by Paul Ortiz
EPILOGUE
A NEW ORIGIN NARRATIVE OF AMERICAN HISTORY
I had to leave the United States to begin to understand it. As a soldier in the US Special Forces in Central America in the mid-1980s, I encountered Augusto Sandino everywhere I went. Murals of the Nicaraguan revolutionary’s image and his sayings were ubiquitous. Governments that aligned themselves with US interests viewed Sandino’s words as seditious. No sooner had the local policía scrubbed Sandino’s words “Come, you pack of morphine addicts; come to kill us in our own land” off the side of one building, than rebel artists would write, “We will go to the sun of freedom or to death,” on a wall across town. My ignorance led me to believe that Augusto César Sandino (1895–1934) was still alive and that he was our greatest enemy.
Over two decades later, then a historian, I stumbled upon Augusto Sandino once again. This time I encountered a living, breathing guerrilla leader whose exploits were lionized in the Black press. The Baltimore Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide celebrated Sandino as a hero fighting white supremacy and the United States’ invasion of Nicaragua. These two meetings with Augusto Sandino taught me that American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is the freest nation on earth, the champion of the oppressed, and can do no wrong—or at least never intends to do wrong—is a myth. The African American writers who recorded Sandino’s exploits knew that the government that denied their citizenship had not sent the Marines to Nicaragua to promote democracy. Decades later, the people of Central America deployed the words of Sandino against me and my fellow soldiers as a reminder that their battle against our imperialism was resilient and longstanding.
Years would pass before I finally understood that the idea that the United States could bring democracy to Central America in the 1980s was only possible because we were ignorant of the bloodshed we had inflicted on that region. But the innocence that Americans claim regarding their actions overseas is viewed by the citizens of the Global South as a kind of national disease emanating out from Washington, DC. Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes laments, “So we are left with this final image of the United States: a democracy inside but an empire outside; Dr. Jekyll at home, Mr. Hyde in Latin America.”1 What blinded my generation to the history of US imperialism are the doctrine of American exceptionalism and the myth of isolationism. Both ideas are firmly disproved when we approach US history from African American and Latinx perspectives.
If American exceptionalism is a harmful fable, then what do we replace it with? We can begin by continuing to learn more about ordinary people’s capacity to create democracy in action. One of the great benefits of comparative ethnic studies is the opportunity it affords to explore the capacity of workers, immigrants, and marginalized people to organize for social change. Two of the best case studies of social-movement building may be found in the mass strikes launched by African Americans and Latinx people at two perilous moments in the history of the republic. The Black workers’ general strike against slavery saved the Union, and this is the core of Frederick Douglass’s observation, in 1863: “But we are not to be saved by the captain, at this time, but by the crew. We are not to be saved by Abraham Lincoln, but by that power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself.” This egalitarian logic was on display a century and a half later when the Great American Strike restored the ideas of international solidarity and the dignity of labor to American politics. Whether one looks at events such as the making of the Underground Railroad to Mexico in the 1820s or the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, it is an incontestable fact that the United States advances the most when its most oppressed people achieve power and control over their lives.
Though this history in this book has been told from the perspectives of people whose ancestors hail from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, it is in fact a universal tale. It is the story of anyone who has ever tried to live on poverty wages or no wages at all. It is a portrait of a people who believed that freedom should be enjoyed equally by all. It is the chronicle of individuals who lived their entire lives with their backs against the wall, and still had the faith to build a social movement that led Martin Luther King Jr. to say, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”2
Teaching American history honestly means ending the unforgivable silences surrounding the debts of gratitude we owe to Haiti, Mexico, and Latin America generally in demonstrating through words and deeds the meanings of justice and freedom. Generations of people in the United States drew inspiration and lessons from the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican War of Independence, and the Cuban War of Liberation, among many other struggles. Scholars should continue to research the threads of emancipation that people in the Americas have attempted to weave together. At this writing, we have only scratched the surface. At his inauguration in 2006, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, framed a national campaign for autonomy from neoliberalism into a hemispheric-wide liberation struggle: “And above all, I want to say to our Indigenous brothers and sisters who have gathered here in Bolivia: the campaign of 500 years of Indigenous—Black—popular resistance has not been in vain.”3
We must give credit to immigrants of the Global South for sharing practical visions of liberation that have reinvigorated civic culture in the United States. A basic knowledge of the battles fought by the ancestors of today’s immigrants—whether they hail from Latin America or elsewhere—is important if we are to understand contemporary US politics. For example, the oft-ignored role of the citizens of Mexico as carriers of traditions of social democracy to the United States needs to be better understood. Mexican migrants to the United States hail from a country that abolished slavery long before the United States, fought off repeated imperial invasions from Europe, and promoted ideals of sharing the nation’s wealth on a roughly equal basis.
Inequality in American life today is not the result of abstract market forces, nor is it the consequence of the now-discredited “culture of poverty” thesis. From the outset, inequality was enforced with the whip, the gun, and the United States Constitution. Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws, backed by law enforcement and paramilitary organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, stood like flaming sentinels against Black and Brown progress. African Americans and Latinx people were forcibly brought or recruited to the United States to toil and to do work that others could not or would not do. Their labor built this nation, but they were not fairly compensated for their work. Instead, they were starved, tortured, traumatized, and murdered for attempting to exercise rights that others took for granted. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, farmworker organizers in California immediately understood that he had been “killed helping workers to organize.”
This history leads me to strongly endorse the demand of African American and Latinx workers in North Carolina who in 2001 called for “reparations for African Americans, Black Farmers, and Mexican Braceros.”4 Centuries of state-sponsored expropriation of labor power, land, resources, and human rights demand redress. The mechanisms for creating reparations policies have been soundly presented by William Darity.5 He and Darrick Hamilton have also proposed the idea of “public provision of a substantial trust fund for newborns from families that are wealth-poor,” in order to finally achieve something approaching equality in the United States.6 We must finally prove that we are a society based on fairness and equality of opportunities, or else abandon this rhetoric altogether.
As I finish the writing of this book, the United States is facing a period of deep crisis. The Supreme Court has placed even more power in the hands of corporations. Firms pay enormous bonuses to Wall Street CEOs who have been bailed out by public funds. At the same time, 63 percent of school teachers in the United States report that “they buy food
for hungry students every month,” while 21 percent of children in the richest nation on earth live in poverty.7 This economy is the heir of racial capitalism, a system in which the accumulation of wealth takes priority over the healthy development of the individual, hence betraying the basic human instinct for freedom. African American and Latinx people have challenged and fought this system for centuries, and a careful study of their histories certainly offers clues on how to confront the current social emergencies faced by increasing numbers of Americans.
Many of today’s politicians want to build barriers, both literal and figurative, to divide nations; the individuals highlighted in this book struggled to bring the hemisphere’s people together. The United States continues to deny citizenship to millions of this nation’s hardest workers despite a rich tradition of emancipatory internationalism that envisioned a new kind of citizenship spanning the Americas. There is a great beauty in this history, which confirms Elizabeth Martinez’s insight: “We can choose to believe the destiny of the United States is still manifest: global domination. Or we can seek a transformative vision that carries us forward, not backward. We can seek an origin narrative that lays the groundwork for a multicultural identity centered on the goals of social equity and democracy. We do have choices.”8
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a new interpretation of US history is a humbling experience, a collective effort made possible by many teachers, students, and movement elders who taught me to listen carefully and to pay attention to details. At Bremerton High School, Don Bidwell gave me a literary foundation in Richard Wright, Joseph Conrad, and Shakespeare. At Olympic Community College, Philip Schaeffer and David Toren showed me how history and philosophy can change lives. At Evergreen State College, Stephanie Coontz, Beryl Crowe, and Tom Grissom trained me to ask meaningful and rigorous historical questions. At Duke University, William H. Chafe, Charles Payne, Lawrence Goodwyn, Raymond Gavins, Nancy Hewitt, and Julius Scott demonstrated through personal example that being a university professor and a community organizer were not mutually exclusive vocations.
My father, Paul Pedro Ortiz, and my mother, Johnine Powell MacDonald, instilled in me a love of learning from an early age. (Dad also read the entire manuscript and patiently corrected errors.) My abuelas, Tulles Martínez and Julia Martínez Reyna, ensured that our family survived the long nightmare of Juan Crow. My uncle Leonard Ortiz shared with me a piece of family history on the long drive between Houston and San Antonio that helped me frame a significant part of this book.
I am grateful to the following institutions for giving me the opportunity to present ideas and to receive critiques on the manuscript-in-progress: the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies Research Symposium; the John W. Davidson Lecture Series, Fort Valley State University; the Duke University Human Rights Center Symposium; the Rutgers University Center for Historical Analysis; the University of South Florida, Tampa Office of Community Engagement and Partnerships—Poverty, Equity, and Social Justice Program; the Department of History and the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Latino Americans: 500 Years of History Series, Santa Fe College; Symposium in Pan African Studies, Clemson University; the Virginia Tech Department of History’s “Legacies of Reconstruction” Speakers Series; and the Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts Speakers Series.
I am immensely thankful for the criticism and ideas offered by commentators and audience members at the following panels and conferences held between 2006 and 2016: A New Vision of Black Freedom: The Manning Marable Memorial Conference, Columbia University; Confronting Racial Capitalism: The Black Radical Tradition, Graduate Center, City University of New York; The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, Methods, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Monuments and Memory: Race and History, Duke University Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences; Chicanas/os and Latinas/os Read James Baldwin: A Roundtable Discussion, East Side Café, El Sereno, East Los Angeles.
While putting the final touches on this manuscript, I benefited incalculably from being able to share ideas with colleagues as a Havens Center for Social Justice visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the fall of 2016. I am also grateful to the Department of History and to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida for a year’s sabbatical during the academic year 2015–16. Without that sabbatical, this book could not have been written.
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University graciously provided free lodging on several research trips that allowed me to access collections at the university’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I am also grateful to librarians at the University of Florida, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the staff at the Library of Congress for their assistance and direction.
This book has benefited from countless discussions, editorial interventions, and late-night rap sessions. So many friends, colleagues, and movement fellow travelers have contributed to my understanding of this history that I hesitate to begin the process of naming lest I exclude anyone. Here goes: Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, Cedric J. Robinson, Lawrence Guyot, William Darity, David Roediger, Lawrence Goodwyn, Larry Trujillo, Rosie Cabrera, Thulani Davis, Helen Safa, Carlos Muñoz, Karen Fields, Robin D. G. Kelley, Peter Bohmer, Larry Mosqueda, Suzanne Oboler, Anani Dzidzienyo, Vicki Ruiz, Derrick White, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, Donna Murch, Max Krochmal, Genesis Lara, Benjamin Marquez, Jane Landers, Robert P. Wolensky, Zaragosa Vargas, Irvin D. S. Winsboro, William Link, Laura Edwards, Peter Wood, Thavolia Glymph, Melinda Wiggins, John Brown Childs, Gay Zieger and Robert H. Zieger, Hernan Vera, Michael Honey, John Due, Gaye Johnson, William Loren Katz, and Alex Lubin.
I have had the privilege of working with a remarkable array of graduate students whose new ideas and scholarship animate and inspire this book, including Kevin Bird, Sean Burns, Erin Conlin, Chris Dixon, Michael Brandon, Justin Dunnavant, Armin Fardis, Randi Gill-Sadler, Jonathan Gomez, Justin Hosbey, Kevin Jenkins, Allen Kent, Raja Rahim, and Matt Simmons.
My students remind me every year that the historical narratives currently dominating our schools and intellectual culture are in need of a vast overhaul. These students are determined to use history to address contemporary social problems and they inspire me to find new ways to teach old topics. I am particularly indebted to students in my courses such as African Diaspora in the Americas and African American and Latina/o Histories. Many of my students have gone on to become labor organizers, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and workers dedicated to challenging inequality wherever they find it. I hope that this book honors their passion for justice.
Tomás Villanueva and comrades in the United Farm Workers of Washington State taught me the importance of rigorous, social movement history. The Evergreen State College Labor Center reinforced these lessons during its too-brief existence.
My colleagues in the Oral History Association have been a source of constant encouragement. Students, staff, and volunteers at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida have helped me learn anew that historically informed civic engagement is a necessary ingredient in creating an egalitarian future.
My editors at Beacon Press—Gayatri Patnaik, Joanna Green, Jill Petty—and managing editor Susan Lumenello deserve awards for their brilliant editorial guidance and faith that I would finish this book after years of research, ruminating, and writing. I am especially indebted to historian and UC-Santa Cruz colleague Dana Frank for introducing me to Gayatri and Beacon Press in 2005.
My wife, Sheila Payne, and stepson, Joshua Redmond-Payne, served as constant reminders for me to “get the book finished.” Josh helped me keep my sanity by taking me to the movies on a regular basis and cheering the Seattle Seahawks to victory. Sheila
read every single word of this book—more than once—and her editorial eye vastly improved the final product. I relish our work together in the archives, and Sheila’s passionate commitment to peace with justice. I am excited to move on to our next project. ¡Adelante!
A NOTE ON SOURCES
An African American and Latinx History of the United States is based on archival and oral history research conducted between 1993 to the present. I also draw heavily on secondary works in African American, Chicano, and Latinx histories—as well as on literature in Latin American history and labor and ethnic studies. Many of the oral history interviews were conducted when I was a graduate student fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities–funded Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, an oral history project based at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Subsequent interviews were conducted by staff and students of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.
During the years spent researching this book, I transitioned from reading newspapers in the microfilm collections of the Library of Congress, Duke University Libraries, George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, and other repositories to increasingly using online databases to find newsletters, pamphlets, and other sources. The African American Newspapers collection via Accessible Archives contains invaluable sources, including the Christian Recorder, the North Star, Freedom’s Journal, and other nineteenth-century abolitionist journals. The online database Ethnic NewsWatch consists of a plethora of documents, including periodicals and newsletters created by Native American, African American, and Chicano movement organizations between 1959 and the present. The ongoing digitization of primary and secondary documents in African American and Latinx historical sources will make future studies in these fields even more productive and accessible to scholars and to community organizations.
