Teaching & Learning at the Intersections of Black & Latinx Histories with Prof. Paul Ortiz: Video & Recap

By Daisha Brabham

On April 26th, the ARTLC hosted a public webinar titled “Teaching and Learning at the Intersection of Black and Latinx Histories with Professor Paul Ortiz,” featuring historian and teacher educator Paul Ortiz. Ortiz brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in social movements.

In his groundbreaking book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, history is told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans. Its content reveals the radically different ways 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 freedom and human rights.

In addition to Ortiz, the session featured three ARTLC educators – Nataliya Braginksy (Metro Business Academy, New Haven), Daisha Brabham (Windsor High School), and Julian Schafer (Danbury High School) – who shared their experiences incorporating content from Ortiz’s book in their teaching. The event was co-moderated by teacher educator Daniel HoSang from the ARTLC and youth organizer Kaatje Welsh from Students For Educational Justice. 

The webinar - which you can watch above - introduced examples of historical content best taught intersectionally, two of which are featured briefly below. It offered classroom applications, three of which are featured below. And it yielded powerful insights for educators, shared in the final section.

Examples

At the start of the talk, Dan HoSang drew attention to the newspaper El Grito Del Norte, edited by the revolutionary Chicana organizer Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez. Martinez was active with the SNCC and worked tenaciously in the struggle for human rights. Although some may be familiar with Martinez and the newspaper, they might not know that the typewriter Betita used actually came from the Black Panthers and her time working within the Black Freedom Movement.

Ortiz emphasized that connections like these are everywhere: “Each issue is going to have stories about not only the struggle to regain land in New Mexico, where Betita Martinez was working at the time, but also stories about the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the struggle for housing justice in South Chicago…” If you look for them, Ortiz argued, “You’re going to see a lot of emphasis on Indigenous struggles, but also the Irish liberation struggle that’s going on in Northern Ireland, at the same time.” 

Another example that Ortiz shared first came to his attention during an educational workshop at the suggestion of several teachers. In their unit on lynching, the teachers drew on two historical documents detailing the lynching of a man named of Ed Coy. One was written by the extraordinary Black journalist and activist Ida B Wells, who reported on lynchings across the American South. The other was written by Jose Marti, Cuban nationalist, poet and professor. In their classroom, teachers had students compare the two documents, reading for similarities and differences. 

Ortiz offered this example to underscore the long history of shared struggle and activism between Black and Mexican communities. “And there were many others,” he explained, “who were writing in Spanish language newspapers in California, in the 1820s 1830s againt lynching.” 

Applications

Each of the participating ARTLC teachers have used Ortiz’s work to fuel ideas and inform their pedagogical approaches teaching the state-mandated African American/Black-Latino/Puerto Rican Studies Course. 

Nataliya Braginsky from Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven has been teaching the course for three years and has used Ortiz’s book substantially. “Reading this book in preparation for teaching the course and learning these histories in this intersectional way,” Nataliya explained, “has only deepened my understanding of both Black history and Latinx history, and US history.”

Braginsky shared her unit plans on the Mexican American War, emphasizing the important role Haiti played. This unit follows a unit she teaches on Enslavement & Abolition and Reconstruction. One area she focuses on is a little known history of the Underground Railroad from the South. As Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, the young country became an important refuge for enslaved people seeking freedom. 

Nataliya explained: “The Underground Railroad most of us were taught about only went to the northern states in the US and to Canada. We're rarely taught that it also went south into Mexico. And when I teach this to my students they're just like, ‘why didn't anyone tell us this? There's something sort of earth-shattering about that and it changes your entire worldview.”

Daisha Brabham, who teaches the course at Windsor High School, shared a curriculum that she developed with the Ungroup Society in Waterbury. The curriculum has five different units that take a thematic approach to US History. The unit's essential question focuses on “How have BIPOC envisioned utopia?” Specifically, Daisha’s unit asks, “Who has access to this vision [of utopia]?” and, as she focused on with her students, “what does it mean to practice freedom?”

One of the topics that Brabham addressed is the message of Global Reconstruction, which is covered in chapter three of Ortiz’s book. After Reconstruction, Black abolitionists turned their sights to Cuba, which did not abolish slavery until 1886. Many Black Ministers argued for what Ortiz calls “emancipatory internationalism,” the idea that justice can only be fully realized if achieved both nationally and internationally, and in so doing, jump-started the Cuban Solidarity Movement to end enslavement in Cuba. One of major figures of the Solidarity movement was Reverend Barnett, who presented a petition to Ulysses S. Grant, advocating for him to intervene on behalf of resistance movements in Cuba. 

In her unit, Brabham emphasizes that Black Utopia has always been a global vision. “Global visions of freedom, specifically in Black and Latinx communities,” acknowledge that “we aren't free until everyone is free.” Pointing this out to students, Brabham noted, has impacted their thinking profoundly – not only how they respond to current events in Connecticut and across the country, but how that awareness translates to international acts of injustice. 

Julian Shafer, who teaches the course at Danbury High School, shared the importance of teaching grassroots organizing and the role of collective action in movement building. Shafer explained that one of his key goals is “to give students an idea of the kind of challenges and work that organizers did in the social movements.” One example he and students focused on is that of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

During the unit, Shafer asked students to play the role of activists, making decisions, developing flyers, and gathering feedback from each other to guide organizing decisions. Through role plays, students examined the struggles, limitations and possibilities of grassroots organizing. 

One of the primary sources that Shafer had students engage around is a letter from Martin Luther King Jr. to Cesear Chavez. In this letter, “King is basically saying that our separate struggles are really one – a struggle for freedom for dignity and for humanity” and against “exploitation.” Once students encountered the source and did background research on the Chicano movement, they were asked to put together a national campaign to demand workers’ rights. 

Ortiz praised the unit emphasizing that “all of these things together, allow us to begin to give our students the tools to really think critically and to take up the challenge themselves.”

Insights for Educators

Looking across the webinar’s content, a few key insights emerge for educators.

Foreground intersectionality when teaching about organizing movements. One major takeaway is that to teach about social movements, you must teach how groups came together in efforts toward justice. As Shafer noted, when researching freedom movements, it is important to remember that those happening at the same time were not only in communication, but also actively influencing one another. In fact, movements made intentional efforts to be in solidarity because, as Braginsky explained, “they saw that their liberation work was bound up in each other.”

Embrace all students through inclusivity. Ortiz emphasizes that when teaching through a nationilistic lens, students often feel left out. He explained, “My students are asking me both when I teach anti-racist workshops, but also in my university classes, and when I work with high school students… “where are our people in this story? Where are our ancestors?” My Cuban students say, “we didn’t just pop up in 1959, y’all!”  Braginsky, Brabham and Shafer all agree that teaching intersectionally has helped connect more students to the curriculum and to one another.

Re-envision US history through internationalism. So often in classrooms students are positioned to examine and understand history through a rigid nationalistic lens. But, as Ortiz points out “intellectuals, thinkers like WEB Dubois and CLR James told us that these were international events.” When we teach the intersectionality and interconnectedness of movements globally, Ortiz explains, we are “teaching the history as it actually unfolded.”

Acknowledge that these intersections are not just in the past, but also the present. Although historical movements are important and fundamental to our understanding of intersectionality and organizing, it is also important to draw in contemporary examples. Ortiz explained, “The twenty-first century is where my students want the course to move; they love the earlier histories, but for them they’re trying to explain or we're trying to explain, you know, how we got Trump in 2016. They want to know where Black Lives Matter comes from and how do we fight imperialism?” Contemporary movements are never static; they are constantly changing and important fodder for classroom teaching that connects to kids’ own lives.

Emphasize that histories are not the same, they are shared. When approaching these histories, it is important to teach that these are not stories of monoliths or groups that have the same visions or strategies or experiences, but rather deliberate, intentional steps taken by communities of color to build solidarity while learning from each other. As Brabham pointed out, “Our human connection is really to get to know each other and talk to each other and learn from each other. So being able to bring that into our classrooms, whether that be through music or fashion or dancing or just regions, is so important.”