José martí, the United States, and Race by Anne Fountain (review)

The Latin Americanist, December 2016 Built on some twenty-five oral interviews and research into a rich body of national and regional sources, McCormick offers a nuanced analysis of peasant politics between 1935 and 1965. Her main contention about the importance of the countryside does raise questions. For instance, to what extent is this thesis applicable to rural settings outside of Puebla and Morelos, where the absence of intense sugar cultivation and community autonomy made for vastly different regional contexts? The author rightly notes that as late as 1940 two-thirds of Mexico’s population resided in the countryside. However, at that same time, rural populations were in the process of abandoning the countryside in unprecedented droves. At the end of the next decade, some five thousand people per week were leaving rural areas for Mexico City alone. The implications of this demographic shift may potentially strengthen (and definitely impacts) McCormick’s analysis, but she devotes little attention to urban centers. Obviously, a study about the countryside ought not be a study of cities, but McCormick draws too neat a distinction between the countryside and urban settings, leaving unexplored the social continuities between the two. No doubt people in the countryside and the instruments of control McCormick places at the center of her investigation were shaped by factors associated with this profound demographic shift. Despite these questions, this captivating and wonderfully written book should be required reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century Mexico. Steven J. Bachelor University of Connecticut JOSÉ MARTÍ, THE UNITED STATES, AND RACE. By Anne Fountain. Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2014, p. 176, $69.95. At first sight, one might overlook Anne Fountain’s José Martí, the United States, and Race as merely another work that offers little more than a passing glance over of Cuban patriot José Martí’s views on race relations or years in the United States. After all, specialists still remark upon the martyr ’s continuing and often contested contribution to political debates over Cuban independence and democracy, students know of the exile’s years spent in New York City, and admirers throughout the Americas pore over and cite the poet and essayist’s writings. However, Fountain’s work actually provides a focused, comprehensive examination into how Martí’s time in the United States directly shaped his hemispheric vision of race. Thus, José Martí, the United States, and Race serves as a useful contribution to the literature on not only José Martí but Latin American, U.S. and the World, and transnational studies. Fountain’s study centers upon the exile’s readings and writings about race while in the United States. After opening with a preliminary chapter on Martí’s life, the author turns to an overview of the obra martiana and an 590 Book Reviews historiographical outline – ranging from Alejandro de la Fuente and Aline Helg to Ada Ferrer and Louis A. Pérez, Jr. – that is especially beneficial to non-specialists. Next, the author delves into six thematic chapters on various aspects of how Martí confronted race while in the United States. In each chapter, Fountain taps into Martí’s most famous essays and poems (such as “Nuestra América”), his articles in the newspaper Patria, his time with black Cubans in New York and Florida, and his translations and summaries of U.S. articles for Latin American periodicals. It was the confluence of all these experiences that kept U.S. race relations at the forefront of the exile’s own thoughts. Repeatedly, the Cuban read and translated passages from the U.S. press on successful black professionals alongside horrific lynchings in the first decades after the Civil War. He wrote tributes for abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison and lamented the racism directed against Chinese immigrants in Wyoming and California . Epitomized in his decision to translate Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, his articles drew connections between indigenous peoples in the United States and Latin America. The evolution of Martí’s ever-increasing understanding of racism due to his time in the United States is most apparent in Fountain’s “Native Americans and ‘Nuestra América.’” Though travels in Mexico and Guatemala may have first and...