Although a discussion of book covers does not usually constitute a part of a scholarly review, I find that in the case of the two collections reviewed here, each book’s most excellent cover art helps to illuminate the conceptual aims of their respective editors. On the cover of Afro-Latino Voices is Adrián Sánchez Galque’s 1599 painting of three maroons, or escaped slaves, titled Mulatos de Esmeraldas. Painted on the occasion of a treaty between the Spanish colonial authority and a maroon community or palenque known as Esmeraldas in what is now Ecuador, the portrait shows the representatives of this community as proud, important men, dressed in a combination of African, native, European, and even Chinese sixteenth-century finery. They flourish the broad hats of European gentlemen in their hands, and as José F. Buscaglia-Salgado notes in his Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean, each of the three men “is wearing a buttoned shirt with gorgueras and puñetas, the ruff and sleeves that were fashionable adornments in the attire of Spanish gentlemen of the time.” They wear necklaces of seashells from the coast, but their shirts are covered with Andean highland ruanas or ponchos, and over these “they have rich and colorful cloaks of Chinese silk ... as references to trans-Pacific trade.”[1] Finally, these men sport huge, fabulous Amerindian gold earrings and nose rings piercing the tops as well as the lobes of their ears and their noses. All proudly carry spears. It is a glorious painting of what the editors of Technofuturos might call, in Cuban scholar Fernando Ortíz’s term, “transculturation”: those times where cultures forcibly conjoined bleed together.
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