The Sun of Jesús del Monte

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The narrator refers to the Ladder Conspiracy of 1843 to 1844 in this paragraph. 2. Since “Afro-Cuban” was not an available term in the nineteenth century, those of African descent were collectively known either as negros (blacks) or as la raza de color (the race of color). When Belencita and Matilde discuss the raza de color, they are implicitly refusing the contemporary distinction between pardos and pardas (light-skinned mulattoes such as Plácido) and morenos and morenas (those with darker skin). 3. The Houghton Library of Harvard University holds a holograph manuscript edition of Orihuela's account of the death of Plácido in its José Augusto Escoto history and literature collection. Although the Escoto collection attributes the manuscript to Orihuela, he copied it from the pamphlet by José María Salinero, the owner of the printing house La Aurora de Yumurí, who published it in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1844, according to Vidal Morales y Morales in his Iniciadores y Primeros Mártires de la Revolución Cubana, 171 n. 1. 4. The narrator refers to the Corona fúnebre en honor de la Exma. Sra. doña Maria de la Piedad Roca de Togores (1832). Orihuela held Manuel José Quintana in very high esteem, as evidenced by the fact that he opened his collection Poetas Españoles y Americanos del Siglo XIX (1851) with a selection of Quintana's verse. 5. Translated by William H. Hurlburt in his “The Poetry of Spanish America,” 148. 6. The décima is a popular, improvisational form of verse put to song; see Virgilio López Lemus, La décima constante: Las tradiciones oral y escrita. 7. Translated by the US poet John Greenleaf Whittier in “Placido, the Slave Poet.”

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