In Latin America You Could Be Free

"In Latin America You Could Be Free is a ground-breaking account of African American freedom struggles. At a moment when immigration dominates public debate, this book reminds us that Latin America has long shaped the United States, not only through the circulation of people and goods, but through powerful ideas about freedom, belonging, and alternative futures...Barragan fundamentally reshapes our understanding of Black political imagination."—Alice Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom

"Weaving beautiful prose, gripping storytelling, and keen analysis, Yesenia Barragan demonstrates the deep, powerful nature of Black diasporic consciousness in antebellum America. In so doing, Barragan not only challenges what we thought we knew about antebellum Black politics, she also permanently alters our understanding of Black internationalism itself. In Latin America You Could Be Free is the book I’ve been waiting for."

“Yesenia Barragan has written a game changer of a book. This field defining work weaves together unknown histories of African American fugitivity in Central America, far beyond Mexico, and reveals the pivotal place of Latin America in the black abolitionist imagination. Barragan brilliantly connects the histories of emancipation in the Atlantic and Pacific, and in the United States and Latin America, in a manner that few have done and with timely implications for our own fraught times.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic