Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence

Against the backdrop of one thousand years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces which have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religious beliefs (stone).

Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 ft above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the about Metallic, Sword, and Stone: 3 Crucibles in the Latin American Tale highest individual habitation on earth. Like her past due husband, she works the silver mines very much as the Indians were forced to do during the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign because they did 500 years ago. And now, just as after that, a miner’s success depends on a huge global marketplace whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places.

Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a calm community outdoors New Orleans. He was among a huge selection of bad guys Cuba expelled to the united states in 1980. His tale echoes the assault that has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus towards the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions towards the armed forces crackdowns that convulse Latin America even today.

Xavier Albó is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in mind and heart and, because of this, established fact in his adopted nation. Although his purpose is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of a checkered recent, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, switching the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to earn the New World. Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central function in the politics lifestyle of Latin America—occasionally for good, occasionally not.

In Metallic, Sword, and Rock Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these tales with the history of days gone by millennium to describe three enduring themes which have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the international greed for its nutrient riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, as well as the abiding power of religion. What emerges is certainly a vibrant family portrait of a people whose lives are significantly intertwined with this own.