José Martí

Maps the influence of America's Hispanic past, from the explorers and conquistadors who helped colonize Puerto Rico and Florida, to the missionaries and rancheros who settled in California and the 20th-century resurgence in major cities like Chicago and Miami. The United States is still typically conceived of as an offshoot of England, with our history unfolding east to west beginning with the first English settlers in Jamestown. This view overlooks the significance of America's Hispanic past. With the profile of the United States increasingly Hispanic, the importance of recovering the Hispanic dimension to our national story has never been greater. This narrative begins with the explorers and conquistadores who planted Spain's first colonies in Puerto Rico, Florida, and the Southwest. Missionaries and rancheros carry Spain's expansive impulse into the late eighteenth century, settling California, mapping the American interior to the Rockies, and charting the Pacific coast. During the nineteenth century Anglo-America expands west under the banner of "Manifest Destiny" and consolidates control through war with Mexico. In the Hispanic resurgence that follows, it is the peoples of Latin America who overspread the continent, from the Hispanic heartland in the West to major cities such as Chicago, Miami, New York, and Boston. The United States clearly has a Hispanic present and future, and here the author presents its Hispanic past. -- From book jacket.

"This Reader presents an outstanding new anthology of the writings, poetry and letters of Jose Marti - one of the most brilliant and impassioned Latin American intellectuals of the 19th century." "Teacher, journalist, revolutionary and poet, Jose Marti interweaves the threads of Latin American culture and history, fervently condemning the brutality and corruption of the Spanish colonizers as well as the increasingly predatory ambitions of the United States in Latin America"--Jacket.

Keith Ellis has swum with respect and wisdom through the rough seas of José Martí's Versos libres and offers the fruit of a lucid, tenacious and responsible work of translation. He does it, moreover, in the format of a bilingual edition, which gives the reading public an incomparable advantage and enhances the editorial undertaking for which we must be thankful, because from now on these Martí poems will be better known. From back cover.