Books like Jose Marti Reader

I had never heard of Lorenzo de Zavala until I started researching El Norte, and his story deserves to be much more widely known. He was born in Mexico when it was still under Spanish rule, and later became involved in Mexican independence. He also participated in the formation of the breakaway Republic of Texas (Tejas) in 1836, and he served as its first vice-president. Before that period of his life, however, he took a tour of the United States. He started in New Orleans in 1830, working his way north and east. This book describes that trip and his observations about the United States. It is one of the earliest travel accounts of the US written by a Mexican, and it provides a fascinating perspective from someone whose life intersected with pivotal political moments in both countries.

I’m not usually a fan of political memoirs (I tend to be skeptical of the authors), but this one is an enlightening read in terms of understanding the sorts of structural and governmental prejudices that Hispanic people faced in the early twentieth century as exemplified by New Mexico’s long struggle to obtain statehood. Otero was from a prominent New Mexican family and was the governor of the territory from 1897 to 1906. New Mexico was acquired as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war in 1848, but it didn’t become a state until 1912, due in part to the anti-Hispanic attitudes in Washington DC that Otero discusses in his book.

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton lived through one of the most tumultuous periods of history in California. She was born in Baja California to an elite family but moved to Mexican Alta California, as it was then known, during the Mexican-American War, marrying US army captain Henry Burton and becoming a US citizen. Ruiz de Burton watched California’s transformation under US rule, and this 1885 novel uses fiction to lay bare the very real problem of land dispossession of the Mexican Californians (known as Californios) and the arrival of ‘squatters’ from the eastern US who were claiming contested property. Ruiz de Burton is considered to be one of the earliest Mexican-American female authors to write in English, and this work illustrates how Alta California’s transition to statehood upended the lives of many people who had lived there under Spanish and Mexican rule.

Gloria Anzaldúa was born and raised in South Texas, growing up along the U.S.-Mexican border. For many years she lived in San Francisco, and then in Santa Cruz, California.

The first 113 pages of the book are stories and essays drawn from her life experiences as a woman of Mexican and Indian heritage, daily experiencing life at the physical border between the United States and Mexico.

She was raised in a strongly Catholic tradition, while also drawn to and inventing her own spirituality rooted in indigenous practices of harmony, balance, and reverence for the earth. She was a lesbian in a straight world that condemned her woman-loving sensibility.

Each of these is a “borderland” to be navigated and negotiated, and each of these borders is rich with insight, life, laughter, tears, violence, and love. The last 100 pages of the book is titled “Un Agitado Viento/ Ehécatl, The Wind.” It… show more.

Set in late 1800s Cuba, during their wars for independence from Spain and the first wave of reconcentration camps, this entry holds a special place on my list because it’s written in free verse. I believe poetry can capture emotion in a raw, powerful way that prose sometimes can’t, and Engle’s work serves as a perfect example of this. Through alternating perspectives, this book shows readers the horrors of war alongside the power of hope and compassion.

Between Empires compares the anti-imperial literature and history of two former Spanish colonies, Cuba and the Philippines, but this time focusing on the late-nineteenth-century “intercolonial alliance” and, more specifically, on the oeuvres of two nationalist authors and national heroes: the Cuban José Martí and the Filipino José Rizal. Hagimoto explores a transpacific collective consciousness of resistance as well as the shared historical ties between Latin America and the Philippines. What I found more exciting about this book was that it reveals how, led by two national heroes and martyrs, there was still, well after the end of the Manila Galleon transpacific route, an end-of-nineteenth-century anti-colonial alliance between two far-away countries united by a shared history of colonial domination and oppression.

The Machado Era (1924-1933) and the build-up of U.S. tourism are key to Cuba’s later history, but I have always found that period hard to teach. Schwartz does an admirable job of documenting the close connections between business circles in both countries, and the process by which Cuba became a playground for wealthy Americans in the ‘Teens and Twenties, fueling both deep corruption and a powerful anti-imperialism.

In Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, Melina Pappademos studies the participation in and contributions to Cuban politics by Cubans of African descent, particularly those of relatively elite status, during the entire period of the Cuban Republic (1902–1958). This work is not primarily about popular politics in the manner of Whitney or Farber; rather, it examines the impressive ingenuity of the tiny Black elite at working the patronage system embedded in formal politics in Cuba to gain advantages for itself (and sometimes causing gains to trickle down to the Black masses in the form of vote-buying). Although she does not focus on broader areas of Black popular mobilization, Pappademos acknowledges the importance to this end of mass organizations such as labor unions and the Cuban Communist Party and discusses challenges to the Black elite by non-elite Black voices. 

Naturally, when we think of sports in Latin America we first think of the region’s great athletes, from Pelé to Roberto Clemente, from Lionel Messi to Albert Pujols. But baseball and soccer players do not make sports meaningful on their own; many others – owners, sponsors, politicians, fans – make them what they are. This is the essential insight that guides Thomas Carter’s anthropology of Cuban baseball. He acknowledges the important role of the Communist regime in shaping the game, but he shows convincingly that the game belongs to its fans, for it is their passion that makes baseball important to Cuba, and it is their arguments about the game which make it a site for the negotiation of what it means to be Cuban.

I have been totally captivated by this book about Cuban palenques, Maroon settlements, from 1737 to 1850.

La Rosa Corzo gives a fascinating account of several communities, their organization, activities, and resistance. I particularly appreciate his use of slave hunters’ diaries and military dispatches, which provide a unique insight into the repression against the palenqueros.

The author's meticulous study confirms what I found when researching Maroons in the United States: whenever possible, they preferred flight to combat, an approach that enabled them to stay alive, return to their settlement once the danger had passed, or build a new one elsewhere.

In the case of Cuba, it was a winning strategy: several of these settlements have survived as small towns.