At a bomba and plena dance workshop, I ran into Mayra Santos-Febres and she asked me “what was I up to” in reference to my graduate studies. When I informed her that I was conducting a close reading and textual anal-ysis of Llanos-Figueroa’s novel, she instantly put me in touch with her and insisted I meet her. After a few email exchanges, I called Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa from a Denny’s diner in Isla Verde, waiting to meet her and talk about her novel. I explained to Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa that I was fascinat-ed by the storytelling and the employment of it as a motif via the characters and the titular stone. Daughters of the Stone is original in its imaginary and captures Puerto Rico’s rich and diverse histories, which are often omitted or minimized in other texts that depict Puerto Rican history.

Llanos-Figueroa’s text follows a trans-generational account of an Afro-Puerto Rican family through the women’s stories and their journeys through motherhood. In doing so, Llanos-Figueroa centers Black women’s narratives across five generations and portrays them as characters with agency and voice. My goal here is to evoke how important and provocative Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone is in the ways we think and conceptualize Puerto Ri-can memory and history, and thus define Puerto Rican culture and identity. In thinking about how many writers in the Puerto Rican literary canon miss the opportunity to provide a more just revisionist history in their fictive works, questions concerning the literary canon and misrepresentation arise. In what follows, I include my conversation with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa in thematic relation to my analysis and breakdown of her novel, Daughters of the Stone, while also examining the motifs in the text that suggest Afro-Puerto Rican healing practices and storytelling offer an alternative archive.

A Contrapuntal Meditation on Daughters of the Stone

Keishla Rivera-Lopez (KRL): What stories/persons do you think are missing in Puerto Rican literature? Do you think the Puerto Rican literary canon has made enough progress, or what type of work is still needed to be done?

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa (DLF): I absolutely do not think the canon is open to the diversity within the culture. Much lip service is given to our being a com-bination of three cultures—the Taino, the Spanish and the African. But I find no real intellectual curiosity, scholarly study, nor academic recognition of