An African American and Latinx History of the United States (revisioning History)

Paul Ortiz, a historian, labor organizer, and US Army veteran who grew up under racism as a Chicano (a Mexican American identity term), constructs what he calls a "new origin narrative" of American history. He centers African American and Latinx voices across the Americas to challenge the dominant story of American exceptionalism: the belief that the United States is uniquely democratic and exemplary among nations. Latinx is a gender-inclusive term for people of Latin American descent. His central framework is "emancipatory internationalism," born of centuries of struggle against slavery, colonialism, and oppression, in which Black and Latinx organizers linked domestic fights for justice with liberation movements across the hemisphere.

Ortiz begins in the Age of Revolution, arguing that the American Revolution was fundamentally a war to preserve slavery and property. While propertied elites sought to safeguard chattel bondage, African Americans fought to transform the revolution into a struggle for universal freedom. Lemuel Haynes, a free Black Revolutionary War soldier, wrote "Liberty Further Extended" in 1776, insisting that the Declaration of Independence's promises must apply to Africans. Approximately 5,000 Black men served in Patriot armies, and African Americans petitioned colonial legislatures to make emancipation a central goal. After the war, however, the Constitution protected slavery through the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved people fractionally for representation; the Fugitive Slave Clause, which mandated returning escaped enslaved people; and the Electoral College, which amplified slaveholding power. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to "free white persons," entrenching racial exclusion.

The 1791 slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, became the foundational inspiration for emancipatory internationalism. The revolutionaries defeated European armies and declared Haitian independence in 1804. African Americans commemorated the revolution through newspapers, public celebrations, and education, and it inspired slave revolts including Gabriel's Rebellion in Virginia, the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, and Denmark Vesey's planned revolt in Charleston. In Baltimore, African Americans built cultures of resistance through churches, schools, and the Underground Railroad. At an 1825 celebration, participants toasted "Washington, Toussaint, and Bolívar," connecting their freedom with emancipation movements across the Americas.

Ortiz turns to the Mexican War of Independence, led by José María Morelos, a man of African, Indigenous, and European descent who called for the abolition of slavery. Morelos proposed a "beautiful bond" between the two nations against tyranny, but racial capitalism, an economic system built on racial exploitation, doomed his vision. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams denigrated Latin American independence movements as "servile wars" and used racial arguments to justify US expansion. Mexico's abolition of slavery in 1829 made it a sanctuary for enslaved African Americans, who established a new line of the Underground Railroad stretching south. Frederick Douglass, a leading Black abolitionist, and the Black press linked the US invasion of Mexico in 1846 with the extension of slavery, while Francisco P. Ramírez, an abolitionist newspaper editor, challenged US imperialism through his California Spanish-language paper El Clamor Público.

During the Civil War, African American self-activity proved decisive: Black troops fought on land and sea, provided military intelligence, and built fortifications. The mass exodus of enslaved people from Southern plantations constituted what W. E. B. Du Bois, a prominent Black intellectual and historian, later called the first national general strike. African Americans viewed the war through a global lens, connecting it with Mexican resistance to the French invasion of 1861 and with antislavery struggles in Cuba.

In the Reconstruction era, African Americans built a Cuban solidarity movement linking civil rights at home with international human rights. The Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee gathered hundreds of thousands of petition signatures calling on President Ulysses S. Grant to recognize Cuban independence. Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a leading Black abolitionist, delivered a galvanizing keynote at Cooper Union in 1872, and Black political leaders in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida pushed resolutions of support through state legislatures. The Grant administration rebuffed the movement, favoring American sugar investors over Cuban patriots. In Key West, African Americans, Cuban émigrés, and Bahamians built a multiracial enclave of freedom, but voter suppression and Jim Crow segregation systematically destroyed these gains.

In the early twentieth century, African Americans revived anti-imperialism by connecting Jim Crow at home with US military interventions abroad. The Black press exposed US occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic as serving Wall Street interests. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) built a global network linking anticolonial struggles through its newspaper, the Negro World, published in English, Spanish, and French. Du Bois argued that opposing disenfranchisement at home must accompany opposing US economic control abroad.

Between the 1890s and 1940s, violent labor conflicts generalized the exploitative labor relations rooted in slavery. Ortiz documents the suppression of agricultural workers across the Sunbelt, the forced "repatriation" of over 350,000 Mexican and Mexican American workers during the Depression (many of whom were US citizens seized without due process), and the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from New Deal protections. African American women in Charleston launched a pioneering 1933 strike, and Latinx workers helped build the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and Cold War purges of left-led unions undermined these gains.

At the 1945 Chapultepec Conference in Mexico, Haitian delegates submitted a resolution demanding the abolition of racial discrimination throughout the Americas. African American and Mexican American organizers seized on the Act of Chapultepec, a hemispheric agreement pledging mutual cooperation, to advance civil rights, citing it in landmark cases including Méndez v. Westminster and Shelley v. Kraemer. These openings narrowed as the United States prioritized national security, engineering the 1954 coup against Guatemala's President Jacobo Árbenz.

Ortiz traces the farmworker movement of the 1960s, showing how labor organizers César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla founded the National Farm Workers Association. A grape strike and boycott culminated in 1970 contracts covering some 30,000 workers. Ortiz connects this movement with the broader civil rights struggle, from the Montgomery bus boycott through civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s opposition to the Vietnam War and his development of the Poor People's Campaign. King was assassinated in 1968 while in Memphis supporting a sanitation workers' strike. Ortiz also documents Rainbow Coalitions linking the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and white working-class activists, before the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeted these organizations.

The book reaches its climax with the Great American Strike of May 1, 2006, when Latinx workers initiated a massive nationwide strike, shutting down meatpacking, garment manufacturing, trucking, and food service to protest punitive immigration legislation. Ortiz connects the strike to the election of Barack Obama, the nation's first African American president, and to the backlash that followed: raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting unionizing workers, the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and Arizona's legalization of racial profiling. He highlights the Fight for $15 movement and Black Lives Matter as continuations of emancipatory internationalism.

In the epilogue, Ortiz calls for reparations for African Americans, Black farmers, and Mexican braceros (contract laborers recruited from Mexico to work in the United States). He argues that inequality was enforced "from the outset" with "the whip, the gun, and the United States Constitution" (188), and concludes that the self-activity of the most oppressed remains the key to liberty in the Americas.