In “El Año del Desarollo,” Génesis Lara reframes studies of Cold War Caribbean revolutions in her study of labor organizing among Afro-Dominican and Haitian sugarcane workers in the Dominican Republic. Labor organizers rejected the visions of leftist Dominican revolutionary organizers, as they battled the transnational forces, in the form of Cuban exile Teobaldo Rossell and the U.S. owned Gulf & Western corporation, determined to quell the largest labor organizing movement in modern Dominican history. Griselda Jarquin Wille also asks us to reconsider conceptions of revolutions in “Grassroots Diplomacy.” Griselda centers the sister city program as one of the most subversive and effective strategies that the transnational solidarity movement employed to break down American apathy and ignorance and instead win the hearts and minds of the American public as they fought to respect Nicaraguan autonomy. Together, these papers ask us to decenter the perspectives of leftist guerilla revolutionaries, to instead place people at the margins, such as labor and local communities organizers, as they shifted the trajectories of resistance struggles at the heart of the Cold War through the efforts of transnational solidarity organizing.

Diana Johnson continues our exploration of transnational labor and solidarity efforts through her research of multiracial coalition building in the Pacific Northwest. In her paper, “Seattle in Mozambique”, she analyzes how skilled trade workers of color in Seattle’s Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office challenged and shaped interrelations between the United States and the Global South. Their efforts countered Regan era foreign policy while viewing fund-raising and on-the-ground construction and farming work. The role of food: the labor behind who grows food products and its role in our society is a running theme in several of these presentations. In “Transnational Latinx Veganism,” Jessica Ordaz utilizes a transnational lens to analyze the ways various threads often viewed as modern day, such as veganism, animal liberation, health, and the environment, which in actually are all topics that have been of concern for Latinx folks for centuries. Jessica Ordaz uses a transnational approach, looking at communities in Mexico City and Southern California to discuss how food is connected to the ideologies and practices of labor, community, and identity.