Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office by Frederick Douglass Opie

Abstract

406 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office. By Frederick Douglass Opie. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 294 pages, $30.00 Cloth. Reviewed by John H. Barnhill, Independent Scholar Upsetting the Apple Cart is Frederic Douglass Opie’s third book. To an extent it combines the interests explored in his first two, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (2010), and Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882–1923 (2009). Opie also edits www. foodasalens.com, which combines his interests in history and food. In the case of Upsetting the Apple Cart, the apple in question is the big one, New York City, and the cart is the long-standing political structure, mostly white and Jewish at the top but with an undercoating of machine-loyal black politicians. At first glance this work appears to be a nice but nonessential addition to the already groaning bookshelf of studies of relations between African Americans and other minorities in the twentieth-century United States. Even the setting, New York City, does not particularly set the study apart from earlier ones. New York City’s ethnic history, particularly ethnic politics, is rightly the subject of many earlier volumes. Upsetting the Apple Cart not only tracks the development of black and Latino political awareness and acumen over several decades but it also serves to reinforce the reality that black and Latino are not monolithic categories, merely convenient for government programs. Within each group are competing ethnicities, economic classes, and political persuasions. Black-Latino coalition building, as Opie brings out, requires a great deal of black-black and Latino-Latino coalition building first. What is distinctive about Opie’s work is the sidebars, not that sidebars are unusual in works of political history but that Opie’s sidebars highlight ethnic recipes. In a departure from the norm, he combines his interest in ethnic politics with his enthusiasm for ethnic food by using sidebars to reproduce recipes for the foods he mentions in the narrative. Where else would one find mention that the student occupiers of a university building fueled themselves on fried chicken from the place down the street—with a recipe for the chicken ? More significant, although not stated, is the implicit way the separate Book Reviews 407 recipes for black and Puerto Rican dishes reinforce the story he tells of the difficulty blacks and Latinos had in joining forces, even in a coalition fragile and with a tendency to fly apart at the slightest disturbance. Despite recipes for fried chicken and carne asada and other dishes, the main focus is on the civil rights movement—more precisely, movements, one black and one Latino. Coverage includes the hospital workers’ strike for union recognition and a living wage, the various student movements, the shift to more mainstream efforts to work within the political system, and the eventual entry into that system, for good or ill in that it entailed a bit of cooptation and conformity in what was once a set of radical movements . The coverage includes token mention of white radicalism, Black Panthers, and western Hispanic organizations, but mostly the coverage deals with New York City. The exception is the concentration on Chicago politics as a model adopted by New York black politicians and activists. New York lagged behind Chicago, another city traditionally dominated by European ethnicities and machine politicians, as well as several other northern cities. Opie devotes extensive coverage to Chicago politics, specifically the election of Harold Washington as Chicago mayor and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and presidential campaigns in the 1980s. The Chicago story broadens the context of the New York story and clarifies that similar developments in New York City had, if not roots in, then influences from the Windy City. In both cases, the long-standing structure came under attack by effective grassroots minority coalitions strongly influenced by 1960s radical politics. The recipe for upsetting the apple cart did call for a pinch of the student politics that roiled Columbia University and other institutions of higher education. In addition, Opie brings out clearly the difficulties that Latinos had in forming effective coalitions with...