I never left home : poet, feminist, revolutionary : a memoir of time & place

In __I Never Left Home__, poet and revolutionary Margaret Randall tells the moving, captivating, and astonishing story of her life, from her childhood in New York to joining the Sandanista movement in Nicaragua, from escaping political repression in Mexico to raising a family and teaching college. In 1969, poet and revolutionary Margaret Randall was forced underground when the Mexican government cracked down on all those who took part in the 1968 student movement. Needing to leave the country, she sent her four young children alone to Cuba while she scrambled to find safe passage out of Mexico. In I Never Left Home, Randall recounts her harrowing escape and the other extraordinary stories from her life and career. From living among New York's abstract expressionists in the mid-1950s as a young woman to working in the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture to instill revolutionary values in the media during the Sandinista movement, the story of Randall's life reads like a Hollywood production. Along the way, she edited a bilingual literary journal in Mexico City, befriended Cuban revolutionaries, raised a family, came out as a lesbian, taught college, and wrote over 150 books. Throughout it all, Randall never wavered from her devotion to social justice. When she returned to the United States in 1984 after living in Latin America for twenty-three years, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered her to be deported for her “subversive writing.” Over the next five years, and with the support of writers, entertainers, and ordinary people across the country, Randall fought to regain her citizenship, which she won in court in 1989. As much as I Never Left Home is Randall's story, it is also the story of the communities of artists, writers, and radicals she belonged to. Randall brings to life scores of creative and courageous people on the front lines of creating a more just world. She also weaves political and social analyses and poetry into the narrative of her life. Moving, captivating, and astonishing, I Never Left Home is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman. "I NEVER LEFT HOME is a memoir by Margaret Randall, capturing details about her life as an American writer, activist, and academic who lived in Latin America for twenty-three years. Randall resettled in the United States in the eighties, after waging a successful five-year battle against deportation. The memoir, which chronologically charts her time in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, reproduces the meaning and feelings of particular eras and their cultures, politics, and everyday life. Poems and quotes from others, as well as some of her own creative work, are interspersed throughout the chapters, creating vivid images of places and people in time. After an introduction that explains how the book came to be, the chapters follow Randall's life trajectory chronologically. Chapter 1 explores Randall's family history and early days in New York during an era of Anti-Semitism and Jim Crow. She speaks of her parents, Jews who had settled in New York, and how hard they tried to escape their Jewishness, an internalized prejudice that would influence most of their family life. In chapters 2 and 3, Randall reminisces on her young adult years and, particularly, her encounters with poetry, art, and feminism during the ensuing Civil Rights era. Randall then writes extensively of the political, literary, and artistic landscape of Mexico City, her years amidst the Cuban Revolution, and her time with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The final chapter, "Home - 1984 and Beyond," maps her return to the mainland United States and her career as a professor. This book will be of interest to a general readership, but also to students and scholars in Latin American studies and cultural studies"-- Provided by publisher