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An historical novel about the disappearance of the Mayan civilization. One of the Mayans, not wanting to continue in his father's business, involves himself in government and discovers he can associate with the rich and powerful and be favored by them with offers of property and power. He finds himself obliged to support one or another of two powerful factions. The first part of the story covers his social and political life in helping build a new city. Later, he is obliged to go to the land of the Aztecs to learn warfare and return to his homeland to avenge an earlier defeat at the hands of the Quiche. Oza, the Mayan, finds that treachery by one of the Mayan leaders leads to the threat of an invasion by an Aztec army, even after the leader is murdered by a rival. The only solution Oza offers the political leaders who were pawns in the treachery and bankruptcy of the nation is exile. While one group flees further south, Oza leads his group to the Pacific Ocean where they can sail away to distant lands for refuge.

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.