When Making Art Means Leaving the United States

Throughout the 1950s, Havana served as “a hedonistic playground for the world’s elite,” filled with gambling joints, jazz, and brothels, moneyed by the mob, politicians, and aristocrats. The playwright Arthur Miller described Batista’s Cuba in The Nation as “hopelessly corrupt, a Mafia playground, [and] a bordello for Americans and other foreigners

Over the course of the twentieth century, Haitians, escaping poverty and unrest, sought refuge in the Bahamas as well. It was and remains a deeply stratified place, sitting at a crossroads, with the global elites and their tax havens at the top and poor Haitians living in shanties at the bottom. It is one of the tragic ironies of global history tha

In this hemisphere, the shifting borders of Texas, and the interests of its power brokers, make Mexicans, Central Americans, and Indigenous people part of both the history and present of Texas. But the numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans living inside of Houston increased dramatically during the labor shortages caused by the World Wars. The h

“It tells what happens to an intelligent Negro who discovers that he has, within American society, no future,” observed the Times review. “And it tells in the most powerful and precise terms what this really means—the systematized destruction of Negro self-esteem as an almost automatic function of white society.”