Book Talk — "Little Liberia: A Dream of Black Freedom in the US-Mexico Borderlands"

Little Liberia was an agricultural business and transborder activist community in northern Baja California, Mexico in the early twentieth century. They sought to counter the forces of White supremacy in North America primarily by building a stable financial and political foundation for African Americans. Its sister organization, the International Community Welfare League, dedicated itself to fighting the spread of White supremacy by unifying African Americans, Indigenous peoples, and people of Mexican descent. Little Liberia is a story of Black innovation and cross-cultural enterprise at a time of racial persecution and political turbulence—a little known but instructive chapter in the intersecting history of Black America and the borderlands of the Southwest.  The movement was born out of the intersection of Black spaces and borderland places, and its story reveals the crucial role of that intersection in the history of race, borderlands, immigration, social movements, and White supremacy in the United States and Mexico. 

Speaker: Laura Hooton is an Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at New Mexico State University. She teaches and writes about African American history, North American borderlands, civil rights and social movements, immigration and migration, and comparative race and ethnicity. Her monograph, Little Liberia: A Dream of Black Freedom in the US-Mexico Borderlands was recently published with the University of Oklahoma Press. She is also co-author of the second edition of Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (Routledge, 2023).