With her books When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, Esmeralda Santiago captivated readers. Today we are pleased to welcome this Puerto Rican writer based in the United States. Her work speaks of migration, of identity, of a childhood that remained in the past and in memories, of the question, where am I from?
This is an excerpt from a conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: Esmeralda, you write from the United States about Puerto Rico in the United States. At some point, did you realize that you were part of a movement of something that was happening on a national and international level? Would you call this a movement? What is happening with Puerto Rican writers writing from the United States?
Esmeralda Santiago: Well, I think good writers come and I think publishers are also much more open to finding voices that are different from the traditional ones, let’s say. And now we’re writing a lot in both languages, English and Spanish, and it’s being translated from Spanish to English, English to Spanish, so there’s an exchange between readers as well.
A.P.: You’ve talked about that topic, about what language you feel most comfortable writing in. You prefer to write in English, don’t you, Esmeralda?
E.S.: Yes, I’ve been here in the United States for so long and the truth is that I speak English 90% of the day, and every now and then I talk to a family member or friend in Spanish, so my Spanish is not as developed, as literary as my English, the language that I practice almost all day. So it’s not a decision of which one I prefer, but which one I’m more skilled at.
A.P.: Sure. Your family came to the United States as migrants when you were very young and you come from a large family. Tell us a little about that moment, that time, your childhood, your community as a child when you arrived.
E.S.: I grew up in the countryside in Puerto Rico, in a place called Macún. It’s a neighborhood in the town of Toa Baja. And then my mother, whose family was in New York, was divorcing my father, and so she decided to go to the United States. I always say, “I didn’t leave Puerto Rico, they took me.” Because the truth is that I didn’t want to leave Puerto Rico. I didn’t want to leave my dad and my friends and the place that I knew, but that was a decision she made because she was looking toward a future I couldn’t see. So, it was difficult, as you can imagine, to arrive from the countryside in Puerto Rico, to be in Brooklyn, to learn a new language, to adapt to the weather, to learn how to live in a city.
A.P.: Sure. And in the nineties, you wrote When I Was Puerto Rican, which is based on several interesting moments in the history of Puerto Rico from the fifties to the sixties. Tell us about this first book.
E.S.: I started writing when I was about 38 or 39 years old. I started writing personal essays that appeared in newspapers and magazines, and an editor at a fairly small but respected publishing house outside of Boston read one of my essays. She wrote to me and said, “I liked that essay. Do you have others?” I sent her a bunch of what I had. She gave me the idea to write a memoir. I was writing novels and couldn’t think of doing something else. But then she read the essays and she told me, “Here’s a story that hasn’t been read here in the United States, especially in English.” And it was her who suggested that I try to write a memoir. The first draft of this book was almost 700 pages long, because when I started writing I couldn’t stop. And so, well, the idea was, “Let’s cut the book a little bit more.” Fewer stories. And then, when I finished the book, it didn’t have a title. I used to call it Memoirs Number One. No, I didn’t have any idea, and my editor said, “Esmeralda, we need a title… It’s important to have a title.” I went for a walk near my house and asked myself, “What is this book about?” And then I realized that I wrote a book about a childhood that no longer existed in Puerto Rico. And that you couldn’t have in Puerto Rico since what happened with Hurricane Maria.
A.P.: Of course, you’re making me think of other women writers who have addressed precisely that question of identity. For example, Sandra Cisneros, who, by the way, wrote a blurb on your book Las madres. How do you think these contrasts—because each of you also write from a different background, from a different heritage—how do you feel that you connect in some way in a wonderful dialogue within the United States, which we need to somehow go beyond into the rest of the world as well so that other readers can read your work?
E.S.: That’s the truth, it’s the right word. It’s wonderful that we, a generation of women writers, should appear in the literary world as if out of nowhere, like Athena coming out of Zeus’s head, right? But the truth is that we were women trying to present our lives and our experiences. I think we started writing to learn about what we were going through. And then, the more we wrote, the more we realized that this information, these tales, these stories were necessary for our people because we weren’t the only ones who were asking those questions.
A.P.: Your book Almost a Woman (another title that I love) made it to the big screen in 2002, in a movie directed by Betty Kaplan. What did this book mean to you? What was it like for you to see the story there on screen, to imagine what people were going to think and feel when they saw it?
E.S.: Well, the book Almost a Woman was the second part I mentioned, from the first draft of When I Was Puerto Rican, when it was 700 pages long. That’s when I cut the book in half. I had already written the second part of Almost a Woman, and then it was a process of rewriting that story from the point of view of a teenager, a girl who is still learning and maturing. It was a big surprise to me. An American company owned by two older ladies found the book at an airport, I think. They lived in Los Angeles, they were traveling, I think from Chicago or New York, and they stopped at a bookstore at the airport and there was the book. One of them grabbed it, and she says when she got to L.A., she said to the other, “Hey, this is a movie.” And about two or three weeks later, they called me and my husband and suggested this idea, they had a contract to do five movies for Masterpiece Theater and they wanted my book to be a part of that series, and it was… Well, imagine my excitement, but I was also like, “But why don’t they want to do When I Was Puerto Rican?” Since it’s the first book. But she was very interested in that process of learning the language, adapting to the climate, the environment, and also this idea that the little girl, Nelly, was more aware of what was happening, so it would be better than making a film about that childhood in Puerto Rico.
A.P.: That’s wonderful. Something I see Puerto Ricans writers doing, and it’s very interesting, is recognizing our ancestors, our mothers and our grandmothers. Yolanda Arroyo has this project and this program precisely to bring grandmothers to the fore, and to go to our family tree, especially on the maternal side, on the female side. Tell us a little about this process of going to the origin, but the origin of a matriarchy, of a genealogy where women pass their legacy down from one to another, and with this question we begin to warm up to start talking about Las madres.
E.S.: It’s very interesting to me what you just mentioned, that we’re all very interested and want to write about our ancestors. I think, because we are women who were raised by, well, very strong women, many of whom did not have many resources, but with everything they had they found a way to give us those ambitions and that idea that you have to fight, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to give up because it’s difficult—the more difficult it is, the more effort it takes. And it’s very interesting; I think we can all talk about our mothers, whether they are mothers or grandmothers who raised us, and that is definitely the case for me. For me, my mother was and continues to be the muse behind my work.
A.P.: Wonderful. Well, this book Conquistadora, which was a total revelation for many—that’s where you enter historical literature, a novel that is fictionalized, of course, but has a lot of history, to do with this genealogy, also from the historical point of view, right? Tell us a little bit about Conquistadora.
E.S.: Conquistadora, or the idea of Conquistadora, begins with conversations I had with my father and my mother. I recorded them in the last years of their lives, I recorded them and I asked them many things that no one in the family had thought to ask them, but I am very impertinent according to my mother and father. So, I asked them things they might never have revealed to anyone, but I had them on tape now. And the more I listened to those stories, the more interested I became in their lives, in the time when they grew up, where they grew up, etc., and then I began to imagine their ancestors as well.
A.P.: And, well, I have this gorgeous book in my hands, this edition of Las madres. What a necessary book, so conciliatory with friendship, so deep in its solidarity with this question of care. How long did it take you to write this beautiful and important book?
E.S.: Thank you very much. Yes, Las madres starts with a scene that came from I-don’t-know-where. Three women on the roof of a building in the Bronx watching the fireworks on July 4, 2017. This came about after Hurricane Maria. I knew I had an idea to write something based on the events in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, but I still hadn’t decided in what direction I would take it, and I was still researching and reading and talking to people from Puerto Rico and here, but suddenly, one day, I woke up in the morning and I had that idea and I started writing. So, it’s three women, and I ask myself, “But who are they and why are they talking like that?” And that familiarity from the beginning. I felt that there was a good, very intimate relationship between these women, but I wasn’t very sure. So I said, “Okay.” For two or three days I kept exploring, and I think the first full chapter that I wrote in a day or two was a scene where Graciela, who is one of the girls, is driving from the Bronx after the Fourth of July to her home in Maine, a small town in Maine.
A.P.: Unbelievable.
E.S.: It’s a process that’s interesting to me. Someone asked me if it’s easy to write. No! Writing is very difficult. I cry a lot, I throw things against the wall, I slam doors when I leave my office sometimes, but there are times when I sit down and write something and say, “Wow, wow. Where did that come from?” I don’t know, some muse is talking, right? But it’s not me. It’s a very, very fascinating process.
A.P.: Thank you for being so honest. Thank you very much for your generosity and for leaving us so excited and motivated to follow your work and that of all the women of your generation, nationality, and region who have written so many things about Puerto Rico.
E.S.: Thank you very much. We’ll see each other soon, hopefully.
Translated by William Howard
You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
