Afro-Boricuas: Puerto Rican Culture and Representation

In an effort to recover the Puerto Rican cultural traditions of the past and pres-ent, Llanos-Figueroa focuses on healing via Afro-diasporic religions as a moth-ering practice for Afro-Puerto Rican women, and thus a Puerto Rican practice. It is hard to ignore the labor of recovery work in this novel because the author, Llanos-Figueroa, and the protagonist, Carisa, rewrite Puerto Rican History.

KRL: Why was it important to include Afro-diasporic religion as an impor-tant cultural tradition of the main characters? 

DLF: Traditional African religion has given people a core of strength that has allowed them to survive institutionalized brutality and systematic erasure of their true selves. It gives my characters the strength to persevere and progress. Oshun is a crucial figure in the novel, a powerful and pervasive presence in the lives of all the women throughout time and space and is a constant that helps them survive and endure.

KRL: Why did you write this novel?

DLF: I feel that Afro-Boricuas have been rendered voiceless and faceless in both American and Puerto Rican society. Our presence and contributions weren’t acknowledged until quite recently and it is still a struggle in which I have to constantly deal with people saying, “You don’t look Puerto Rican.” The prevailing myth, the stereotypical image doesn’t look like me. Erasure is a form of annihilation. Even after Hurricane María, many Americans didn’t even realize that we are American citizens as well, that we are wo-ven into the fabric of U.S. society, whether acknowledged or not. I felt that erasure had to be remedied.

KRL: Is there an aspect of recovery work in your novel due to the focus on Afro-Puerto Rican characters and their perspectives?

DLF: The word recovery doesn’t quite fit. To those outside our culture, we were invisible or purposely erased. We simply did not exist within the con-text of the dominant discourse. One was either “Spanish” or “Black”. The concept of Afro-descendancy within the Latino community was alien to those outside it and even within the Latino society, many of the elite closed their eyes to our contributions. The notion of an African diasporic conscious-ness was just not within the western imaginary. As for those of us within that reality, we never lost ourselves; therefore, there was no re-discovery.