Paul Ortiz - An African American and Latinx History of the United States

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 Awardwinning
author of Stamped from the Beginning:
The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Paul Ortiz is a true peoples 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 Ortizs new book is a crucial read for our current moment. Like Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States, which popularized a radical new approach to history written from the bottom up, Ortizs 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 freedomtogether.

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 Jos Maria Morelos to Csar Chvez 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 MUOZ 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:
compaera and sister in struggle

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 postcivil 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 mothers marriage to MacDonald ended in my mothers second divorce, and I spent my teenage life trying to reclaim my original name as well as my ability to speak in publicin 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, Washingtonthe towns where 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 todays 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.