Cecilia Valdés in New Orleans This paper considers some New Orleans sources, parallels and intertexts of Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés o la loma del Ángel: novela de costumbres cubanas (Havana, 1839-New York, 1882) and the fact that Cuba’s national novel was written over thirty years’ residence in the United States. Like José Martí, Benito Juárez, … More An unplanned child

Lomax’s description occurs in his documentary, Cajun Country, where his specific goal is to discuss the concept of “Cajun” not as a group of people so much as a cultural dynamic capable of absorbing and reworking a variety of influences, albeit most of them deriving from traditional folkways found in southern France. That goal is … More Alan Lomax, vendor of mestizaje…

Here is a discussion of him. It is interesting and he may not have been entirely wrong about the nature of Louisiana. Axé.

If race is constitutive of the modern state, as Goldberg demonstrates (2002), or of modernity itself, as da Silva argues (2007), the liberal assumption that inequality can be addressed within the framework of the nation does not hold. How might this perception change our understanding of these and other texts that have been read as … More My egalitarian bias keeps me from seeing this.