Upsetting the Apple Cart ─ Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office

Upsetting the Apple Cart looks at the history of black-Latino coalitions in New York City from 1959 to 1989. In those years, African American and Latino Progressives organized, mobilized, and transformed neighborhoods, workplaces, university campuses, and representative government in the nation's urban capital.

The book makes new contributions to our understanding of protest movements and strikes in the 1960s and 1970s and reveals the little-known role of left-of-center organizations in New York City politics as well as the influence of Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns on city elections. Opie provides a social history of black and Latino working-class collaboration in shared living and work spaces and reveals racist suspicion and divisive jockeying among elites in political clubs and anti-poverty programs. Upsetting the Apple Cart offers a different interpretation of the story of the labor, student, civil rights, and Black Power movements than has been traditionally told. This is a story that highlights both the largely unknown agents of historic change in the city and the noted politicians, political strategists, and union leaders whose careers were built on this history. Lastly, as Napoleon said, "An army marches on its stomach." This is also a story that delves into the role that food plays in social movements, with representative recipes from the American South and the Caribbean included throughout.

Frederick Douglass Opie is a professor of history and foodways at Babson College. He is the author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America and Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882--1923, and the editor of the history and food blog www.foodasalens.com.