An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz. Boston. 2018. Beacon Press. 9780807013106. American Crossroads 16. 276 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Louis Roe.
DESCRIPTION - 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. 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.
Professor Paul Ortiz (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His book Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 was awarded the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology. He also co-edited and conducted oral history interviews for the book, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South. He teaches undergraduate courses and supervises graduate fields in African American history, Latinx history, comparative ethnic studies, U.S. South, labor, social movement theory, oral history and field work methodologies among other topics. Ortiz is currently working on three books: Settler Colonialism and the ‘War on Terror’: 1492 to the Present, which will be published by Beacon Press. He is co-editing a book with Wesley Hogan of Duke University titled Changing the System Now: People Power, History, and Organizing in the 21st Century, which includes contributions by William Greider, Lane Windham, Ernie Cortes and other activist intellectuals. He is currently finishing a synthesis of the segregated South with William H. Chafe titled: Behind the Veil: African Americans in the Age of Segregation, 1895-1965. Professor Ortiz is the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Under his leadership, SPOHP has received three national academic awards. The program offers oral history and experiential learning classroom and fieldwork opportunities year-round. The Proctor Program has led 15 field work trips to the Mississippi Delta where students have interviewed veterans of the civil rights movement. Most recently, SPOHP students helped to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Elaine Massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas. The program has also facilitated field work on special topics including global climate change, Latinx studies, African American history, women’s history, LGBT studies and many other areas. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 2008 after teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Community Studies between 2001-2008.
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