"Upsetting the Apple Cart," by Frederick Douglass Opie

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Introduction

O

ne of the most headline-grabbing pronouncements from the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau was that Latinos had surpassed African Americans to become the nation’s largest minority group, totaling 41,300,000 compared with 38 million. With each ethnic group making up close to 13 percent of the U.S. population, this meant that more than 25 percent of the country’s residents was either African American or Latino. In several major cities in the country, this combination already comprises the majority population.

With projections of continued Latino population growth, most demographers predict that this combination will rise to more than one-third of the U.S. population by the middle of the twenty-first century. The national immigration-related demographic shift has inspired a number of books on Latin American immigration to the United States and the Latino experience in the United States.1 This slow but steady increase in the number of blacks and Latinos in the United States has already shaped the political history of most of America’s major cities. I chronicle how these minority groups pooled their power to upend politics-as-usual in New York City, thus changing the face of local politics and challenging the political status quo in the postwar era. The importance of coalitions to political success is proven by their power to raise such politicians as David Dinkins to office. Nonetheless, the fragility of these coalitions was reflected in the rivalries that sometimes ensued as well as their inability to reelect Dinkins.

This book focuses on shared grassroots movements among black and Latino workers, students, tenants, trade unionists, and political operatives in

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New York City over a critical thirty-year period. It looks at black and Latino workers within New York City’s labor movement, and the struggle of black and brown labor coalitions against racism in the construction trades.2 The book calls for scholars to move beyond treating left-of-center Latino Progressives in the same way that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was treated— which is to say, as “invisible activists.”3 Finally, it focuses on times in which African Americans and Latinos came together and the lessons learned from the electoral coalition of the mid- to late-1980s.4 By focusing on a history that resonates with the most recent New York City mayoral election of Bill de Blasio, this book is certainly not defined by that history but stands as one of the first works to explore it.

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While in the graduate program at Syracuse University, I studied both U.S. and Latin American history and undertook intensive Spanish-language training. I first traveled to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1992 to live with a host family and study Spanish. In 1996 and 1997, I lived in Guatemala City, Guatemala, for six months doing dissertation fieldwork and conducting archival research at the Archivo General de Centro América there. My book Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882–1923 (2009) came out of that research. It is a study of transnational labor radicalism among railroad and banana workers at the turn of the twentieth century in the frontier towns of Caribbean Guatemala. National, ethnic, and racial identities all informed the character and strength of the coalitions among workingclass black immigrants and Latin Americans living in the Caribbean borderlands of Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador. I also wrote Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (2008), a study of the global origins of soul food, the forces that have shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans (particularly the maize culture from the Maya of Central America) to create this distinctive cuisine. It draws on a wide range of sources from oral histories to traditional archival materials to examine the ways that food has been an indicator of social position, a source of community cohesion and cultural identity, and a vehicle for change and crosscultural collaboration. Because I believe that food is a critical lens through

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which to view cross-cultural relationships and coalition building, I’ve included related recipes in this book as a way of highlighting the role of food in social movements. Napoleon once said that “an army marches on its stomach,” and this is certainly true for the army of volunteers in the movements covered in this book.

During the summer of 2005, I came across a set of Works Progress Administration (WPA) records in the New York City Municipal Archives, which described blacks and Latinos in Harlem in the 1930s eating in the same restaurants, frequenting the same nightclubs and theaters, and intermarrying. I was struck by these descriptions given the degree of separation I observed between contemporary blacks and Latinos (Ecuadorians, Dominicans, some Puerto Ricans, and Cubans) in Westchester County, just north of New York City. The contrast inspired me to explore the dynamics of African American–Latino coalitions at different times and places.

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In this book, I describe the dynamics among African Americans and Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean in New York City between 1959 and 1989. While the data is site-specific, my findings suggest a tentative framework for answering the broader questions that drive this study: What forces have shaped African American and Latino coalitions at various points in history? Where and why did collaborations and political alliances emerge—or fail to emerge—between blacks and Latinos in twentieth-century America?

I found evidence dating back to 1959 that broad cross-sections of black and Latino communities did form successful coalitions to advance what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the struggle [of unorganized black and brown workers] for justice, freedom, and dignity in New York City.”5 Indeed, I found that blacks and Latinos repeatedly formed strong coalitions around struggles for justice, freedom, and dignity during the thirty years examined in this study. Blacks and Latinos developed the strongest coalitions when they shared a language, a political goal, an employer, or class status as well as when they operated within the same spaces, such as in housing projects, work places, union halls, school campuses, or public streets.

Black and Latino coalitions in New York City grew around campaigns for worker rights, equality in schools, and democracy in South Africa and

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Central America and led to greater participation and representation of blacks and Latinos in New York’s Democratic Party.

The focus on relations between black and Latino activists fills a gap in the historiography of the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and electoral politics in post-1970s New York City and Chicago. The detailed portraits of Latino Progressives working in coalition with African American activists and elected officials serve to balance the neglect historians outside the field of Latino studies have given to Latino Progressives in organized labor, the Left, and electoral politics in New York City between 1959 and 1989. The electoral coalitions covered in the second half of the book (1970s and 1980s) did not come about easily. The left-of-center groups, unions, and civil rights groups and their leaders who formed coalitions had been the target of state repression including COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program whose mission was to disrupt actions of the radical leftist organizations and groups such as the Black Panthers.

An important part of this story takes place not in New York City but in Chicago, which elected its first black mayor in 1983, six years before New York City elected David Dinkins. In many ways, the seeds for Mayor Dinkins’s election and Jesse Jackson’s presidential run were sown in Chicago where lessons learned in coalition politics were put to use in New York City.

The final three chapters in the book focus on Progressive Latino activism in the 1970s through to the election of Dinkins as mayor of New York City in 1989. These chapters provide new perspectives on electoral politics and coalitions in the 1970s and 1980s. What exists on the topics has been written through a liberal and Progressive white and black paradigm with only an occasional mention of Latino agency and involvement. This book, then, is an attempt to end the division that now exists among those writing about blacks, Latinos, and electoral politics in post-1970s New York.

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Chapter 1 looks at the two waves of black and Latino migration to New York that occurred between 1930 and 1949 and from 1950 to 1970 and the subsequent patterns of resettlement. I explore how different backgrounds and reasons for emigrating shaped their relationships and participation in social, vocational, and political activities in twentieth-century New York.

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Chapter 2 examines a series of strikes by low-income hospital workers in New York City between 1959 and 1962. The strikes fostered a political alliance among white labor leaders, Latino activists, black civil rights leaders, and the black nationalist Malcolm X before he left the Nation of Islam.

Chapter 3 analyzes the student movements in the 1960s and early 1970s at Lehman College, CCNY, and Columbia University, as well as events occurring at the same time in East Harlem around issues of community control. I discuss how Latino involvement in the student movement made the limitations of Black Power ideology all the more apparent.

Chapter 4 shows how political clubs and organizations trained black and Latino Progressive activists to participate in electoral politics in the 1970s and 1980s and look at the response by black and Latino members of District Council 37 (DC 37), a New York City public-employees’ union, to the election of President Ronald Reagan and U.S. foreign policy in South Africa and Central America in the early 1980s. The chapter delves into the movement to stop U.S. bombing on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico and the formation of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights.

The final three chapters address electoral politics from the late 1970s to the late 1980s and are based on interviews with elected officials, campaign managers, labor leaders, and activists. The book ends with a chapter on the election of David Dinkins in 1989. Until the election of Bill de Blasio in 2013, Dinkins had been the last Democrat elected mayor of in a city where registered Democrats outnumbered GOP members almost 4 to 1. Today the ratio is 6 to 1.

Chapter 5 examines the political campaigns of New York City politicians José Rivera and Major Owens in 1982, Chicago mayor Harold Washington in 1983, and Jesse Jackson in 1984, and the importance of black and Latino coalitions to their campaigns. The chapter specifically discusses the importance of unions in Democratic politics as demonstrated by the Democratic primaries for governor of New York in 1982. I also review the early contributions of Chicago-based Black Panther Fred Hampton to the notion of a black and Latino Rainbow Coalition.

Chapter 6 looks at the impact of the 1984 Jackson campaign on black and Latino Progressives in New York City. Voter registration and fund-raising drives begun during the Jackson campaign continued after 1984 in order to leverage the political power of black and Latino voters and thereby help

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unseat Mayor Ed Koch in 1989. I set aside the myths surrounding the Coalition for a Just New York’s search for a candidate to defeat Koch in 1985 as well the group’s efforts to take over the borough presidents’ offices in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Chapter 7 delves into the planning and organizing that led to the election of David Dinkins as New York City’s first African American mayor and the role that organized labor and Latino activists played in that effort. It also discusses Dinkins’s failed reelection campaign in 1993.

The conclusion provides an overview of the post-Dinkins black–Latino coalition, a general assessment of what happened, and how this period either diverged from or continued trends from the previous decades not only in the labor movement but also in political representations for black and Latino communities.