"Antón Pérez tells the story of a momentous, transformative conflict in which the good guys beat the odds and won. ... Terry Rugeley’s introduction and copiously annotated translation make it accessible to an English-speaking audience while at the same time throwing light on its more engaging features: the peculiarities of the Tabascan geography and experience; the visions of disappointed revolutionaries, unable to recognize the nation that they had fought for; the tensions and connections between personal experience remembered and national memory exalted. ... Few historians know and understand the turbulent, often bloody decades of the mid-nineteenth century in the Mexican southeast as well as Rugeley does. By weaving together context and analysis, he brings forth complexities that have been flattened out by seamless patriotic narratives. His translation is remarkable in that it manages—by, among other things, preserving the costeños’ open-ended words and redolent speech patterns—to re-create, in a foreign language, a holistic sense of time and place (p. xxvii). By bringing historical knowledge, heart, and humor to the specialized, technical exercises of editing and translating, Rugeley reveals the powerful, relevant, fascinating read that was hiding inside a seemingly fuddy-duddy novel." —Hispanic American Historical Review
"This book is a significant contribution to literary history and historical literature. It provides a unique perspective on nineteenth-century Mexican society, politics, and culture. General readers as well as academics in literature and history (particularly) will benefit from the high-quality work undertaken to bring this previously under-appreciated novel to light. It is straightforward and fully accessible to general readers and specialists alike, who will especially appreciate the finely crafted and highly intelligent introduction." —Andrew Wood, Rutland Professor of History/History of the Americas, University of Tulsa
"This is one of the most comprehensively edited translations of a Mexican novel of any period. It is meticulously annotated with a specialist, interdisciplinary introduction and more than 260 notes explaining and unpacking the history, culture, and language of the text. These notes, which demonstrate Terry Rugeley’s uncommon general scholarship as well as his specialist knowledge, are education and entertainment in and of themselves. Its presentation of a readable novel and the cultural history it contains, at times highly specialized, will appeal to scholars of both Mexican history and Latin American letters. Its quality, brevity, strong sense of place, and value as an optic onto key processes in nineteenth-century history will also appeal to an advanced undergraduate readership, for whom it might fill something of the role of a much better-known novel, Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs. I would even consider assigning it in survey courses as a nuanced treatment of colonialism." —Paul Gillingham, Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University
