Yesena Barragan is a historian of the nineteenth-century Americas and Atlantic and Pacific worlds, focusing on race, slavery, and emancipation. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History from Columbia University and is now an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
In her new book, In Latin America You Could Be Free: An African American History, she explores a forgotten nineteenth-century geography of Black freedom across the Americas. As countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Mexico abolished slavery decades before the United States, Latin America came to occupy a powerful place in abolitionist imagination and strategy.
It will be published by Basic Books on November 10, 2026.
Debuitul is honored to reveal the cover of the book, which was designed by Alex Camlin, along with a Q&A with Barragan about how it was created.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like? I knew I wanted the cover to convey the spiritual enormity of the African Americans who dreamed of, and escaped to, Latin America in the antebellum period. These individual, ordinary and extraordinary, had bold visions, and some made heart-wrenching decisions, so I wanted the cover to speak to that.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team? It was fairly simple: I sent several images that “stuck” with me throughout the book’s research, including the one that the design team chose, which was from a mid-19th century drawing of the harbor of Chagres, Panamá. The village of Chagres became an important site where thousands of African Americans passed through on their way to the California goldfields; some even settled in Panama. The design team took that image and ran with it, while highlighting the breath-taking natural and geographic beauty of Latin America, which is a major theme that runs throughout the book.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time? I gasped. It was as if I had just witnessed the design team perform a miracle. Their artistic wizardry fundamentally captured the essence of the book.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about? It’s bold, breath-taking, and beautiful—what I hope the readers will see in the lives of thousands of African Americans who sought safe haven south of the US border. That’s essentially what my book chronicles. It’s a story of desperation, but also possibility—a story of the making of greater America.