Curious

Regrettably, I’m reading faster than I can write. Although I am behind and never intend to catch up, I keep returning to Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. As the first novel of an autobiographical trilogy, WPR depicts Santiago’s childhood, one marked by upheaval. Migrancy is much more than an eventful journey for this PR family. Whether Esmerelda lives on the island or the mainland, with her mother or her cousins, in the country or the city, migrancy represents a way of life. And as is often the case with migrant literature, this ambiguous migrant life inveigles*readers to personally identify with Esmerelda’s upheaval.

I catch myself appreciating Santiago’s novel on both an academic and personal level. Academically, I respect the range of material Santiago introduces and explores. Her first novel makes Puerto Rico a home. I found that refreshing. Often American migrant novels detail the distressing conflict between the migrant community’s expectations for America and the painstaking pull of homesickness and cultural isolation; typically, the novels emotionally climax in hard-won, familial affection for America. Santiago’s work explores her own migrancy in three different books; this allows the first novel to convincingly establish the joys and sorrows of life before America. In some respects WPR feels as much an emigrant novel, detailing a slow, necessary, and miserable divorce, as it is an immigrant one. Against the background of Esmerelda’s turbulent life, America presents more than an economic advantage but an opportunity for reinvention and release. Although America is not the solution to the Santiago family’s tumult, America affords Esmerelda distance from one way of life and the opportunity for another she may not have found otherwise.

Personally, and much more than other Puerto Rican works, WPR made Puerto Rico uniquely accessible to me. As a third-generation Puerto Rican immigrant (more precisely, post-immigrant or post-colonial), I carry a characteristic thirst to return and retrace what I feel I should already know. WPR cracks the door open to a past I’ve been unable to see or hear. Ironically, we are speaking of such a small opening that I scornfully laugh at my own pleasure in that sliver of space in the door frame. In reality, it wasn’t Puerto Rico that clarified (after all, Santiago writes of life on the opposite side of the island from where my father’s family would have lived), but life on the island and as a Puerto Rican. To my surprise, I identified with this proud, misfit Esmerelda in more ways then I care to admit online.

Last week I professed ignorance with some frustration in response to my Puerto Rican coworkers’ questions about my family. “Don’t worry.” They smiled wryly. “Not knowing the truth about your family…that is being Puerto Rican. I don’t think any of us really know who are Papi is.”

* There is some danger in unchecked self-identification with migrant literature. See “Anzaldúa’s Mestiza: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t.”