Third Worlds Within

“Dazzling! Spectacular! In this sweeping yet intimate account of Southern California and the Pacific Basin against the backdrop of his diverse family, Daniel Widener provides an utterly unique way to tell a profoundly important story.” - Gerald Horne, author of Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s

“Protests against police violence and inequalities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic have created an urgent sense that we can’t go back to the way things were. But how do we move forward? Weaving together threads of antiracism, anticapitalism, and anti-imperialism, Daniel Widener’s book charts a path, blending a deep exploration of the history of relational organizing with sharp analysis of the way that our frameworks of race and ethnicity are shaped by global understandings of race and social movements. Third Worlds Within is the right book for these times.” - Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community

"Widener makes an important contribution to the state of the research by unearthing . . . forms of solidarity and common struggle that challenge dominant narratives of interethnic conflict." - Lena Dallywater, H-Soz-Kult

"Widener presents a dazzling panoply of 20th-century movement history." - Rachel Ida Buff, American Historical Review

"This ambitious, frankly personal, emphatically political history offers a locally specific understanding of multiracial radicalism transcending the outdated paradigms of 'Old' and 'New' Lefts." - Van Gosse, Journal of American History