The Mangy Parrot A Northern Story

Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi's experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel--the first to be published in Latin America--after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of The Mangy Parrot (El Periquillo Sarniento) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death--and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain.