ldquo;Me./Just me. Willful/woman. As much have I of life/as I asked for.” These are the words of Cuban writer Georgina Herrera (quoted in Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, 141). They are words that have as much to do with a female meatpacking worker in Peronist Argentina, as they do with a poor black woman in twentieth-century Cuba. They are words that describe well the lives of Maria and Reyita, the narrators of their own histories in Daniel James' Doña Maria's Story: Life History, Memory and Political Identity and Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno's Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, as told to her daughter Daisy Rubiera Castillo.