A Thousand Bridges

Hi again! Today I’d like to tell you a little bit more about the book I’m writing. Think of it as preparation for what I’ll be posting about for the next two years! For the moment, I’m calling it A Thousand Bridges, and it’ll be an argument-driven narrative of Latino history over the past 500 years and more.

Crown will publish it in 2026, the 250th anniversary of the United States. We’ll be thinking and talking a lot about American history and identity, and the relationship between America’s past and present. I hope that A Thousand Bridges will center the role Latinos have played in the history of the Americas and our nation.

When I started this newsletter, I said I wanted it to be a kind of journal for me that will also be interesting and educational for you. I’ll preview here some of the themes I’ll be writing about in my book, introduce you to some of the sources I’m working with, and, if you’re willing, ask you to share your views, which would in all likelihood influence my writing.

Writing is always about dialogue, and I hope you’ll be interested in engaging with me in a conversation about Latino history. In particular, Latinos and teachers at all levels: I want to know what YOU think about Latino history, and what the Latino histories are that you and your students need and want to know about. I’m serious! Write any time! Leave comments or write me at my Northwestern address.

First, where did the title A Thousand Bridges come from? It’s part of a quote from the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos’s seminal essay, La raza cósmica. Here’s the full quote: “In Latin America ... a thousand bridges are available for the sincere and cordial fusion of all races. The ethnic barricading of those to the north in contrast to the much more open sympathy of those to the south is the most important factor, and at the same time, the most favorable to us, if one reflects even superficially upon the future, because it will be seen immediately that we belong to tomorrow.”

To those of you who are already familiar with Vasconcelos and his work, let me say this: yes, of course I’m aware of how fiercely his writing and politics have been critiqued in recent years. Writing in 1925, he engaged in the same sort of racial essentialism he was trying to refute; his ideology of mestizaje marginalized Latin Americans of African descent, and relied on the assimilation of Indigenous people at the same time that Indigenous communities in Mexico were being dispossessed of their lands; and just a few years after he wrote La raza cósmica, he became a fascist. And yet, the importance of his writing is undeniable. I certainly do not lionize Vasconcelos, but I can’t dismiss him easily.

I like the image of “a thousand bridges” because I see it as a way of thinking about Latino history as a whole. Latino history is a bridge between the history of Latin America and the United States. It is a bridge between the histories of several racial groups—White, Black, Indigenous, and more. It is a bridge between the past and the present, between Spanish and English and other languages, between liberalism and conservatism, and between colonialism and anti-colonialism.

I especially like the phrase “a thousand bridges” because it suggests the possibility of connection without requiring it; the multiplicity of bridges could point in lots of different directions that may or may not lead to the same place or anywhere in particular. If this isn’t Latino history—the history of a people that do and do not see their relation to one another, who endlessly debate what brings us together and what keeps us apart—then I don’t know what is.

What exactly will I argue in A Thousand Bridges? Boiled down, I will argue that Latino history is the history of both colonizers and colonized. This contrasts with the dominant argument—expressed in other overviews of Latino history, such as Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire and Laura Gómez’s Inventing Latinos—that Latino history is the history of colonized people who are best understood as victims of empire and racism. Understanding Latinos as a colonized people is certainly important, but it’s hardly the whole story; understanding Latinos as colonizers is another important part of the story, without which the whole history of Latinos remains incomplete.

“Face Off,” by Virgil Ortiz. Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe, NM. Photo by yours truly.

So, what does it mean—and what doesn’t it mean—to argue that Latinos are both colonizers and colonized? To me, it means that Latinos have both aligned with and fought against imperial and national powers. It means that we have both lamented and embraced colonial languages and religions. It means that we have been both victims and perpetrators of capitalist exploitation. And it means that we have been discriminated against at the same time that we have discriminated against others. You have to look no further than the vile anti-black statements by L.A. city council members two months ago to recognize that this is true.

It does not mean, however, that all individual Latinos are both colonizer and colonized; I’m talking about the population as a whole, rather than any single person. It also does not mean that I see the balance of colonizer and colonized as fifty-fifty; that Latino history is equally the history of colonizer and colonized. As my Northwestern colleague reminded me recently, the utility of a binary is that it establishes a useful framework for understanding a problem, but then, as thinkers and writers, our job is to constantly hold the binary up to scrutiny, press against it, challenge it in some ways. That’s what I aim to do. (And to be clear, others have written aspects of the history of Latinos as both colonizers and colonized—of particular groups, in particular times and places—but my hope is to offer a more panoramic view by writing about all Latinos in all times and places.)

So, yes, I’m writing a history arguing that Latinos are and have always been both colonizers and colonized, and that the dynamic relationship between colonizer and colonized helps us understand the wide diversity of Latinos today—racially, culturally, linquistically, politically, economically, and in most other ways. I’m writing the book as a history in four parts: 1) the Spanish colonial period, from the 1500s to the 1800s, 2) the long 19th century, from the age of revolutions to the end of the Spanish American War; 3) the early twentieth century, when Latinos both redefined themselves and confronted their redefinition as a racial minority in the United States; and 4) the period from the 1960s forward, when historians wrote the history of Latinos as a colonized people (see Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, for example), even though that framework never quite worked for understanding Latino history as a whole.

When I’m not writing here about Latino politics, or about the teaching of Latino history, I will be writing about one aspect or another of A Thousand Bridges. Next Monday, for example, I’m going to write about José Vasconcelos’s 1941 biography of the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés. It’s called Hernán Cortés: creador de la nacionalidad. Buckle up, it’s a wild one!

As a teaser, if you understand Spanish, check out this two-part YouTube video of Vasconcelos talking about Cortés and the conquest. Fascinating.

PART 1:

PART 2: