Reading to Connect
by Isabel Schechter
I started a book club at my local Puerto Rican culture club this year and have been enjoying learning about and getting closer to my heritage while expanding the type of reading I do.
Everyone in our group is Puerto Rican, but we all come from diverse backgrounds. We are split roughly in half by gender, and there is a 20-year range in our ages. Some of us were born in Puerto Rico, some were born on the mainland, some started in one of the two and moved to the other or keep bouncing between the two, and some of us have never visited the island. And, like any group of Puerto Rico-loving puertorriqueños, some of us are pro-independence, others pro-statehood, and some want the island to continue as a Commonwealth. Our differences have made for some very interesting discussions.
We read works with a Puerto Rican-related theme: works set in Puerto Rico, about Puerto Rico, or written by a Puerto Rican author. We have read a variety of genres: fiction (historical, contemporary, fantasy, and literary) and non-fiction (memoir). When I first started the group, I wasn’t sure what kind of books we would read or if they would appeal to non-Puerto Ricans, but as I’ve told friends outside of our group about the books we’ve read, it is clear that they touch a chord even with people who have no connection to Puerto Rico.
The book club’s first selection was the historical fiction novel, The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera. The novel tells the story of a young couple who were a part of los hambrientos, the thousands of poor Puerto Ricans whose lives were upended after the Spanish-American War and the San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899, and who were recruited to work in the sugar plantations of Hawaii.
Lured by promises of a better life, many died due to the inhuman conditions on the packed ships before making it to Hawaii. Of the ones that survived, they realized once they arrived that not only were the promises of good housing, schools for their children, and a decent wage all lies, but they were treated as slaves.
It was difficult for us to read about the way these Puerto Ricans were treated, especially given that Puerto Rico’s population comes from a mix of not just Spanish and Indigenous Taino people, but also enslaved Africans. None of us in the book club had any idea about this period of our own people’s history and wanted to learn more about it.
Our next selection was Velorio by Xavier Navarro Aquino, which tells the story of a fictional group of survivors of the 2017 Hurricane Maria. A velorio is a wake, the kind that precedes a funeral, and that is very much the setting created by Aquino when showing the despair and hopelessness created by the destruction that leads to the death of thousands of people on the island.
The group of survivors escape the lack of food, electricity, and water and trek to the mountains hoping for refuge. Instead, the charismatic leader of the promised utopia gradually becomes a dictator and molds the children in the community into a maniacal Lord of the Flies-style gang to help him keep his hold on power.
The resilience of the group of survivors from helpless victims to individuals taking back their agency and power to build back their island resonated with all of us in the book club, whether we had loved ones who lived through the tragedy of Hurricane Maria or watched in horror while our people were left to die by the ineptitude and lack of concern in the United States’ response to the humanitarian crisis on the island. The book sparked painful conversations about Puerto Rico’s treatment by the United States as little more than a colonial possession whose people were not considered to be worth saving.
Our third book was the National Book Award Finalist, The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré. The novel is a beautifully told story of successive generations of a wealthy family in Puerto Rico at the turn of the 20th century. The novel shows how the different generations of the family are affected by some of the many divisions in the lives of Puerto Ricans, most of which continue to this day.
The patriarchal system that allows men to be unfaithful yet punish their wives if they try to speak their minds or exercise any decision-making for themselves is questioned as we see how the women in the family are expected to live under the rule of the men in their lives.
The concept of a parent’s absolute authority and a child’s duty to their family comes into conflict just as the Puerto Rican pro-independence and pro-statehood movements tear families apart. Some of this conflict derives from class distinctions between those born in Spain and those born on the island and the struggle to escape the restrictions these roles place on the opportunities available to the characters. Race and colorism are also inescapable factors in how people are treated and allowed to be recognized as members of the family.
Our book club then explored differences between living on the island and living on the mainland with When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, the first of three installments of a memoir of Santiago’s life. It is a coming-of-age story that starts in Puerto Rico when Esmeralda is six years old and ends after she moves to New York and becomes a high school graduate.
Esmeralda struggles to discover who she is and her place in the world as well as in relationships with her family, friends, and new cities that she is forced to move to as her family’s situation demands. Her father’s philandering, her mother’s ambivalent treatment of her children, her siblings’ need to be cared for, and the relief and guilt she feels for having been one of the siblings who were able to stay with their mother while her other siblings had to stay back in Puerto Rico with their father, all clash at various times. Esmeralda’s experiences elicited tales from each of us in the book club about our own childhoods and how we identified with aspects of Esmeralda’s life, and how that influenced how we judged Esmeralda’s parents. Several of us went on to read the other installments of Santiago’s memoir.
A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry was a way for me to sneak some genre reading into the book club. The poison in the story is Isabel, a green-skinned child born of a curse and hidden away in her family’s house. Several of the neighborhood busybody viejitas gossip about the tragic story from back in the day when the girl’s beautiful mother married a White man, causing the curse.
Seeming to repeat her mother’s mistakes, Isabel begins a strange relationship with Lucas, the White son of an American mainlander who is busier building resorts for tourists than he is with parenting. Lucas throws a note with a scribbled wish over the garden wall hoping the stories that the cursed girl can grant wishes are true. He then starts receiving notes from Isabel in his hotel room. Lucas and Isabel join together to find out if the curse is responsible for a rash of disappearances of local girls and find answers that they weren’t expecting and that change both of their lives in ways they couldn’t have imagined.
Although many of us laughed and told stories of busybody viejitas in our own lives, we also discussed how far parents will go for their children and the morality of their actions, especially when others have to be sacrificed to achieve the parents’ goals.
We then read A Woman of Endurance by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa. This was another historical fiction novel, this time giving us an insight into the Puerto Rican Atlantic slave trade. It was the most emotionally difficult book our group read.
The main character, Pola, is an enslaved African woman who is used for breeding purposes. Pola tries unsuccessfully to escape after yet another child is taken from her, and she is then savagely beaten and sold to a different plantation.
Life on the second plantation was a particular point of disagreement among members of the book club. Although we all wanted a better life for Pola, the benign, and even kind treatment of the plantation owners Llanos-Figueroa presents can be seen as a fulfilment of our hopes for Pola or the author’s attempt to pretend that there were places where slavery was not a heinous crime, but an institution that had some redeeming aspects.
Reviews of the book are positive, and one even says it “will resonate with readers of strong African American feminist narratives like those of Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange.” I am still torn between thinking the novel is slavery apologism or a heart-wrenching tale of one woman’s struggle to make a life for herself by taking what happiness she can from a system that tries but ultimately fails to break her spirit.
Our group has not yet finalized our list of books to read in 2023 but this coming year’s selections will dwell less on Puerto Rico’s unfortunate history and more about the joys of being Puerto Rican. I look forward to sharing the list with readers who may not be Puerto Rican but who are interested in learning more about La Isla de Encanto.
Isabel’s essays on race and representation in SF/F have been published in Invisible 2: Essays on Race and Representation in SF/F, Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and several volumes of the WisCon Chronicles; and she is Co-Editor of The WisCon Chronicles Volume 12: Boundaries and Bridges. She is Puerto-Rican, feminist, child-free, Jewish, vegetarian, and a Midwesterner living in Southern California, and embraces the opportunity to represent the fact that no one of those identities excludes any of the others.
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