt larger than to any living man. It can only be repaid by effectively organizing in the fields of our nation, so that farm workers can wrest their right to dignity and a decent life from the forces that have confined us so long.”8
Here, we will retrace the odysseys of African American and Latinx thinkers as they theorized outside the nation’s borders and beyond its mythologies of innocence and exceptionalism to challenge the crises facing them inside of the belly of the beast. El Malcriado did not believe that a return to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the principles of the US Constitution would solve their members’ problems. The Colored American, one of the nation’s first Black newspapers, had asserted quite frankly in 1840, “Now our Government is a government of slaveholders and has been so for more than forty years. Slavery has made war and peace for us, embargo and non-intercourse; it has set up and pulled down protective and banking systems.”9 Francisco P. Ramírez, the abolitionist founder of El Clamor Público, a Los Angeles–based Spanish-language newspaper, wrote in 1855, “The United States’ conception of freedom is truly curious. This much lauded freedom is imaginary. . . . To buy a man for money, to hang or burn him alive arbitrarily, is another great liberty which any individual has here, according to his likes. This happens in the United States, where slavery is tolerated, where the most vile despotism reigns unchecked—in the middle of a nation that they call the ‘Model Republic.’”10
Generations of Black and Latinx writers argued that the ability of oppressed people throughout the world to exercise genuine self-determination would strengthen liberty in the United States. This idea of emancipatory internationalism was born of centuries of struggle against slavery, colonialism, and oppression in the Americas. When Martin Luther King connected the lives of Vietnamese villagers with the prospects of Black youths in South Central Los Angeles he was drawing on an extraordinary fountain of experiential wisdom. In her foreword to Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Coretta Scott King noted that her husband “spoke out sharply for all the poor in all their hues, for he knew if color made them different, misery and oppression made them the same.”11 In the midst of Reconstruction, the Christian Recorder, the national organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, exulted in the rising of Cuban people against the Spanish empire. The Christian Recorder’s editors believed that a Cuban victory would enhance freedom’s march everywhere: “The Cuban Revolutionists still hold out against all the force the Spaniards are able to bring against them. A number of battles have been fought, in all which the Cubans show bravery worthy of the cause in which they fight. . . . Spain may as well keep her legions at home. They can never crush out the spirit of liberty in the Queen of the Antilles.”12
Herein lies a new way to understand American history. The radical ideas of Frederick Douglass, the Christian Recorder, and the editors of El Malcriado were generated in social movements where people came together to learn how to overturn slavery and other forms of domination. Placing these struggles at the heart of the historical narrative allows us to reenvision a vibrant past that shines a path for every individual who yearns for a more democratic future.
CONFRONTING AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Students of color and working-class students in general lament their people’s absence and inferior placement in this nation’s historical record as reflected in history and other textbooks. The majority of students whom I have taught do not believe that their textbooks present a realistic story of how we reached this point in our history nor how we might use the past to address historically rooted problems. High school students often find history “boring,” elitist, and worse. One of my former students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explained: “As a student of African heritage growing up in Santa Cruz, a predominantly Caucasian town, the role my ancestors played in the development of the country was never revealed. Slavery was always downplayed in favor of glorifying Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. How was I to regard my heritage with confidence while the environment I was raised in depicted Africans as nothing but slaves saved by a white man? Believe me, no teacher ever let me forget that.”13
All of this leads me to maintain that we need to create what Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, a Chicana scholar and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer, calls a “new origin narrative” of American history.14 Many of the events chronicled in the following chapters either occurred outside the boundaries of the United States or happened in such a manner as to make the idea of borders and boundaries seem absurd. Creating a new origin narrative of our history means following the African American writer Carl Hansberry as he traveled to Mexico in 1945 to report on a conference that proposed to end racism and militarism in the Americas. It means keying on individuals such as Geoconda Arguello Kline, who left Nicaragua in 1983 and helped to organize a labor union in Nevada composed of individuals from eighty-four nations. In his essay “A Chicano in Philadelphia,” Danny Romero writes, “If there had never been a George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, I would still have been born in ‘El Norte.’ If there had never been a Woodrow Wilson, a Nixon, or Reagan, I still would have been born in (El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de) Los Angeles. My history stems from south to north, not east to west.”15 Today, the descendants of former slaves and the descendants of people in Latin America and the Caribbean are heirs to oft-forgotten lineages of democratic struggle that provide vital reminders of how linked our histories are in the Americas.
Those interested in the origins of democratic traditions in this country must look to Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa as often as they look to Europe. In eras when fascism, eugenics, and apartheid dominated the nations of Europe and the Global North, it was often ideas from the Global South (referring here mainly to the nations of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa)—as well as the immigrants who brought those ideas to the United States—that rejuvenated US political culture.16 The historian Greg Grandin has observed that “Latin America is famous for revolutionaries, but Latin America practically invented social democracy. The world’s first fully realized social democratic constitution was [framed in] Mexico. The right to organize, the right to education, the right to health care: those rights disseminated throughout Latin America, and then they found their way into the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Latin America invented what we think of as modern social democracy, and it never gets credit for it.”17
Readers will quickly see the debt I o
we to Chicana/o and Black studies scholars who have taught us how to make critical knowledge accessible to the broadest possible audiences. This book draws on classic texts in the field of ethnic studies to emphasize themes including democratic striving, coalition building, and the dream of the self-emancipation of the working classes of all nations and peoples.18
Drawing deeply on scholarship in labor studies, this book reenvisions American history as working-class history. Standard approaches to the nation’s story stressed a tale of steady progress toward the creation of a middle-class republic, but this progressive narrative does not square with the facts. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed of most white people in the nation: “They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions.”19 The United States has persisted in creating economic, legal, and political barriers to full citizenship for much of the nation’s workforce.
Whether one studies the fate of African American workers at the nation’s inception or the experiences of twelve million “undocumented” immigrant workers today, disenfranchisement has been a traumatic factor of life for millions of working-class people.20 The imperial thrust of US military and trade policies—often pursued in tandem—has resulted in what journalist Juan González calls a “Harvest of Empire.”21 I witnessed this traumatic process firsthand as a Special Forces soldier in the 1980s carrying out foreign policies that forced numerous residents in Central America to leave their homelands for El Norte.22 Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Junot Díaz, whose family originally hailed from the Dominican Republic, writes, “I’m here because the United States invaded my country in 1965, an illegal invasion, completely trumped-up excuse to invade the Dominican Republic and crush our democratic hopes. We’ve lived the consequences of that illegal invasion politically, economically, and in the bodies of the people who were wounded, in the bodies of the people who were killed. We’ve been living it for over 40 years.”23
EXPLANATION OF TERMS USED IN THIS BOOK
Broad terms such as “Black” and “Brown” are necessary to describe groups of people who have struggled to survive in a society determined to keep them at the bottom rungs of the social order—but they are also problematic. In the 1960s, many young Mexican Americans or Spanish-speaking Americans began using terms like “Chicano y Chicana” to describe themselves. These had once been terms of derision, but a newly politicized generation of youths transformed “Chicano” into a term of pride. I began to describe myself as a Chicano when I became an organizer with the United Farm Workers of Washington State in the late 1980s. Elder activists in the United Farm Workers also taught me the term “La Raza” (“our people”), which acknowledged our Indigenous roots and five centuries of struggle against European imperialism. I learned later that the farmworker movement had long served as an incubator of political identity for people of Mexican descent. Likewise, the markers of self-identity used by residents of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic changed—sometimes dramatically—over time.24 The Spanish language is a gendered language, and I have adopted the newer term “Latinx” to reflect my students’ search for “a gender-inclusive way of referring to people of Latin American descent residing in the United States.”25
In the early twentieth century, African Americans commonly referred to themselves and their loved ones as “Negroes” or “colored” people. During insurgent freedom movements in the 1960s, however, the terms “Black,” “Afro-American,” and “African American” were put forth by activists and writers. Because this is a historical study, I will generally use terms of identification invoked and preferred by individuals given their specific historical context and circumstances.
Black and Brown histories have always overlapped. The anthropologist Martha Menchaca notes that Mexican Americans have African, Indigenous, and European roots that go back centuries.26 Literary scholar Marta E. Sánchez stresses that intercultural connections between Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano cultures have been a pervasive aspect of life in the Western Hemisphere.27 Millions of people in the Americas identify with multiple ancestries, including Afro-Latinx, Indo-African, moreno, mestizo, biracial, and multiracial, among many other conceptions of identity.28 Today, many Latin American countries are acknowledging the cultural and civilizational debts they owe to African civilizations. Mexico has declared Africa to be Nuestra Tercera Raíz (Our Third Root) of the nation, and increasing numbers of Mexicans are identifying as Afro-Mexicans.29
CONNECTING THE STRANDS OF HISTORY
In the course of my research, I have learned that it is impossible to understand United States history as a singular entity. To comprehend where we are and how we got here, we must go outside the confines of the nation-state for answers. 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. 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. To quote Aimé Césaire, “There is room for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.”
Connecting Black and Latinx historical experiences draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s idea of “intersectionality,” as well as the timeless idea that forms of oppression—as well as methods of resistance to that oppression—are linked.30 This does not mean, however, that one can erase the distinctive experiences that mark centuries of exploitation in the Americas. Manuel Pastor and Angela Glover Blackwell urge us to avoid the trap of historical amnesia:
In a time of increasing diversity, it might be tempting to look beyond the black-white framework that structures race relations and social and economic opportunity. To the contrary, as other racial minorities grow, it becomes increasingly important to address the fundamental question of fairness for African Americans, which affects the fortunes of the other groups. The black-white economic and social divide created by slavery and cemented through years of servitude and subjugation has endured and helped shape America.31
Shortly after El Malcriado published its tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, it announced that a series of educational workshops in Spanish would be held for the children of striking grape workers in Delano, California. Students would study Mexican folklore and art, and that they would be taught lessons about the lives of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, “and the leaders of the farm workers’ Cause.”32 It was a course of study emphasizing revolutionary struggle as well as pride in the cultures and survival of African Americans and Chicanos. It is just the kind of new origin narrative that An African American and Latinx History of the United States seeks to promote as a way to reenvision American history more accurately and more democratically.
CHAPTER 1
THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF EMANCIPATORY INTERNATIONALISM, 1770s TO 1820s
The foremost issue facing the Americas in the Age of Revolution—roughly from the 1770s to the 1840s—was the future of slavery in a hemisphere bristling with anticolonial insurgencies. In 1780, Peru’s José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera, claiming the mantle of the last King of the Incan Empire, rechristened himself Tupac Amaru II, and with his African-descent wife, Micaela Bastidas, launched a rebellion against Spanish rule. Tupac Amaru II recruited a massive army that included Indigenous Peruvians, mestizos, libertos, and slaves, in an effort to end European rule forever.1 In this same period, a cohort of propertied elites in Great Britain’s thirteen North American colonies organized a revolution to safeguard slavery, proper
ty, and political power.2 Thomas Jefferson and his peers sought to preserve as much as they looked to overthrow. The Founding Fathers looked primarily to Europe for inspiration.3 They drew on the ideas of the political theorist John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers to construct rationales for racial slavery, the expropriation of Native lands, and control of the continent’s unruly masses, disdainfully referred to by elites as “the people out of doors.”4
The wealth built up by enslaved African labor gave English colonists the resources they needed to challenge British rule and to subsequently contest European powers for domination in the Western Hemisphere.5 The slave plantation was the engine of early economic growth in the Americas, and the force behind the rise of global markets in tobacco, sugar, molasses, dyestuffs, cotton, and other commodities.6 The pages of the Charleston-based South Carolina Gazette in the 1770s reveal an interior world of racial capitalism and the degradation of labor: “Anyone person who wants to hire a negro with a good breast of milk, and without a child—Enquire of the printer,” reads a typical item.7 Another advertisement noted that three “negroes” would be sold along with brandy, porter, and empty bottles.8