Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher JosA (c) JoaquA n FernA ndez de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi's experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel--the first to be published in Latin America--after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of The Mangy Parrot (El Periquillo Sarniento) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death--and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain. Though never before published in its entirety in English, The Mangy Parrot has become a Mexican classic beloved by generations of Latin American readers. Now, in vibrant American idiom, translator David Frye captures the exuberance of Lizardi's tale-telling as the author follows his narrator and alter ego, Periquillo Sarniento, through a series of misadventures that exposes the ignorance and corruption plaguing Mexican society on the eve of the wars for independence. Raw descriptions of colonial street life, candid portraits of race and ethnicity, and barely camouflaged attacks on colonial authority fill this comic masterpiece of world literature--the Don Quixote of Latin America.

David Frye's abridgment of his 2003 translation of The Mangy Parrot captures all of the narrative drive, literary innovation, and biting social commentary that established Lizardi's comic masterpiece as the Don Quixote of Latin America.

David Frye's abridgment of his 2003 translation of The Mangy Parrot captures all of the narrative drive, literary innovation, and biting social commentary that established Lizardi's comic masterpiece as the Don Quixote of Latin America.

Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher JosA (c) JoaquA n FernA ndez de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi's experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel--the first to be published in Latin America--after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of The Mangy Parrot (El Periquillo Sarniento) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death--and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain. Though never before published in its entirety in English, The Mangy Parrot has become a Mexican classic beloved by generations of Latin American readers. Now, in vibrant American idiom, translator David Frye captures the exuberance of Lizardi's tale-telling as the author follows his narrator and alter ego, Periquillo Sarniento, through a series of misadventures that exposes the ignorance and corruption plaguing Mexican society on the eve of the wars for independence. Raw descriptions of colonial street life, candid portraits of race and ethnicity, and barely camouflaged attacks on colonial authority fill this comic masterpiece of world literature--the Don Quixote of Latin America.

Few English-speaking readers are familiar with the life or the writings of the sixteenth-century Franciscan chronicler Luis Jerónimo de Oré, particularly his neglected Relación, about the early Spanish presence in territories now part of the United States. His account of La Florida—an area that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included present-day Florida as well as territory north to Virginia and west into Kansas—reflects the desire of the Spanish Crown and various religious orders to explore and to establish a presence in the region. This edition of Luis Jerónimo de Oré’s work presents readers with a new introduction and an annotated translation that place the text in the broader context of international politics. The narrative develops our understanding of the early Spanish presence in the continental United States while documenting frontier life and the contacts with Native Americans in the South and along the Eastern Seaboard.