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2026 Silver Medal for the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – Spanish, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
A definitive, bilingual selection of poetry, essays, and letters by one of Puerto Rico’s most beloved poets.

Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) is best known for her poetry, but she is also an important cultural figure famous for her commitment to social justice, feminist ideas, and the independence of Puerto Rico. Admirers cultivated her legacy to bring to light the real Julia de Burgos, the woman behind the public figure, which this remarkable collection further illuminates by supplying a complex portrait using her own powerful and imaginative words.

Beginning with a critical introduction to Burgos's life and work, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario then presents a selection of poems, essays, and letters, that offer a glimpse into this formidable talent and intellect. Burgos left Puerto Rico, spending the 1940s in both New York City and Havana, where she cultivated a new kind of identity refracted through her pathbreaking work as a poet and journalist. Both poetry and prose are alive with politically charged insights into the struggle of national liberation, literary creation, and being a woman in a patriarchal society. I Am My Own Path is essential reading for anyone interested in Puerto Rican literature and culture as well as a foundational text of Latinx literature and culture in the United States.

An illuminating look at the festival performances of slaves in Havana and New Orleans

However urban slave societies might have differed from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their African-descended inhabitants to maintain power and control. This ambitious book looks at how people of African descent in two such societies—Havana and New Orleans in the nineteenth century—created and maintained their own forms of cultural resistance to the slave regime’s assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of self and the social landscape.

A rare and unfiltered witness to Spain’s colonial collapse—Ciges Aparicio’s prison memoir exposes the political, human, and moral stakes of the Cuban War of Independence.

Ciges enlisted in the Spanish army in 1893 at the age of twenty. He served in Africa and then in Cuba, where he opposed Spanish General Valeriano Weyler’s policies in Cuba as well as the war itself. Ciges soon found himself imprisoned and facing execution for treason as punishment for an article critical of Weyler’s conducting of the war that was intercepted by Spanish authorities before it could be published in the pro-Cuban Parisian paper L’Intransigeant.

First published in book form in 1903, Ciges’s account includes detailed observations concerning prison organization, perceptions of political events and personalities of the time, as well as graphic descriptions of the daily life of the men confined in the infamous prison. Ciges is the only one of the so-called Generation of 1898—writers considered to have been deeply marked by el desastre (the loss of the colonies)—who was in Cuba during the war years. His witness to events there, colored by his stance as a freethinker and political skeptic, constitutes a significant historical document. Following his release from prison, Ciges returned to Spain where he resumed his career as an activist journalist and also earned acclaim as a translator and novelist. In time, his political allegiances shifted from socialism to liberal republicanism. He was acting as provincial governor of Avila when he was killed by unidentified assassins on August 4, 1936—eighteen days after the Falangist uprising against the Second Republic.
 

Why Havana attracted the most important architects in the 1950s, and how the Cuban Revolution transformed the uses of these impressive skyscrapers. 

During the 1950s, Havana’s Vedado district became an epicenter of modern architecture. Architects from around the world—including Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Josep Lluis Sert—worked in Cuba and helped make Havana one of the most modern capitals in Latin America. After the Cuban Revolution, the buildings designed during Cuba’s American-influenced hyper-capitalist past had to be reimagined, about what use what use could luxury hotels, private condominiums, and golf clubs could have in a socialist society. Writers and artists from around the world including Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, and Gabriel García Márquez flocked to Havana to witness the first socialist experiment in the Americas and marveled at the modern towers. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about “Skyscrapers in Havana” for his first journalistic piece about his trip. In contrast, modern architects abandoned Cuba after the Revolution: not even those designers who had built projects there set foot in the island again. 

Considering Havana’s architecture as part of a larger Cuban modernity, Gallo places built projects in dialogue with film, literature, and other cultural texts, revealing how poets, novelists, filmmakers, and designers theorized the city’s urban fabric. Skyscrapers in Havana features six chapters, each devoted to an iconic modernist structure, as well as five shorter meditations on the architects, including Le Corbusier, who had the opportunity to go to Cuba after the Revolution but decided to stay away. 

According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.

Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell’s close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a “dissonance of heritage”—in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works’ significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.