“As to this”—he pointed to my journal—“this is a mass of superstitious nonsense, clichéd ghosts and goblins. You must understand that I’m interested in high-quality literary work. This… is just not it. This type of marginal material has no place in belle letres […] You might have a flair. There are some nicely turned phrases. Maybe one of the children’s fantasy magazines. Their editors are always looking for stories for their Halloween issues…”

I heard nothing more. I left his office, his words trailing behind me. I slipped my book into my coat and hugged it all the way back to the dorm […] I felt it needed my protection and yet I felt so wounded and in need of protection myself. (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 264-5)

The professor is used as a symbol of the institutional protection of and investment in whiteness at the university level, which is representative of the nation. Furthermore, this moment represents the lack of diversity in the voices that are given institutional support to write or develop ideas concerning the nation. Yet, Carisa writes her story anyway and no longer seeks institutional validation or approval, and thus also rejects the Puerto Rican literary canon that is made up of writings by mostly elite, white men.

Through Carisa’s experience, Llanos-Figueroa is making the argument that these stories, which represent the history of Puerto Rico from the nine-teenth century to the twenty-first century as told by Black women, subvert power dynamics and carve a pathway towards liberation. Llanos-Figueroa resists the silencing and erasure of Afro-Latinas in these narratives and the “denigration of African lineage on the island” and “reclaiming this identity from colonial narratives requires countering a coloniality of power and its mechanisms, as well as complicating the histories that coloniality bequeaths” (Hurtado 2017, 2). Writers and thinkers, most of whom were white men of the upper class, began defining Puerto Rican identity, culture, and nation-hood in the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. For example, An-tonio S. Pedreira’s Insularismo: An Insight into the Puerto Rican Character [1934] sought to define Puerto Rican identity and culture with Spanish and Eurocentric ancestry coupled with Taino roots, thus ignoring and eradicat-ing any African heritage. Jorge Duany’s (2001) chapter “Making Indians out of Blacks” demonstrates how this anti-Black rhetoric that defined Puerto Rican nationalism and identity, that prioritizes an ethnic identity more akin