When I Was Puerto Rican

"That's part of being an imperialist. They expect us to do things their way, even in our own country."

Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican is a beautiful memoir. It's always interesting when writers return to the magical world of youth and the experience of loss, which is inevitable in one's younger days. Her moving personal story takes her from the poor barrios of Puerto Rico to Brooklyn in the 1960s, chronicling her migrant experience, the bitter fights between her parents, and the colorful, tropical delights of her 'jibara' romanticized lifestyle. Her 'life' story during her youth seems to encompass every aspect of growing into adulthood, but I wonder how vivid and accurate can the memories of a four year-old child be? She surely embellished certainly memories with fiction literary techniques to enhance her story, which is really a tribute to a loss of life and culture due to urbanization, migration, and family discord. 

Despite some of her perhaps romanticized notions of Puerto Rican rural life (then again, I think I would rather live in rural Puerto Rico than a filthy slum like El Mangle), the other strength to this work is the attention to the experience of women as central to the narrative. Women work non-stop and get little recognition or respect, as Esmeralda Santiago's mother illustrates perfectly. The sexist, patriarchal world of Puerto Rico and New York affect young Esmeralda in ways she only begins to understand in her teen years, and highlight a factor lacking in other Puerto Rican writers, like Piri Thomas, whose famous work does not highlight themes of gender at all despite Puerto Rican women being the potomitan of Puerto Rican culture and society, too.

This memoir also reminded me of works by V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau and Dany Laferrière which also explored their childhoods in Martinique and Haiti. Overall, Laferrière's short fictionalized novel of his childhood in Petit-Goave is my favorite, but the parallels in all three's work is remarkable. Laferriere also shares with Santiago a narrative rooted in the influential women who raised him and the world of a child in provincial Haiti. Chamoiseau, on the other hand, shares a political subtext in his School Days that is present in Santiago's work but muted in An Aroma of Coffee. Naipaul's Miguel Street (arguably, A House for Mr. Biswas, too) also explores life in the Caribbean, provincial and urban, with similar local color, language, cultural miscegenation, and identity (including some rather humorous and intriguing conflicts along lines of gender).

Perhaps would be an interesting research topic to analyze Caribbean writers on the subject of childhood, because I am sure there are other writers who have returned to their youth and reached similar conclusions or observations on Caribbean societies, migration, gender, race, or language. There is something magical about nostalgia and youth, and I intend to read more on the subject.