‘A Most Imperfect Union,’ a retelling of U.S. history by Ilan Stavans and Lalo Alcaraz

*Brilliant! Toss out the pale-male history texts, here’s a truer narrative from a “red, non-white and blue perspective.” This is what Stavans wrote about this work: “a single, controlling leitmotif: the idea of creative destruction.” Lalo and Ilan are leading the new Latino narrative. VL

By Michael Cavana, NBCNews

“Enough with the dead white men!”

So goes the opening salvo from a Mexican-born Jewish immigrant and a California cartoonist of Latino descent in “A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States.” This illustrated reexamination of a continent’s “conquering” aims to turn schoolhouse narratives into academic-canon fodder. Just in time for Independence Day, Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans and “La Cucaracha” comic creator Lalo Alcaraz have come to make a statement against the republic’s accepted pale-male tales by intellectually dumping all those dog-eared capital-T Textbooks into our national waters. Their new battle cry: Out with the old; in with the red, nonwhite and blue.

What the authors seek to paint is a “colorful group portrait of these United States” — in every sense of that phrase. In their view, history is written not by the winners, necessarily, but by the biggest sinners: the robber barons and the murderers who stooped to any infernal depth to conquer.

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