The Worthy of My Race

About the Book

. Trans. Edith Moss Jackson The Worthy of My Race: Social Sketches, is a bilingual edition of Jorje Miguel Ford’s biographies, published in 1899. The United Nations, declaring that 2012 initiates the Decade of the Afrodescendant, encourages the recovery of such texts. This translation broadens readership of the biographies to English speakers, while offering the Spanish text for others desiring the original. Ford’s difficult style required that the translator render the text with flexibility. Ford selected fourteen Afro-Argentine men as motivational icons for contemporary Afro-Argentine youths who, like the massive waves of European immigrants, were unaware of the Afrodescendants’ crucial contributions to the nation’s construction and development. These biographies, with original photographs, document the achievements of Afro-Argentines that challenged the prevailing racialized ideologies of the period.

About the Author

Edith Moss Jackson earned the master's degree in Spanish literature at Harvard University and the doctorate in Spanish literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published an anthology, Forgotten Texts: 19th Century Afro-Argentine Poetic Constructions of Self and Community (2010), and authored a critical study Myth and Meaning: A Paradigmatic Analysis of Galdos's Fortunata y Jacinta (2002). She published "Bajo construccion en carnaval: las identidades etnicas de algunas comparsas afro-argentinas del siglo XIX," Konvergencias: Literatura, (Buenos Aires 2007), and presented papers at national professional meetings and international conferences in Eritrea, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Puerto Rico. She is also a recipient of Fulbright and John Hay Whitney fellowships.