milial) history that represents Black history and women’s history as impor-tant ‘pieces’ of Puerto Rican history though not necessarily included in the archive, popular culture, or other spaces where national histories are shared, like museums and universities.

Subverting the Novel: Resisting Institutional Investments in Whiteness

In the novel-within-a-novel subplot, Llanos-Figueroa highlights the strug-gle Carisa faces to write her story by first changing the oral history tradi-tion into the written word. Carisa fights to tell her stories despite institu-tional disenfranchisement, embarrassment, and rejection from university professors. When Carisa tries to enroll in an advanced writing class, she approaches the table of Professor Stevens and he assumes she is looking for the “Composition 101” registration table upon first seeing her, a Black woman with an afro, though she is an advanced writer and the intro class was waived. He did not give her a chance to explain her credentials. He saw a Black body and believed she could not be in his class. He told her “Look, I rarely accept freshmen into my classes anyway. Maybe this is a waste of your time and mine,” and mocked her journal (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 264).2 In this journal Carisa has written her family’s stories, which are predominantly focused on the daughters of the stone, as the title sug-gests. One can infer that Carisa’s journal is a derivation of her mother’s writing practice; her mother, Elena, habitually wrote in a diary and docu-mented her struggle and survival in New York City.

After a quick look through Carisa’s journal, Professor Stevens offered her advice: “You need to start reading before you attempt to write. Read voraciously. Read the masters. Read everything in every genre. Study the canon. Steep yourself in the great themes of Western thought” (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 264). The professor’s racial bias is once again revealed es-pecially since he only deems Western discourses and literature as worthy of attention and study. Professor Stevens is unable to recognize that other forms of knowledge as well as alternative ways of being and writing exist outside of his expertise. He disregards Carisa’s writing as mythic nonsense and she is disheartened: