archivist and author. These stories constructed her identity and span five generations of women in her family, but they also represent a larger history of Afro-Puerto Rican women in the island: “These are the stories. My sto-ries, their stories—just as they were told to my mother and her mother and hers. They were given to me for safekeeping, and now I give them to you […] These are the stories of a time lost to flesh and bones, a time that lives only in dreams and memory. No matter. Like a primeval wave, these stories have carried me, and deposited me on the morning of today. They are the stories of how I came to be who I am, where I am” (Llanos-Figueroa 2017, x). More importantly, because Fela is literally and figuratively silenced in the novel via a grotesque tongue removal, we need Carisa to document and share these stories as a way to subvert the lasting colonial power. Through the charac-ter of Carisa, the author who provides the manuscript, “[Llanos-Figueroa’s] novel Daughters of the Stone is a literary intervention to re-claim the Afro-Latinx subject and to give witness to the past” (Lam 2017, 1). And, Hurtado adds, Daughters of the Stone “explores the ways in which decolonial fiction storytelling can demystify, as well as challenge, erasure and/or denigration of Afro-Latina identity that manifests in colonial narratives” (2017, 1). Ca-risa’s role is critical as the author and archivist because this book emerges as a project of memory and recovery work.

Lugones writes “the decolonial feminist’s task begins by her seeing the colonial difference, emphatically resisting her epistemological habit of eras-ing it” (Lugones 2010, 753). In Daughters of the Stone, Llanos-Figueroa mo-bilizes the character of Carisa to ‘rewrite’ Puerto Rican history in a way that includes Black women’s history as inclusive of Puerto Rican history and also demonstrating how different ways of knowing (and being and writing) led to this book. This story encompasses discourses of thought and motherhood that negate and challenge hegemonic epistemologies of knowing, producing knowledge, and archiving. Lugones also states:

One does not resist the coloniality of gender alone. One resists it from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that is shared and that can understand one’s actions, thus providing recognition. Communities rather than individuals enable the doing; one does with someone else, not in individualist isolation. The passing from mouth to mouth, from hand to hand of lived practices, values, beliefs, ontologies,