"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 such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US 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 against 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. And in stark contrast to the resurgence of "America first" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the America. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americas, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights."--Dust jacket.

Introduction. "Killed helping workers to organize" : reenvisioning American history -- The Haitian revolution and the birth of emancipatory internationalism, 1770s to 1820s -- The Mexican War of Independence and US history : anti-imperialism as a way of life, 1820s to 1850s -- "To break the fetters of slaves all over the world" : the internationalization of the Civil War, 1850s to 1865 -- Global visions of reconstruction : the Cuban solidarity movement, 1860s to 1890s -- Waging war on the government of American banks in the global South, 1890s to 1920s -- Forgotten workers of America : racial capitalism and the war on the working class, 1890s to 1940s -- Emancipatory internationalism vs. the American Century, 1945 to 1960s -- El gran paro Estadounidense : the rebirth of the American working class, 1970s to the present -- Epilogue. A new origin narrative of American history.