in the novel. Carisa resists institutional racism symbolized by university pro-fessors in Puerto Rico and rejects the cultural and political discourses in the island that exclude her from the Puerto Rican imaginary because she is black and has an afro. Writing her family’s stories not only provides an account of Afro-Puerto Rican history and culture, but she rewrites Puerto Rican history and redefines Puerto Rican nationhood to include black history and women’s history through the focus on generational mothering practices.

I contextualize Llanos-Figueroa’s decision as author to include the novel-within-a-novel “tool” and theme of motherhood as a primary motif in her text. This is important because context is key and proves why and how the author’s feminist politics or agenda resonates with the charac-ters who are writing texts, Carisa, and the overall integrity of their novels. The novel-within-a-novel plot is productive because it reveals to readers what the characters, and by extension the author, deems is important and vital to the rewriting of Puerto Rican history. Whose perspective matters and needs to be told? Considering the important question of what revision-ist work is and whose otherwise excluded voices must be included (now), many authors fall short. Llanos-Figueroa, however, carefully pens a novel that follows five generations of Afro-Puerto Rican women since slavery to the present day in the diaspora, the island, and back to Africa. In “Flipping the Script” C. Christina Lam writes, “In response to the white-washing of Puerto Rico’s history, Llanos-Figueroa’s novel centers on the mother-daughter bond disrupted by slavery and the resulting inter-generational trauma spanning five generations to recover this silenced past” (Lam 2018, 1). More importantly, through the archiving of these women’s histories Lla-nos-Figueroa accomplishes two tasks: 1. She challenges which discourses of knowledge and knowledge production matter by positing Carisa as the storyteller of black women’s history and black cultural traditions in Puerto Rico’s history and, 2. She preserves the memory of these histories via a stone which functions as an archive and source of Afro-diasporic religious powers that are quintessential to Afro-Puerto Rican motherhood.

KRL: Why is motherhood and mother-daughter relationships a focus of the novel?

DLF: I believe that culture is passed down primarily through the women, es-pecially mothers, in our society. As such, they hold tremendous power and