Latinx Agencies: Emerging Histories of Politicians, Religious Leaders, and Undocumented Migrants

Abstract

Michael Fortner’s 2015 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment put forth a controversial thesis: “black middle-class morality” and “members of the black silent majority” compelled this particular Black socioeconomic group to “prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality. It drove them to rally and rail against ‘hoodlums’ instead of seeking reform of society.”1 Fortner’s analysis of late 1960s and 1970s drug laws and ethnic-racial identity provided a different interpretation into mass incarceration’s origins that would continue to proliferate under President Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs.”2 Fortner asked scholars to take “black agency seriously” when considering an African American history that did not reflect Black people simply as victims or as interlocutors in a declension narrative or narrative of dominance.3 Furthermore, he wrote that specialists could acknowledge Black agency while not maintaining that African Americans had complete control over political outcomes.4 Historians such as Donna Murch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson have all disputed Fortner’s reconstitution of Black agency for false structural agency, arguing that there are not sufficient sources to reframe one of the origins behind mass incarceration to a Black middle class.5 Yet Fortner’s book leaves its reader with a particular question: if scholars place agency onto racialized communities,