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.
