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Letters from Latin America with Leo Boix: October 14, 2024
Mexican Yuri Herrera’s novel about Benito Juarez in New Orleans, and poetry by Mexican Fabio Morabito and Argentine Sergio Chejfec

BENITO JUAREZ, who, being of Zapotec origin, became Mexico’s first and only indigenous president in 1858 and the first democratically elected indigenous president in the postcolonial Americas, spent nearly 18 months in New Orleans in the early 1850s as a political exile.

Despite numerous historical accounts and his well-known autobiography, these 18 months in New Orleans were a mysterious void in the record.

What did Juarez do in the city soon after a major yellow fever epidemic swept through it? What did he see, and who did he meet ?

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