This chapter addresses the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Latin America by examining the relationship between three of the continent’s major cities and three historical moments. The following case studies chosen are: Buenos Aires in the stories of Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1942) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; Havana in Armando Cristóbal Pérez’s novel La ronda de los rubies (The Ring of Rubies, 1973); and Mexico City in Días de combate (Days of Combat, 1976) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The chapter traces a textual trajectory from Borges and Bioy’s parodic games with the English models of mystery fiction to Taibo’s scathing national questioning of the Mexican neo-crime fiction, passing through Cristóbal’s politically committed and Cuban revolutionary crime fiction. That trajectory demonstrates the flexibility of the crime fiction genre, which has allowed it to branch out and adapt to the literary needs of different authors and contexts in the period between 1930 and 1980 in Latin American literature.

This analytical survey of key texts in contemporary urban Caribbean fiction and poetry from Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Havana, Santo Domingo and Pointe-à-Pitre explores several themes this literature holds in common: the postcolonial (or, in the case of Cuba, post-revolutionary) breakdown of the urban fabric and its attendant covert and more often overt violence, seen here in relation to the haunting and haunted after-lives of the plantation complex, along with the lived textures of daily life, with its unstable interplay of social anomie and possible emancipatory alternatives.

Carmen made its debut in the Spanish Americas when the local networks of opera were at their apex, with a constant stream of singers from Europe and a desire for new repertoires outside the main staples of Italian opera. In this chapter, considering sources from across the region, we discuss four layers of Carmen’s reception in the Americas. First, the reception of the opera beyond the stage, in the form of vocal scores, arrangements for military bands and isolated numbers. Second, the perception of Carmen as a French opera, and the way it served as a vehicle for French opera companies in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Third, the idea of Carmen as Spanish, and how different countries considered that hispanicity as part of their own culture and theatrical expectations. Finally, we discuss how the habanera in Carmen was perceived as part of a larger contemporary debate on the transatlantic popularity of the habanera as a musical genre, its origins, ethnicity and its moral and musical character.

In Chapter 3, we see how Caribbean anarchists closely followed and engaged with the Mexican Revolution of 1910. They published manifestos from the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party; PLM) and raised money for the magonistas. Yet, the revolution also revealed fissures in the regional anarchist network as individualists and communists waged a global war (literally) on each other over whether the PLM was truly an anarchist group.

Chapter 2 explores the decade and a half following the Cuban War, noting how anarchists emerged and evolved across the region. In Cuba, the visit by Errico Malatesta and the creation of ¡Tierra! helped anarchists build Havana into the network hub. Meanwhile, anarchists in Florida and Puerto Rico developed dual relationships by working with the anti-anarchist American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions on the ground while communicating with and funding ¡Tierra! as their newspaper. By the early 1910s, anarchists in Florida abandoned the AFL associations and forged the first Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Locals in the network. In Panama, anarchists migrated to the construction project shortly after it began, organized anarchist groups throughout the Canal Zone, linked themselves with Havana, and in 1911 created the isthmus’s first anarchist publication. Throughout all of this, anarchists – no matter where they were – attacked US intervention, capitalism in the region, oversight of the canal, and US-designed political systems then being developed across the Caribbean.

Chapter 1 focuses on the Cuban War for Independence in the 1890s. As Anderson noted, the war in Cuba itself was linked to global resistance in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and even Barcelona. But this chapter draws the focus to the particular roles of anarchists in Florida and the connections between them and their comrades in Havana. The side of the Florida Straits you were on could make a world of difference. While Havana’s anarchists faced severe repression by late 1896, anarchists in Florida operated in a climate of almost benign imperial neglect as Washington gave anarchists the space to support the war against Spain with supplies, men, and money. This trans-Strait symbiotic relationship gave birth to the Caribbean network which came to be centered mostly in Havana after the war but in which Tampa played an enormous role during the war and in the first years of Cuban political independence after 1902.

The exceptionalism of New Orleans from the perspective of the United States is reversed when considered from the perspective of major cities along the southern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, cities that, as New Orleans once did, formed part of the Spanish empire. Though this legacy has not been foregrounded in recent decades the way the city’s ties to France have been, major literary activity in Spanish has been associated with New Orleans since the career of Eusebio Gómez in the 1840s, perhaps reaching a peak in the first decades of the twentieth century with the rise of the New Orleans–based magazine, El Mercurio, which served as an important incubator of Modernism in the Spanish-speaking world.