Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa for sitting down with me to have conver-sations about her work and life. These phone calls and meetings helped me better understand her work. I appreciated our dialogue in which Dahlma, too, was inter-ested in my work and ideas. Mayra Santos Febres put me into contact with Dahlma—without her I would not be able to write this article. Thank you for expanding my network. Without Yomaira C. Figueroa, I would not have met Mayra and none of this work would be here today. Thank you for inviting me to Puerto Rico to be a part of #ProyectoPalabrasPR and helping my research become multilayered. Lastly, thank you for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

notes

1 To learn more about #ProyectoPalabrasPR reference their twitter account: <https://twitter.com/PalabrasPR>. Translation: Literary Salon and Festival of the Word.

2 In the novel, Carisa is fairly protective of her journal and it is an extension of her. When the journal is discussed in a bad light, Carisa feels disrespected and hurt. After Professor Stevens mocks her journal, and thus her writing, Carisa “slip[s] [her] journal into [her] coat and hug[s] it” until she reaches her dorm and thinks, “It would keep me warm in the autumn winds. Or maybe I could keep it warm and protected. I felt it needed my protection and yet I felt so wounded and in need of protection myself [...] I fell asleep swearing I would never let anyone touch my jour-nal again” (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 265).

3 Jose Luis Gonzalez’s foundational text, Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country and other Essays (1990), rejects the writings of Pedreira and other writers of this generation and traces a historical genealogy of Puerto Rico’s culture and identity in a way that includes African, European, and Indigenous roots but adds that the U.S. colonization of the island is the ‘4th story.’ Juan Flores (1993) examines Puerto Rican culture and identity in a way that includes all of Puerto Ricans’ cultural and racial roots while also incorporating the diaspora. Jorge Duany (2002) also interprets the various evolutions of Puerto Rican identity and includes the diasporic influence on the Puerto Rican identity and culture.

References

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Akbar Gilliam, David. 2005. Mother Africa and la Abuela Puertorriqueña: Francisco Arriví, Rosario Ferré, and the Ambiguity of Race in the Puerto Rican Fam-ily Tradition. Afro-Hispanic Review 24(2), 57–70.

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Carter, Rodney G.S. 2006. Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence. Archivaria 61(1), 215–33.

Duany, Jorge. 2001. Making Indians Out of Blacks: The Revitalization of Taino Iden-tity in Contemporary Puerto Rico. In Taíno Revival: Critical Perspectives