Matador Negro, "Azucar Ii"

Matador Negro,
Author: Odie Hawkins
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 613
Release: 2016-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504924940

I lit my fire, I greased my skillet with virgin pressed olive oil, and I cooked. Thats one of the statements Chester L. Simmons, Jr. made about his career as a Novillero/Matador in the art of bullfighting. Its really weird that it should be called bullfighting. No reasonable person would ever think of fighting a bull who has been bred to fight. Would any reasonable person think of fighting a pit bull who was bred to fight? But I have to ask, are bullfighters reasonable people?

The Black Matador, "Sugar"

The Black Matador,
Author: Odie Hawkins
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1481706624

The Matador Negro Azucar (Black Matador, Sugar), is the story of a young African-American man, born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, who is obsessed by the idea of becoming a matador. Chester Simmons is opposed by his parents. Bullfighting!? Get serious about yourself, Chester! Dondisha Phillips, the kindergarten teacher who loves him, Chester, you could get hurt messin around with those bulls. Chester trips to Mexico City. He spends time in the projects called Tlaltelolco before he does an espontaneo/jumps into the bullring during a fight in the Plaza Mexico. He does four suicidal passes and is taken under the wing of an unscrupulous promoter, -- re-named Matador, Juan Negro, Azucar. Seor Flores holds him as an indentured servant/bullfighter until Maya de las Reyes, the great Mexican artist, bails him out. He returns to Chicago to work under his father in Gelmans Electronic Affairs. He uses his knowledge of the bullfight to create a bullfighting video game (funded by Mr. Gelman) that makes him a wealthy twenty some year old. Whenever he is asked about his year as a Matador, he answers, I lit my fire, I greased my skillet and I cooked.

A History of the African American Novel

A History of the African American Novel
Author: Valerie Babb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2017-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107061725

This History is intended for a broad audience seeking knowledge of how novels interact with and influence their cultural landscape. Its interdisciplinary approach will appeal to those interested in novels and film, graphic novels, novels and popular culture, transatlantic blackness, and the interfacing of race, class, gender, and aesthetics.

Life in Mexico

Life in Mexico
Author: Madame Frances Calderón de la Barca
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 557
Release: 1982-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520907019

Originally published in 1843, Fanny Calderon de la Barca, gives her spirited account of living in Mexico–from her travels with her husband through Mexico as the Spanish diplomat to the daily struggles with finding good help–Fanny gives the reader an enlivened picture of the life and times of a country still struggling with independence.

A Revision of the Dulcamaroid Clade of Solanum L. (Solanaceae)

A Revision of the Dulcamaroid Clade of Solanum L. (Solanaceae)
Author: Sandra Knapp
Publisher: PenSoft Publishers LTD
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2013-05-10
Genre: Solanaceae
ISBN: 9546426849

This volume is a monograph of the 47 species of the Dulcamaroid clade of the large and diverse genus Solanum. Species in the group occur in North, Central and South America, and in Europe and Asia. The group is most species-rich in Peru and Brazil, and three of the component species, Solanum laxum of Brazil, Solanum seaforthianum of the Caribbean and and Solanum crispum of Chile are cultivated in many parts of the world. All species are illustrated and a distribution map of each is provided. All names are typified and nomenclatural and bibliographic details for all typifications presented. One new species from Ecuador is described. The monograph is the first complete taxonomic treatment of these species since the worldwide monograph of Solanum done by the French botanist Michel-Felix Dunal in 1852.

Menfriends

Menfriends
Author: Odie Hawkins
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504035747

An enchanting intro to a collection of unforgettable characters. Bobo, Burks, Leo (sometimes, when into imaginative self-hatred, alias Tony De Medrow), Billy Woods, Herb Cross, Bruce, Mooney, Johnny Fox, Bernard Kelly, and a few others who lived in the same neighborhood and hung out on the same corners. Some of the less informed thought we were a “gang” because we spent a lot of time together, but that was the result of them being unable to penetrate the esoteric haze surrounding our relationships. There were times, to be honest, when we didn’t know what was happening either.

Historia de Fe

Historia de Fe
Author: María Feliciana Rodríguez Coelho
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2011
Genre: Santa Cruz (Bolivia)
ISBN:

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill
Author: Cirilo Villaverde
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2005-09-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199725233

Cecilia Valdés is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde's novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo's advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime. For the contemporary reader Helen Lane's masterful translation of Cecilia Valdés opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdés thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.

Salsa Consciente

Salsa Consciente
Author: Andrés Espinoza Agurto
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1628954434

This volume explores the significations and developments of the Salsa consciente movement, a Latino musico-poetic and political discourse that exploded in the 1970s but then dwindled in momentum into the early 1990s. This movement is largely linked to the development of Nuyolatino popular music brought about in part by the mass Latino migration to New York City beginning in the 1950s and the subsequent social movements that were tied to the shifting political landscapes. Defined by its lyrical content alongside specific sonic markers and political and social issues facing U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans, Salsa consciente evokes the overarching cultural-nationalist idea of Latinidad (Latin-ness). Through the analysis of over 120 different Salsa songs from lyrical and musical perspectives that span a period of over sixty years, the author makes the argument that the urban Latino identity expressed in Salsa consciente was constructed largely from diasporic, deterritorialized, and at times imagined cultural memory, and furthermore proposes that the Latino/Latin American identity is in part based on African and Indigenous experience, especially as it relates to Spanish colonialism. A unique study on the intersection of Salsa and Latino and Latin American identity, this volume will be especially interesting to scholars of ethnic studies and musicology alike.