My rating: 4 of 5 stars
America has a long history of promoting democracy and human rights, but also denying those basic rights to African-Americans and Latinx people. While there are a lot of histories that look at the history of both African-Americans and Latinx people as oppressed groups, nearly all of them treat each group separately. While there is great value in doing so, it does leave out the ways in which both groups supported each other’s fight for freedom and democratic rights and also implicitly perpetuates the false narrative that these two groups’ struggles are distinct from each other. In this incredible examination of American history from the point of view of both groups, Dr. Ortiz links both of their struggles for freedom and shows how America has too often been on the wrong side of history and freedom not just in America, but in its dealings with the Americas too.
As part of Beacon Press’s ReVisioning America series, which also has published such great books as An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and A Queer History of the United States for Young Readers, the goal of this book is to reexamine American history through a different lens. Too often American history has been filtered through a predominately White POV that emphasizes our country’s many high points while only giving a superficial examination of America’s racist and oppressive past. Dr. Ortiz tosses that White narrative out the window and focuses instead on the perspective of African-Americans and Latinx people. The result is not the flattering picture most Americans already know. African-Americans were enslaved for a good chunk of American history and faced exploitation, legalized segregation, and mass violence after the Civil War. Latinx people in America, though never enslaved, also were exploited, segregated, and murdered by White Americans too, along with being deported unjustly when labor conditions were poor. Thus, American history through this perspective is dark, oppressive, and never in keeping with the high ideals we claim to have founded this country on.
The greatest value of this book though is not in treating African-Americans and Latinx groups as separate, but linking these two groups’ history and showing how each group at their best have supported each other’s struggles for freedom and basic human rights both at home and abroad. Dr. Ortiz does a fantastic job of cataloging how African-Americans paid attention to and supported the revolutions in the Americas, drawing inspiration from them for their own early freedom struggles. He also shows how Latinx people abroad supported African-American’s struggles for freedom in Antebellum America. And once this book moves beyond the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, Dr. Ortiz catalogs the important contributions both groups made to the advancement of civil rights and labor rights in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is fair to say that without both groups working both separately and together, American history would be tragically different.
Though Dr. Ortiz’s book is great, it is not perfect. In the first few chapters, the narrative balance between both groups is tilted more towards coverage of African-Americans. Granted, these chapters deal with pre-Civil War America, so the plight of African-Americans should take center stage at this point. Also, once we get past the Civil War, Latinx people become a larger part of the narrative and the oppressive system of racial capitalism begins to grind both groups. Thus, the narrative begins to balance out and Dr. Ortiz’s book starts firing on all cylinders. Still, I wish he could’ve maintained a better narrative balance from the very beginning.
Too often the voices of African-Americans and Latinx people have been silenced or disbelieved. The great value of a book like this is that it offers a counter-narrative to the simplistically naive story Americans are used to and acts as a clarion call for America to live up to its highest ideals of liberty and equality for all, as both African-Americans and Latinx people have been demanding from the very beginning. Americans of all races, colors, and creeds should read this book along with other books in this series, repent, and resolve to justly apply our founding principles to all people in our country and abroad.
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