100 books like A Sor Juana Anthology

As a Latin American from a country of such diverse cultures as Mexico, I recommend this book by Rigoberta Menchú because it is the first 20th-century voice from an indigenous woman who has taken up arms in defense of her people. For me this connection also touches my family’s past, because I too, lost a brother to armed conflict, just like Rigoberta. A biography from an author that speaks so personally of this struggle stirs the pages in this book and makes this testimony overwhelmingly moving for any reader. But this deep connection with the reader also creates an international concern for justice. Menchú’s voice puts forward in book form a Maya tradition of community where the collective “we” is stressed in the testimony, as well as a history where experience is one, uniting the writer with the events that are being reported.  

As a person from the Andes—and moreover from Bolivia, from a small town in an Andean valley—I also lived and grew up in the US, and I always had to explain where I was from, because so little was known of Bolivia’s geographical location, not to mention its indigenous cultures. The Huarochiri manuscript, in its English translation, is one of the earliest oral testaments of the experience of indigenous peoples under Spanish rule: it’s a testament to their oral tradition and beliefs, it’s a testament of cultural survival, coded in their myths, such as that of the Fox’s Tail, explained as cosmological knowledge in our Anthology. I love this book because it brought me back to understanding my own roots and traditions, it was a source of pride, and it undermined all the negative school teachings about Andean indigenous cultures. Originally written in Quechua, it underwent a translation into… show more.

I recommend this book because it makes me understand the value of being part of many cultures, of a multicultural world, of building bridges between those cultures and surviving in all of them, just as the Inca Garcilaso did, growing up in his mother’s indigenous culture as a member of Inca royalty, while also acknowledging his Spanish father’s culture. I love the way this piece is almost a biography, written in lucid prose, and thus providing an early instance of the linguistic, historical, and cultural fusion that became a distinguishing mark of Spanish American culture. Inca Garcilaso’s text teaches us how to survive in a multicultural world, how to accept change, and at the same time value our diverse identities.

Subcomandante Marcos’ weapon, as the title of the book indicates, are his words, coming from his experience as a member and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). As a writer myself, I admire the clarity and fluidity of Marcos’ writing, which links the political and moral, the moral and the racial, racial issues with social concerns, social problems with economic ones. The result is a complex and multidimensional image of Mexican reality. The Zapatista revolt is the culmination of a history of rebellions such as the ones by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa and the student revolts of 1968. I recommend this book because it also touches me personally, both as a participant in the student revolt of 1968 in Mexico, which later became known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, and as an author writing about the Mexican Revolution, Una muerte sencilla justa eterna. Cultura y guerra durante… show more.

This superb book is a culturally and indigenous-language-focused study of women in four central Mesoamerican native societies—Aztecs (Nahuas), Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe.

In addition to a deep dive into texts dealing with all facets of women’s lives, Sousa uses visual evidence to great effect, showing how images contain much information about women’s and gender history, a history in which women struggled over centuries to maintain agency and authority despite efforts by a newly imposed colonial state to erode their power and status and exploit their labor.

I love this book because on the one hand it tells an incredible story of adventurous derring-do – how a few hundred men conquered a vast empire – and other hand is a testimony to the brutality and savagery that accompanied European colonization.

Diaz is crucial to understanding our present condition. I admire it because it helps us to understand why Europe emerged as the most important region in world history and reminds us of the terrible consequences that conquest had for indigenous people.

It’s an all-too-common crime of a history written by societies victors that brilliant women like Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz are doomed after living a life enriching this world’s literature and thought.

It was rage at this kind of historical injustice which inspired my writing of my book. 

Sor Juana’s great poem "First Dream" also inspired me not only in my first novel, but in many of the visual art I did in my 20’s. We even called my daughter Inés, partially in homage to her.

Octavio Paz’s masterpiece that won him the Nobel Prize of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz is an incredible time travelling journey. It’s so wonderful that sometimes you think you are reading a memoir and go deep inside her poetry, science, love life, and dreams.

It is biography, history, literary criticism, and an expose against the Vatican’s minions who were colonizing… show more.

Any account of dangerous travel holds the potential for unexpected revelation, but this one taps a motherlode of rare insights and observations. Part of the reason is that Diaz, a twenty-something soldier of fortune in Hernán Cortés’ 16th-century expedition to the New World, became enchanted by the Aztec civilization that he and his compadres had come to pillage and destroy. Diaz writes vividly and lyrically, with a keen eye for graphic detail, and is unsparing in his accounts of the remarkable brutality on both sides. Five centuries later, his account remains illuminating and disturbing, and shows it’s not always necessary to like your traveling companion to gain insight into a perilous, previously unknown world.

I adored this captivating, spellbinding tale of the only woman to sail with Francis Drake on the Golden Hind.

It’s based on the compelling true story of a slave called Macaia, a woman who was literally written out of the history books as her ordeal was deemed an inconvenient truth. Nikki Marmery not only vividly and authentically brings to light this courageous woman's story, but she sets Macaia front and centre.

I learned so much about this period of human history, about what life was like aboard a 16th Century sailing ship, and about how world exploration has never been solely a male endeavour. Macaia is an ordinary woman, who showed extraordinary bravery and endurance, and I found her story fascinating, moving, and life-affirming.

In my opinion, Bill Taylor is the greatest living American historian of Mexico. He has written big books and small books, all brilliant, all canonical, and his latest is no exception. In this labor of love, he traces the lives of two charlatans wandering the Mexican countryside, living and suffering by their wits, usually impersonating priests. The stories, in themselves, go nowhere: our two lowlife protagonists bounce from town to town, jail to jail, and never learn a thing or reach an epiphany; but taken together they paint a picture of Spanish American society as exceptionally mobile, and dysfunctionally unstable. Marked by displacement, dislocation, and immigration, New Spain gave birth to the picaresque novel, rooted in an abiding sense that nothing was ever as it seemed. This is Taylor’s real reward: a glimpse at two unpolished, real-life pícaros in the historical record.