I'm starting a Bill Bryson-style memoir of my road trip through Mexico and Central America. If you're not familiar - his books are generally funny, based around personal travel stories, but heavily interspersed with history and science knowledge of the region. So I'm looking for historical, science-based or pretty much anything else interesting about the region. Could be books, documentaries, or just online resources and stories.

So far I've got a couple books on the fairly recent history of Baja (where I plan to start the book), and 1491 - a book about what life was like in the New World the year before Columbus arrived.

Obviously I've got a lot of reading to do about the long and tortured history of Central America and Mexico. I'm looking for any quirky history books, biographies of explorers are great, shipwrecks, pirates, etc. - anything with a great story makes for a good aside in the book.

I'm particularly fascinated with the history of the Caribbean side of Central America - which seems to be the result of countless waves of migration from ex-slaves, ex-pirates, ex-Navy, Spanish colonists, and a ton more mixing with the local indigenous people (if they survived). Each region seems to have a completely different accent and look to the people.

Mike Duncan just did a section of his Revolutions podcast on the Mexican Revolution. I listened to it before my trip to Mexico City and found it very informative. It helped me fit a lot of what I was seeing into a context. Even though it is largely about the revolution it has episodes covering the colonial, independence, and Porfiriato eras. The episodes covering Mexico are 9.1 to 9.27.

Sorry I can’t help much for Central America though.

I've thought about reading this just for fun.

The Atlantic magazine article from 2002 that was the basis for the book was an interesting read.

tailor of panama

howard hughes lived in a 4-star hotel in one of the central american countries

leon trotsky in mexico

under the volcano - malcolm lowery
the pearl - john steinbeck
our man in havana (tons of fiction about cuba partially due to cold war.. mafia in havana too)
mexico - james mitchener

Rollicking true adventure stories:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reb...=9781880684214

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dea...=9781880684269

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fir...=9780452262768

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-...=9780292751248

Great history:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/blo...=9780674025936 (Includes section on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast.)

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bit...=9780674019300

Thanks a lot, I will check those out. Nicaragua is where I had my big adventure and will be climax of the book. I definitely want as much historical context as possible on Ortega, the Sandanistas, the Contras and Somoza. At one of the road blocks I had to talk my way through to escape the country - they asked me if I was a Contra. I knew the protestors were against the Sandinistas - but I decided to just play dumb as the most prudent course of action.

I'm about halfway done with Baja so far (which is pretty long but I realized I did a lot of stuff in Baja - plus the whole trip was so new).

Baja doesn't have anything like the history of Mesoamerica - but it does have some amazing cave paintings (supposedly one of the top 5 sites in the world for those). I've got these books so far:

Cave Paintings Of Baja California: Discovering the Great Murals of an Unknown People

Baja Legends: The Historic Characters, Events, and Locations That Put Baja California on the Map

Californio Portraits: Baja California's Vanishing Culture (Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico Series)

And some books on the flora and fauna - mostly for the incredible cactii that exist nowhere else in the world.

Baja apparently was a backwater of the Spanish colonial ambitions for like 200 years - due to not much arable land, access to water, or exploitable resources. But w/o it none of the Rancho/Mission history of California (US) happens. The last book has some fascinating portraits of the Californos - hardscrabble Baja ranchers who made due off the land and pretty much lived the same way for 200 years, while the world industrialized around them.

I said in my blog at the time that Alaska is the only other place I've been which seemed more like nature was still winning over man.