Intercultural Throughline

The chronicler Inka Garcilaso de la Vega recorded the origin story of the Inka and the founding of Cusco, the capital of their great empire, in his “Royal Commentaries of Peru,” published in 1609. According to the Inka origin story, Inti, the sun, sent two of his children—Manco Capac and Mama SmithsonianNMAI Origin Story of the Inka

Sometime in 1619 enslaved Africans arrive near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia from the Portuguese colony port city of Luanda, the present day capital of Angola. Over 20 captives were unloaded from the hull of the São João Bautista. America had not become herself, yet lit the spark for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and further set the stage for slavery, oppression and persecution across her history.

Omar ibn Said was born around 1770 in an African region then called Futa Toro, near the Senegal River, which now forms Senegal’s northern border with Mauritania. After receiving 25 years of schooling in Africa, he was enslaved and transported to Charleston, South Carolina. Not long after his arrival and sale to a local planter, Said escaped and made his way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was imprisoned after entering a Christian church to pray. After garnering attention for writing on the walls of his prison cell in Arabic, Said became the legal property of General James Owen of..Read More

Indian Removal Act — 1830 Signed into law in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson, the Indian Removal Act provided for the general resettlement of Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River to lands west (Indian Territory). Although the removal was supposed to be voluntary, removal became mandatory whenever the government thought necessary. Thousands of Indian people including nearly the entire Indian population that had existed in the southeastern United States were moved west. The first removal treaty to follow the passage of the Indian Removal Act was with the Choctaw Nation (1830). In 1838 the Cherokee Nation was removed..Read More

In the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Kingdom existed as an independent country recognized as such by the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and various other countries, including by exchanges of diplomatic or consular representatives and the conclusion of treaties. As an independent county, the Hawaiian Kingdom entered into extensive treaty relations with a variety of States establishing diplomatic relations and trade agreements. By 1893, the Hawaiian Kingdom maintained over ninety Legations and Consulates throughout the world. In the United States of America, the Hawaiian Kingdom manned a diplomatic post called a legation in Washington, D.C., which served in..Read More

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act (1917) on March 2, 1917, giving Puerto Ricans U.S. statutory citizenship. This act also separated Puerto Rico’s government into Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches, and endowed Puerto Ricans with a bill of rights. Additionally, the act established an insular bicameral legislature with 19 elected Senate members and 39 elected House of Representative members. It also stated that Puerto Rico’s Governor and the U.S. Executive branch possessed authorization to veto or override any law enacted by that legislature. Citizenship under the Jones-Shafroth Act (1917) resulted in mass migration to the U.S. mainland; mostly to New York State. Approximately..Read More

Audre Lorde was an American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor, philosopher and civil rights activist. Lorde didn’t balk at labels. She was known for introducing herself with a string of her own: “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” To Lorde, pretending our differences didn’t exist—or considering them “causes for separation and suspicion”—was preventing us from moving forward into a society that welcomed diverse identities without hierarchy. “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are..Read More

In 1937, Puerto Rico enacted Law 116, the last eugenics sterilization law passed under United States territorial jurisdiction. Soon after, a program endorsed by the U.S. government began sending health department officials to rural parts of the island advocating for sterilization. The Puerto Rican government fully supported this program, as it attributed overpopulation to the island’s high levels of poverty and unemployment. With the growth of American corporations on Puerto Rican soil and factory work, they also wanted to integrate women into the workforce more fully and child bearing was seen as an obstacle to that. In fact, sterilization efforts were..Read More

Operation Wetback was an immigration law enforcement initiative created by Joseph Swing, the Director of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), in cooperation with the Mexican government. The program was implemented in May 1954 by U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell and utilized special tactics to deal with illegal border crossings into the United States by Mexican nationals. The program became a contentious issue in Mexico–United States relations, even though it originated from a request by the Mexican government to stop the illegal entry of Mexican laborers into the United States. Legal entry of Mexican workers for employment was..Read More

The Chicano Art Movement represents attempts by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement (El Movimiento) which began in the 1960s. Chicano art was influenced by post-Mexican Revolution ideologies, pre-Columbian art, European painting techniques and Mexican-American social, political and cultural issues. The movement worked to resist and challenge dominant social norms and stereotypes for cultural autonomy and self-determination. Some issues the movement focused on were awareness of collective history and culture, restoration of land grants, and equal opportunity for..Read More

“ In January 1967, six months after they first met, Dr. King nominated Thầy for the Nobel Peace Prize, saying, “his ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”A few months later, on April 4th, 1967, Dr. King quoted Thầy’s book Lotus in a Sea of Fire in his landmark “Beyond Vietnam” speech at the Riverside Church in New York. It was the first time he unequivocally denounced the war and finally united the peace and civil rights movements. Dr. King shared Thầy’s powerful message that “Men are not our enemy. Our..Read More

The East Los Angeles Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. The first protest took place on March 6, 1968.

May. 1968 in Paris, France. Students and Blue Collar Workers met on the streets. Together they dreamt and plan a change of power relationships in schools and factories. The young ones like me learnt how to listen. It also may have been my first understanding of the social power of visuals and prints. I was in my first year of Art schools, taking night classes. Our teachers had all been selected for life. The following year, 40 new teachers were hired. They were all under 40. We started to breeze.

“ The First Rainbow Coalition begins in 1969, when the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by Fred Hampton, forms alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latino group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots.” More info: https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/the-first-rainbow-coalition/ https://southsideweekly.com/fifty-years-fred-hampton-rainbow-coalition-young-lords-black-panthers/

Navajo-Hopi Struggle to Protect the Big Mountain Reservation In 1974, the federal government partitioned the Big Mountain reservation, where the Hopi and Navajo tribes currently reside, and transferred some of the land to private ownership. Many Hopi and Navajo were relocated to other lands, but some 300 families remain at Big Mountain to fight the continued exploitation of their lands by private mining companies. Currently, those 300 families are living on land that holds over $10 billion worth of coal. The Peabody Mining Company would like expand its operations by 13,800 acres, thus intruding upon the Big Mountain residents’ sovereignty..Read More

Siembra is the second studio album by Rubén Blades and Willie Colón, released by Fania Records in September 7, 1978. It is considered the best selling salsa album in the history of salsa My father asks me, why are you so political? But he forgets he introduced me to this music. This is an album I grew up listening to prior to coming to the United States. It is full of honesty and resistance. This album helped me understand the importance of making my music political.

Dogeaters, a novel by author Jessica Hagedorn, was published in March 1990. Winner of an American Book Award and nominated for the National Book Award, it became one of the best-known published creative works by a Filipina American. The title refers to a derogatory stereotype about Filipinos, and the novel centers on the lives of several characters from different social classes in Manila in the 1950s. The novel’s surrealist style underscores the maddening contradictions of life in a country where false appearances and abuse of power in politics, mass media, celebrity pop culture, religion, and family relationships overshadow reality and..Read More

“I Like It Like That” is a 1994 American comedy-drama film about the trials and tribulations of a young Puerto Rican man and a half Jamaican half Puerto Rican woman living in a poverty-stricken New York City neighborhood in the South Bronx. The film stars Lauren Velez, Jon Seda, Lisa Vidal, Griffin Dunne, Jesse Borrego and Rita Moreno, and was written and directed by Darnell Martin. This film was groundbreaking for a few reasons: 1) It was the first major motion picture to give an accurate, authentic and nuanced depiction of a Puerto Rican diasporic family trying to make it..Read More

The Gustafsen Lake standoff was a confrontation between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Ts’peten Defenders in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, at Gustafsen Lake (known as Ts’peten in the Shuswap language). The standoff began on August 18, 1995, and ended on September 17, 1995. The RCMP operation would end up being the most costly of its kind in Canadian history having involved 400 police officers and support from the Canadian Military (under Operation Wallaby). The predominantly indigenous occupiers believed that the “grazing rights privilege” ranch land on which they stood was both sacred space and part..Read More

Michelle Kwan takes second at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics and all Asian Americans are mad about it, forever.

Movement leader Grace Lee Boggs wrote The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty First Century with Scott Kurashige at the age of 95. In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a..Read More

38-year old Yang Song, a Flushing massage worker, fell four stories to her death during a New York Police Department raid on November 25, 2017. Song’s family revealed that she described being sexually assaulted by a man who flashed a badge and gun and claimed to be an undercover cop and that the police urged her to become a confidential informant and turn in clients and friends. She had been arrested months before on prostitution charges — her case referred to the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs) and a court date set. After her death, community organizers rallied outside..Read More

Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans filled miles of a major highway in San Juan in protest against Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló, who has resisted persistent calls for his resignation, in what appeared to be one of the largest demonstrations the island has seen. The protests arose in response to the leak of Telegram app messages in which Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and his inner circle make light of the casualties caused by Hurricane Maria and disparage political opponents using vulgar, homophobic, and sexist language. They began July 11 and subsided around July 24, 2019. Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló of Puerto Rico..Read More

In 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of child rapist Jimcy McGirt on the grounds that the Creek Nation’s reservation was never disestablished for criminal jurisdiction. State courts no longer have the authority to prosecute crimes committed by or against Oklahomans who are also tribal members. Hundreds of criminal cases are now being dismissed because the state does not have the ability to try and convict criminals on historic tribal lands.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was a leading activist and organizer around the issues of justice for people living with HIV/AIDS, who lived in Philadelphia, PA for most of his life. His work, while focused, was intersectional and cross-issue, as he worked to make survival easier for people with HIV/AIDS. It wasn’t until the late 2010s, almost 20 years after his death, that he began to recieve more mainstream recognition for his work. Below is a message, from the ACT UP NY archives, from the time of his passing. Even this brief memorialization from his comrades misses many of his contributions to the..Read More