In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The writing depicted Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista. *Troubled Lands* presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. For Hughes, Mexico was a presence almost from the beginning. He himself tells us this in the early pages of *The Big Sea*, his first of two autobiographies, recounting how his father, James Nathaniel Hughes, abandoned his mother just as Langston came into the world, first venturing to Cuba and eventually settling in Mexico.…