Top Quotes: “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” — Paul Ortiz
Introduction
“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.”
“The historian Greg Grandin has observed that “Latin America is famous for revolutionaries, but Latin America practically invented social democracy. The world’s first fully realized social democratic constitution was [framed in] Mexico. The right to organize, the right to education, the right to health care: those rights disseminated throughout Latin America, and then they found their way into the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Latin America invented what we think of as modern social democracy, and it never gets credit for it.”
“Today, many Latin American counties are acknowledging the cultural and civilizational debts they owe to African civilizations. Mexico has declared Africa to be Nuestra Tierra Raiz (our third root) of the nation and increasing numbers of Mexicans are identifying as Afro-Mexicans.”
Colonial Times
“Given the role that plantation owners and merchant capitalists played in the American Revolution, it is not surprising that a war of independence became a war to preserve slavery. The colonial upper class looked with trepidation at signs from Great Britain that foretold the demise of chattel bondage. Foremost among these was the English Court’s Somerset v. Stewart case, decided in 1772. The decision resulted in the freeing of James Somerset, an enslaved African who had been brought by his master to England a few years earlier. The judge in the case found that slavery was not supported in the Common Law. Despite the debate in England about the ultimate meaning of Somerset in England, the decision was interpreted by many white leaders in the Thirteen Colonies as foretelling the doom of slavery in the British Empire.”
“That spring, “a group of slaves, scenting freedom in the air,” approached Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, “and volunteered their services” against their increasingly restless masters. Sensing that he was on precarious ground, the nervous governor initially turned the dissident slaves away. By the fall, however, Dunmore reversed course. In November, he issued a proclamation freeing slaves who promised to bear arms against the embryonic anticolonial revolt. Dunmore sealed the Patriots’ decision to escalate the revolt to a full-blown war of independence. Indeed, the third draft of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence listed as primary grievances against King George III “prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us” and, in the next sentence, “endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.””
“By the end of the war, historian Benjamin Quarles estimated that at least five thousand African American men served in the Patriot armies.”
“By 1776, nearly 500,000 Black Americans, more than 90% of them enslaved, lived in British North America. By the end of the Revolutionary War, nearly 100,000 slaves had braved great risks by escaping from their masters and seeking sanctuary with the British or Native Americans.”
“The slaves defeated each of the European armies sent to crush their rebellion. Winning their independence in 1804, the revolutionaries christened their new nation Haiti in honor of the original indigenous inhabitants’ name for the island — Ayiti — much to the horror of US and European slave owners.”
The 19th Century
“Even as merchants promoted the city as a haven for profits in slavery, in the early 1800s, African Americans and their allies transformed Baltimore into center of anti-slavery resistance. Well into the twenty-first century, archeologists continued to discover hidden tunnels, camouflaged cisterns, and secret compartments in church basements that harbored fugitive slaves.”
“Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), the former slave owner in the land that was to become the Venezuelan republic, was an admired figure in African American communities because of his Decrees of 1816, which freed enslaved people willing to fight on behalf of the Third Republic of Venezuela. These declarations followed Bolivar’s meeting with the Haitian president Alexandre Pétion, who pledged military and financial support to El Liberator contingent on his ending slavery. In gratitude, Bolivar proclaimed, “Should I not let it be known to later generations that Alexandre Pétion is the true liberator of my Country?””
“Though California was admitted to the United States as a “free state” in 1850, slavery was tacitly tolerated throughout the state, and California passed a fugitive slave law in 1852.”
“Oregon was organized as a white homeland. In 1844, the Provisional Government of Oregon banned slavery and ordered all free blacks age eighteen or older to leave the territory. To enforce Black expulsion, provisional authorities established the “Lash Law,” whereby recalcitrant Black Oregonians received twenty to thirty-nine lashings every six months “until he or she shall quit the territory.” This punishment was soon replaced by a more profitable penalty: forced labor.
When Oregon gained statehood, in 1859, its bill of rights contained a Negro Exclusion Law, which remained on the state’s law books until 1926. During the Oregon Constitutional Convention that preceded statehood, the number of votes against admitting African Americans to the state exceeded even the number of votes against slavery. Three years after statehood, Oregon passed a “race tax” that required African Americans, Hawaiians, Chinese, and “Mulattos” (individuals of mixed race) to pay an annual five-dollar penalty for residing in the state.”
“In the early 1850s, the Mexican government welcomed Black Seminoles, veterans of the Seminole Wars, as border guards to defend Mexico from Texas Rangers, slave catchers, and outlaws. In turn, these veterans began helping scores of slaves find freedom in Mexico in what whites, infuriated by these actions, called “The Mexican Border Troubles.”
Genevieve Payne Benson, a descendent of Black Seminoles who evacuated from Florida at the end of the Second Seminole War, recounted how generations of her family found freedom in Mexico. In the 1850s, Benson’s grandfather, Isaac Garden, dug his way out of a Texas prison along with two of his brothers and received sanctuary in Mexico with the help of sympathetic Tejanos. Zaragosa Vargas notes that Tejanos “rescued runaway slaves, hid them, fed them, and at great risk guided them to safe passage across the Rio Grande at Laredo and Eagle Pass. When the Texas Rangers captured Tejano abolitionists, they immediately executed them.”
Slave catchers and law enforcement officials faced increasingly determined slaves, free Black communities, and vigilance committees determined to resist recapture.”
“The Cuban solidarity campaign launched by Black antislavery abolitionists in the heart of Reconstruction was one of the most remarkable social movements in American history. In placing the liberation of Cuba on the same platform with their desperate struggle for equal citizenship in the United States, African Americans from Key West to California created a new kind of freedom movement. The national petition campaign was built on the traditions of anti-imperial antebellum slavery abolitionism. Furthermore, the movement prefigured the Third World liberation and anti-apartheid struggles of the twentieth century.”
The 20th Century
“The birth of modern agribusiness in the United States is a chronicle of dispossession. The Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agents played a key role in the bloody process of expropriating lands belonging to Mexican and Native American people. The historian Robert Perkinson writes, “From the beginning, the territory’s pioneering lawmen did less to suppress crime in any conventional sense than to force open lands for Anglo American settlement.”Mexican victims of the Texas Rangers’ furious attacks were quite often landowners with extensive holdings: “Title challenges and outright theft led to a loss of more than 187,000 acres of land for Tejanos in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1900 to 1910.” The historian Zaragosa Vargas notes, “The eventual violent collapse of Tejano ranching society took place in the early twentieth century, when the Texas Rangers, intermediaries in the transition to capitalism, cleaned out the remaining Tejano landowners, summarily executing more than three hundred ‘suspected Mexicans.” Over time, the pace of land theft quickened.”
“Mexican laborers who regularly crossed the border between Mexico and the United States to work in Texas — for example, from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso — were sprayed with DDT, Zyklon B, and other carcinogenic chemicals by US health inspectors who used these Mexicans as unwilling subjects in experiments with different delousing treatments. Jose Burciaga, who worked as a janitor in El Paso, recalled, “At the customs bath by the bridge . .. they would spray some stuff on you. It was white and would run down your body. How horrible! And then I remember something else about it: they would shave everyone’s head … men, women, everybody. … The substance was very strong.” On January 28, 1917, Carmelita Torres, a domestic worker, organized Latinas who refused to be deloused: they shut down traffic in El Paso and protested the racial stereotype of Mexicans as disease carriers.”
“Forced labor was an integral part of the South’s modernization program, with Northern-owned firms profiting from unfree labor in the region’s mines, blast furnaces, textile industry, and road-building. In parts of Texas and Louisiana, employers and sheriff’s departments cooperated to operate large-scale virtual slave markets of Negro and Mexican cotton pickers, using vagrancy statutes to kidnap workers “to work under armed guard, and without being tried.” In other cases, labor agents “await Negroes and Mexicans on the highways and offer them a bonus and free transportation to go with them to some fictitious place to pick cotton. The cotton pickers having accepted the terms are taken to some distant point outside of a town and there go into camp. The would-be employer leaves them under guard and finds farmers who need cotton pickers.”
“Leaders in President Hoover’s cabinet whipped up anti-Mexican sentiment to direct popular anger away from failure of the federal government to deal with economic suffering and high unemployment.”
“Filipino farmworkers in California were subjected to harsh racism. Pete Velasco recalled, “When we walked the sidewalks in those early days, they shouted at us, “Hey monkey, go home!’””
The Late 20th Century
“Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who had worked with the civil rights movement in the South played integral roles educating consumers about the grape boycott.”
“King Jr. sent a telegram to Chávez: “My colleagues and I commend you for your bravery, salute you for your indefatigable work against poverty and injustice, and pray for your health and continuing service as one of the outstanding men of America. The plight of your people and ours is so grave that we all desperately need the inspiring example and effective leadership you have given.” King supported the boycott because he believed that it represented a two-pronged assault on racism and poverty. “Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation,” he explained. “They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.”
By 1970, the grape boycott had cut into growers’ profits and had turned popular opinion against the table grapes industry. It was estimated that 17 percent of the American public supported the boycott. In addition, the constant strikes, marches, and organizing in growers’ fields undermined their claims that they knew what was best for “their” workers. On July 29, 1970, the United Farm Workers signed union contracts covering approximately thirty thousand workers in the grape industry. The labor historian Robert Gordon notes, “All of the newly signed contracts insured substantial wage increases, created a union hiring hall, and established strict regulations regarding the use of pesticides.””
“A municipal judge in San Bernardino, California, told investigators after the riot, “When I review a person’s criminal record for any purposes, I give no weight whatsoever to a Los Angeles felony arrest unless it is followed by a conviction, since in my opinion, it frequently means merely that the defendant was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began mapping out plans for a massive Poor People’s Campaign. The crusade would unite the poor of all races into a nationwide movement that would descend on Washington and stay there until the highest officials in the land agreed to formulate a plan to abolish poverty.”
“Before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference could initiate the Poor People’s Campaign, municipal sanitation workers in Memphis went out on strike on February 12, 1968, to demand higher wages and union recognition from the city government. As the city’s worst-paid public employees, the sanitation workers – “garbage men” – had to carry leaky, fifty-pound garbage pails full of maggoty foul matter from the backyards of affluent Memphians. Most full-time sanitation workers were paid so little that they qualified for welfare. The city did not provide work clothing or gloves, and at the end of the day, the men’s clothing was so drenched with filth that they had to strip outside their houses rather bring the toxic muck into their homes.
The strike captured King’s imagination, he instantly realized that by attempting to unionize, Memphis garbage workers were engaging in the most efficient form of antipoverty activism possible. King rushed to Memphis on March 18 to stand in solidarity with the garbage men. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 — exactly one year to the day after his antiwar address. A week later, the Memphis sanitation workers successfully unionized as members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1733.”
“In 1985, Howard Jordan, New York assemblyman Jose Rivera, and Congressman Roberto Garcia founded Latinos for a Free South Africa. Growing apartheid repression in South Africa “mandates a collective response by the Latino community,” Rivera was quoted as saying. “Our new organization represents the first endeavor to bring isolated initiatives together under one banner for freedom.” In a collective statement given to the press, the founders of Latinos for a Free South Africa stated, “Latinos who along with their African-American brothers have been the victims of discrimination and racism in this nation, are particularly repulsed by this South African system of apartheid where resources are allocated on the basis of color.””
“On May 1, 2006, International Workers’ Day, Latinx workers initiated the largest general strike in the history of the Americas. Known as el gran paro Estadounidense, the Great American Strike, this mass action breathed new life into a labor movement that had been in disarray for decades. The general strike impacted every aspect of American life. Approximately 70 to 90 percent of students in Chicago skipped school to show the country what “a day without immigrants” looked like. The strike lent momentum to the immigration rights movement and helped to birth a new effort to pass national legislation for a living wage.”
“Corporations and private investors were the big winners in the wake of the disaster in New Orleans. The state quickly replaced the city’s public school system with charter schools. Immigrant workers from Latin America and India were held in debt peonage or saw their wages stolen by employers while hotel and construction firms raked in huge profits from the disaster. Many workers were brought in to New Orleans after the hurricane. One Latina immigrant hotel worker in New Orleans testified, “Every one of us took out a loan to come here. We had planned to pay back our debt with our job here. They told us we would have overtime, that we could get paid for holidays, that we would have a place to live at low cost, and it was all a lie.” Because this worker and her Latina coworkers had signed contracts that bound her to one employer they risked forfeiting thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs. “I felt like an animal without claws — defenseless. It is the same as slavery.””
“When city officials in Arlington, Texas, wanted to move working-class Mexican Americans out of the way for a professional football stadium, they declared the neighborhood “blighted” and invoked eminent domain in order to destroy it. The resulting multibillion-dollar Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, subsidized with public dollars, symbolizes who contemporary municipal governments work for in the United States — and who they work against.”
“In New York, state outlays to local school systems approached a 14:1 ratio in favor of wealthy, predominantly white districts.”
“The Great American Strike shut down meat packing, garment manufacturing, port transportation, trucking, and food service in many parts of the country. Several days in advance of the gigantic protest, dubbed by some organizers as “A Day Without Immigrants,” the companies Cargill, Tyson Foods, and the Seaboard Corporation announced that they would be closing their operations due to a lack of personnel. Customers of fast-food franchises in California were turned away by apologetic managers who explained that “Mexican truckers” had refused to deliver bread. The May Day protests followed an earlier wave of walkouts that occurred in March and April. These incipient strikes were led in many cases by agricultural and construction workers seeking to boost their wages and to escape poverty conditions. “In South Florida and Immokalee, [harvesting] pretty much ground to a halt,” said G. Ellis Hunt Jr., president of Hunt Bros., a Florida grower and packinghouse owner with more than five thousand grove acres split equally between Polk and Immokalee counties.
In the weeks leading up to International Workers’ Day, the union organizer Jorge Rodriguez vowed, “There will be 2 to 3 million people hitting the streets in Los Angeles [on May 1] alone. We’re going to close down Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Tucson, Phoenix, Fresno. . . We want full amnesty, full legalization for anybody who is here. That is the message that is going to be played out across the country on May 1. Latinx workers organized the demonstrations through the social institutions that had helped sustain their communities, including comités cívicos from their home countries, workers’ centers, labor unions, Catholic Church social justice committees, sports clubs, and civil rights organizations.”
“In South Florida, an epicenter of the strike, Latinx workers — even noncitizens — were a decisive part of Election Day 2012. According to Gihan Perera, “In Homestead [Florida] undocumented workers who couldn’t even vote pitched in with a mariachi band and barbecue” to encourage thousands of African Americans, Latinos, and progressive whites to stay in line and cast their ballot.”
