AHA Session 311
Sunday, January 7, 2024: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Continental Ballroom 1 (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Penn State University
Papers:
Comment:
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Penn State University
Session Abstract
According to the Latino Donor Collaborative’s 2022 GDP report, if U.S. Latinxs were a standalone country, they would account for the fifth largest Gross Domestic Product in the world. That is, the market value of all the final goods and services they produced and sold would be larger than that of India, Russia, Canada, or England. Much of this growth has occurred over the past half century in central cities. And since the mid 1990s, Latinxs boasted the highest rate of new entrepreneurs in the US. Yet despite these remarkable transformations, the proliferation of Latinx business firms since WWII remains one of the most understudied areas of modern US history. This panel brings together a group of historians at the forefront of historicizing Latinx entrepreneurship in metropolitan California, New York, and Georgia. Their papers pay close attention to questions of microeconomic patterns, political formation, cultural practice, class tension, and urban revitalization during the second half of the twentieth century. Building on the innovative work in the field of business history that probes nonwhite entrepreneurship—including Marcia Chatelain’s Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (2020)—we ask, What alliances did Latinx businesspeople form as they created and managed businesses for stability and profit? How did they position themselves and other Latinxs in their attempt to influence local and national politics? And how might we consider their activities within a broader framework of US history in which we write Latinxs into the main narrative rather than being relegated to the margins?
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