ReVisioning Black History Month: Linking African American and Latino Histories, Beacon Broadside, by Paul Ortiz, February 24, 2014.
Dr. Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and associate professor of history at the University of Florida, is currently writing Our Separate Struggles Are Really One: African American and Latino Histories, to published by Beacon Press. For Black History Month, Ortiz wrote for the Beacon Broadside progressive blog about parallel histories of African Americans and Latinos in the United States in a “re-envisioning of American history: as a shared narrative of struggle for justice, dignity, and equality for all.”
In the context of Black History Month, the African American century beginning in the 1820s and extending to the eve of the Great Depression was an epoch of Pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism, and expressions of solidarity with a pantheon of Latin America’s greatest freedom fighters including Vicente Guerrero, José María Morelos, José Martí, Antonio Maceo, and Augusto Sandino—among many others.
-Paul Ortiz
