This post was not supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to give a quick and dirty, "you go girl" to Alisa Valdés Rodriguez for her smackdown of Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer. Why? They've written one of the most poorly researched, poorly fact checked, backed by barely just one expert in Caribbean and Latin American history, anthropology or public policy race-baiting piece of drivel about how Latinos will not vote for Obama because they can't relate to his blackness.

In Obama and the Latino Vote, Alisa goes to bat :

The sloppy, inaccurate story goes on for 32 agonizing paragraphs, using the terms “black” and “Latino” as though they were mutually exclusive – which they are not. Historians estimate that 95 percent of the African slave trade to the Americas took place in Latin America.

To this day, the vast majority of people in the African diaspora live south of the U.S. border, in Latin American countries from Brazil to Colombia to Cuba and, yes, even Mexico. The song "La Bamba," in fact, was brought to the Veracruz region of Mexico by Africans enslaved to the Spanish. The song likely has roots in the Bembe (Bantu) culture from what is now the Congo. This is only a stone's throw, geographically, from the Kenya of Obama's father's birth.

How quickly we forget in this country. How brutally we refuse to learn.

The New York Times not only ignores completely the African history of Latin America by positioning "blacks" against "Latinos" as if none of us were both. To do so is enormously irresponsible because it dissolves from public consciousness the fact that African slavery was a crime committed all across this hemisphere, by colonial Europeans who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The story also erroneously portrays Latinos as a race unto themselves - an error egregious enough to be stated in our own census bureau's definition of Hispanic as a person "of any race". Including "black".

I was supposed to expand on Alisa by going deeper into the work I have already covered here, most recently with On Why I Hate Hispanic Heritage Month and Blanquito vs. Latino or the Unbearable Lightness of Being Alberto Gonzales. I was supposed to smackdown Nagourney for his complete lack of any understanding of Latin American history, culture and politics.

And then something happened.

While putting together links and resources for a post that was going to discuss blackness from a Puerto Rican context, I first stumbled upon an April 6, 1900 news bit about a riot that happened in Puerto Rico on where, and I quote :

RIOTING IN PUERTO RICO, Native Mobs Attack Imported Negro Laborers.
April 7, 1900, Wednesday
Page 3, 298 words

SAN JUAN DE PUERTO RICO, April 6 -- At 4 o'clock yesterday evening the natives made a concentrated movement at Puerta, Tiera. Different mobs, totaling about 2,000 men, attacked the foreign colored men. Any English-speaking negro was subject to attack, particularly the natives of St. Thomas and St. Kitts. [ END OF FIRST PARAGRAPH ]

.

Yes, that's 1900 and about a year and a half after the United States invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish American War.

The riot is one of the many uprisings that happened in the island on account of the American governemnt's looting and pillaging of the working and middle class business and property. A working class that, by the way, was mostly negro, mestizo and mulatto.

Through eminent domain they took over land, they took over property. Through taxation and especially through currency exchange they wiped out any wealth that the mostly negroid small business class had accumulated through hard work and abolition, at the end of the 19th century.

The United States was hell bent on Jim Crowing the island, because they wanted Puerto Ricans to become slave labor by proxy. But it wasn't easy, not with the insurgent guerrilla groups that were fighting the invaders with gunfire. Not with the separatists who insisted on negotiating independence for the island.

Unfortunately, the criollo upper class of the island won out. They were able to divvy up the spoils of this new Yankee conquista, as long as they got what was theirs.

In the ensuing years, the state of economic disarray, especially on the black working class, was brutal. There were no jobs to be had because the Americans on the island were the ugly gringos of every racist story about Americans expecting others to bend to their ignorance and lack of education. So the US Army decided to "show a lesson" to Puerto Ricans who didn't want to learn the language or show deference to their lack of comprehension of Spanish by importing black identured servants from the British Virgin Islands.

Hence the riot of the news bit. I've highlighted the telling part on that image of the article I have at the start of the post : The Affair was the outcome of the pier strike, and the pretense of the attack, apparently, was that English islanders were usurping Puerto Rican labor The whole image of the article is on a PDF.

An occupying force takes over an island of mostly black and brown people and instead of bringing change, they destroy the economy and then proceed to bring in foreign laborers to do the work they won't give to conquered people, as a punishment for demanding fair treatment, fair pay and equal rights under the law.

Does this sound vaguely familiar?

Then I proceed to look for images of my black family I have buried deep in my archives, but I do so through the search engines.

Lo and behold, I stumble upon the New York Public Library's The African-American Migration Experience, an online show of the vast archive of images of the African diaspora in America, courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

In it I find an awesome photograph of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, the father of Puerto Rico's modern independence movement. But he's not the reason why I landed on that amazing resource. I landed there because I did a search on Sabater and I found a picture of an ancestor of mine :

Meet Vicente Prats Sabater.

Vicente was born in Ponce, from where all my father's family comes from. He was the one who left for "the mainland" looking for work. He's the cousin my grandfather moved in with when he came to New York looking for work as a steel mill worker.

I was shocked to see this photograph. I knew of him but I had never seen him --photos were not common at that time. If you were poor, photos were meant to record your face for an official document such as a passport, or to record your death. My Tía Carmelita's had a lot of pictures of dead relatives, especially after the typhoid and dissentery pandemics we had in Puerto Rico at the beginning of the 20th century.

I have cried so many times looking at the picture.

It's not like you find your lost relatives every day.

So in between sobs, I went on looking to see what I would find. The University of Puerto Rico has a photo of my father that dates back to April of 1967 --a little bit under a year after I was born!

He was an urban planning consultant for mayor Lindsay Wagner and at some point or another he got to meet through his job people like Bobby Kennedy (he actually liked him), Malcolm X, Martin Luther King.

In this photograph he is with Edward Daniels who was head of an organization called MEND. I can't find much information on it. The only source I have is actually a newspaper clipping from El Diario/La Prensa announcing my baptism. But I am assuming that he was head of the urban development advocacy organization that my father worked for.

So here I am with three very important source of black history in the Puerto Rican and latino communities, two of them reasons for personal pride. I went ahead and I put together a slide show titled My Black Puerto Rico. It shows the historical context of some of my family photographs and in it I try to give you a sense of the context of the historical roots of racism in the Puerto Rican community.

Let's be frank : every single country in the Americas had slavery. Slavery is encoded into the DNA of anybody born in this hemisphere, whether their families where part of the slave economy or not.

That there are many latinos who don't want to recognize their African ancestry? I give you that. Racism --and it's opposite, self-hatred-- is part of the fabric of the cultures of this hemisphere, not just the United States of America.

The difference though is that, racism in latino culture is not manifested as a hatred of blacks for being blacks. Many migrant workers who come to this country have heard of the trials and tribulations of the African American community. The issues of "tension" that Nagourney crapped about, have to do with the economic facts that led to the 1900 riots in Puerto Ricos : Of an American government with imperialist tendencies using every dirty capitalist trick in the book to maintain the lower end of the labor spectrum weakened in order to ensure a never ending pool of labor at 'slave-like' wages.

Adam Nagourney plays right into the divide and conquer narrative.

God forbid African Americans, Native Americans, Asian American and Latinos recognized themselves as part of the same family of slaves and indentured servants that created the wealth of the capitalists formerly-knowns-as "the plantation class" of America.

God forbid the colored people of this country recognized themselves as the fruit of the abduction, occupation and exploitation of one class over another and came together as one voting block against the soon to be a minority socio-political class that has a vested interested in keeping these groups "niched" into their own petty politics.

God forbid every single minority voter in this country woke up one day and said, "You know, fuck the white man and woman. Am gonna get me a black president".

That's why The New York Times, Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer are tools and they deserve to be called out for the crap they rush to print.

They don't know their black and brown history. Not as in my history but the history that got them to where they are right here, right now.

Or, maybe they do and as tools of the ruling class they are doing exactly what they are expected to do.

Read Also :

NYTimes Off-Base on Obama, Clinton and Latinos, Jill Tubman at Jack And Jill Politics

OFARI-HUTCHINSON: LOOKS FOR THE GREEN FOREST WHEN OBAMA NEEDS THE BROWN TREES, Mario Solis Marich at Nuestra Voice

The Latino Challenge to Black America : Q&A with Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Xicano Power at ¡Para Justicia y Libertad!

And some reader submitted articles and resources:

Growing Attacks on Immigrants Have Real Implications for Black America
www.gcir.org/resources/gcir_publications/perspectives/PerspectivesEW.pdf

African-Americans have a stake in supporting immigrant rights
http://www.progressive.org/media_mpjenkins041206

Black Leaders to Investigate Human Rights Violations on U.S.- Mexico Border
http://blacknews.com/pr/black_alliance_for_just_immigration101.html

Forging a Grand Coalition: Opportunities for (and Challenges of) a Black-Brown Alliance (AUDIO)

Mobilizing the Vote: Latinos and Immigrants in the 2002 Midterm Election [PDF]National Consejo of La Raza