"We will examine how Eurocentric narratives crowded out stories of African American and Latinx resilience, survival and resistance in the early decades of the republic." (Dr. Paul Ortiz, PhD). This seminar builds upon antiracism education RCNV conducts through SCCCCOR and RETN racial equity book groups.
Dr. Ortiz will lead from his faculty office at the University of Florida. Dr. Ortiz is a former board member of the Resource Center for Nonviolence and previous Community Studies faculty member at UC Santa Cruz.
This is the first RCNV seminar offered for global access via Zoom!
More information:
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 U.S. 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.
Additional information is available upon request.
