An inspiring coming-of-age story told in prose and “spare, lyrical” verse (The Horn Book Magazine) from award-winning author Margarita Engle about a girl falling in love for the first time while finding the courage to protest for women’s right to vote in 1920s Cuba. Rima loves to ride horses alongside her abuela and Las Mambisas, the fierce women veterans who fought during Cuba’s wars for independence. Feminists from many backgrounds have gathered in voting clubs to demand suffrage and equality for women, but not everybody wants equality for all—especially not for someone like Rima. In 1920s Cuba, illegitimate children like her are bullied and shunned. Rima dreams of a day when she is free from fear and shame, the way she feels when she’s riding with Las Mambisas. As she seeks her way, Rima forges unexpected friendships with others who long for freedom, especially a handsome young artist named Maceo. Through turbulent times, hope soars, and with it…love.

In 1920s Cuba, Rima is bullied and shunned for her illegitimacy, but finds solace in riding her horse and forges unexpected friendships with others who share her dreams of freedom and suffrage. Includes historical note.

A postcolonial study of the conceptualization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America as medieval and oriental If Spain and Portugal were perceived as backward in the nineteenth century—still tainted, in the minds of European writers and thinkers, by more than a whiff of the medieval and Moorish—Ibero-America lagged even further behind. Originally colonized in the late fifteenth century, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were characterized by European travelers and South American elites alike as both feudal and oriental, as if they retained an oriental-Moorish character due to the centuries-long presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Nadia R. Altschul observes, the Scottish metropolitan writer Maria Graham (1785-1842) depicted the Chile in which she found herself stranded after the death of her sea captain husband as a premodern, precapitalist, and orientalized place that could only benefit from the free trade imperialism of the British. Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888), the most influential Latin American writer and statesman of his day, conceived of his own Euro-American creole class as medieval in such works as Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845) and Recollections of a Provincial Past (1850), and wrote of the inherited Moorish character of Spanish America in his 1883 Conflict and Harmony of the Races in America. Moving forward into the first half of the twentieth century, Altschul explores the oriental character that Gilberto Freyre assigned to Portuguese colonization in his The Masters and the Slaves (1933), in which he postulated the "Mozarabic" essence of Brazil. In Politics of Temporalization, Altschul examines the case of South America to ask more broadly what is at stake—what is harmed, what is excused—when the present is temporalized, when elements of "the now" are characterized as belonging to, and consequently imposed upon, a constructed and othered "past."

Skylarks and Rebels is a story about the fate of Latvia in the 20th century as told by Rita Laima. Laima, a Latvian-American, chose to leave behind the comforts of life in America to explore the land of her ancestors, which in the 1980s languished behind the Iron Curtain. In writing about her own experiences in a totalitarian state, Soviet-occupied Latvia, Laima delves into her family’s past to understand what happened to her fatherland and its people during and after World War II. She also pays tribute to some of Latvia’s remarkable people of integrity who risked their lives to oppose the brutal and destructive Soviet state.