# Read the first page of When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago Read the opening of When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago free, no signup. A girl grows up between rural Puerto Rico and New York, negotiating family and identity. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/when-i-was-puerto-rican-esmeralda-santiago - Genre: Immigrant memoir - Year: 1993 - ISBN: 9780201581171 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780201581171&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780201581171 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780201581171 ## The opening People Like Us Foreword by Jaquira Díaz, 2024 El que a buen árbol se arrima, buena sombra le cobija. She who leans close to a good tree is blanketed by good shade.   I was a young college student when I first heard about Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. I remember sitting in my second year World Literature class when my professor, a middle-aged white woman, casually dropped the fact that she was reading a phenomenal memoir about a young woman coming of age in Puerto Rico, and then moving to the United States. She told the class about it the same way she talked about all the other books she loved, recommended it the same way she recommended Adrienne Rich and Eavan Boland and Kate Chopin. These were all writers we should read if we wanted to be serious writers. But I remember feeling like I was sitting in the middle of an earthquake, eyes wide, the earth shaking beneath me, like the world might open up and swallow us all. I gripped my pen and the wood laminate desktop, afraid I might fall out of my seat. I had so many questions, but only managed two: “Can you repeat the name of the author? The title of the book?” After so many years of reading and not finding myself in books, always feeling that the novels and memoirs that made their way into my hands were written by white writers for white readers, something in my world shifted. Something had broken open. Esmeralda Santiago arrived and opened the doors for writers like me. The truth is, I wasn’t much of a writer back then. What I was, more than anything, was a reader. A young woman who’d turned to books as a way of saving herself. In those days, reading was ritual, was prayer. When I held my first copy of When I Was Puerto Rican in my hands, it felt like those prayers were answered. And then, when I started reading—that sense of recognition, of being seen. A few pages into the first chapter, I thought, We exist. And as I kept reading, there we were on every page. People like us. There is something powerful about opening a book and recognizing yourself in its pages, in finding the people you know, people like your family and friends, people who live and love like you. Your community, your language, your history. I’ve returned to When I Was Puerto Rican many times in the decades since, read it in English and Spanish. Each time I return, I find that sense of recognition again, I find people like us in its pages. It is like visiting family members you only get to see once every few years—titis and primas in Macún, in el Mangle, in Santurce, and in Brooklyn. And while there is something powerful about seeing yourself in a work of literature, that’s not why I return. Santiago is a natural storyteller. In the true stories that make up When I Was Puerto Rican, bursting with vivid imagery, with humor and heartbreak, Santiago teaches us something about what it means to be human, about how each of us—beautiful and incredibly flawed—is never just good or bad. We are all capable of compassion or cruelty, loyalty or betrayal. In these pages, as this family loves fiercely, falls on hard times, and recovers, we are reminded that even those we love can hurt us, that in our own families there can be tenderness and violence simultaneously, but also, that we can do much more than survive. A coming-of-age story, Santiago’s iconic memoir follows Negi as she matures into a young woman, as she leaves Puerto Rico with her family and arrives in New York. There is so much wisdom in these pages—the lessons passed down by her mother and father, the tenderness in her abuela’s knitting lessons, the refranes Boricuas that mark the opening of each new chapter. But even more so, it’s in the quiet moments that stay with us, that teach us something about love, about life, about grief. Such as Negi, entering her late grandfather’s room for the first time after finding out that he has passed away: The room was cold, its cement walls whiter than I remembered, the window shaded by a breadfruit tree, its large leaves shedding pale reflections against the ceiling. I touched the small pillow where Abuelo’s head had rested and had an image of him deftly peeling an orange in a long ribbon to his bare feet, which were brown, calloused, and delicately shaped. This memory of Negi, a child, taking “the emptiness of Abuelo’s room inside [herself],” stays with us. Sometimes, the moments in a memoir that hold the most power are not the ones that are beautifully wrought, or the most harrowing, but the simple, meaningful instances when we arrive at a deeper understanding of the world. The story of a life has so many layers of meaning, and there is so much to discover in When I Was Puerto Rican: the realities of being a young woman, how girls maturing in the world face gendered violence, and sometimes teachers or even family members can be the perpetrators; and the truth about colonialism and the duality of the Puerto Rican diasporic experience, how arriving in the United States, we don’t always find a glittering land of promise and opportunity, and yet we work hard in order to make it. That’s how it was for so many of us. Life took everything from so many of the Puerto Rican women I know—their bodies, their dreams. This is more than un cuento. This is history. That’s what I found in the pages of this remarkable memoir all those years ago, beauty and ugliness alive on the same page. People like us, an affirmation that we existed, that we exist, that we were, and are, alive. When I returned once more to the pages of When I Was Puerto Rican in December of 2023, I confess I was afraid. As with so many other books I read as a young woman, before I was a writer, I hadn’t returned to it in over six years, and I was afraid of what I would find in its pages that I’d forgotten. I was afraid to have my heart broken. But as I immersed myself once again in Negi’s world, returning to Macún and el Mangle and Santurce, going back to the places I had loved so many years ago, I realized there was no reason to be afraid. When I Was Puerto Rican resonated, its music and magic just as strong as it had been that first time. It pulled me in, and once again I was caught in its spell. It continues to be, all these years later, an answered prayer.     Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, and more. She is the recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction and two Pushcart Prizes, among others. Díaz is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. Her second book, I Am Deliberate, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. ## Books with a similar feel - [All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson](https://uncovered.ink/read/all-boys-arent-blue-george-m-johnson.md) - [Know My Name by Chanel Miller](https://uncovered.ink/read/know-my-name-chanel-miller.md) - [Beyond the Wand by Tom Felton](https://uncovered.ink/read/beyond-the-wand-tom-felton.md) - [Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel](https://uncovered.ink/read/prozac-nation-elizabeth-wurtzel.md) - [Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss](https://uncovered.ink/read/names-for-the-sea-sarah-moss.md) - [Untamed by Glennon Doyle](https://uncovered.ink/read/untamed-glennon-doyle.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. 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