LEER DC: “When I was Puerto Rican”
By hola | Published | No Comments
Esmeralda Santiago’s award-winning autobiography, “When I was Puerto Rican,” is more than a memoir. It is a story about Puerto Rican culture and history and the struggle of the immigrant. The first of three memoirs she has penned, it is also an authentic and descriptive depiction of the effects a broken household can have on a child.
Her memories transport the reader to Puerto Rico’s past. Her astute way of narrating her life, filled with the wonder and naïveté of her childhood self, allows the reader to live vicariously and experience the life of the young Esmeralda. One learns about Puerto Rico’s ’s class tensions through the unfairness Esmeralda feels as a young girl, subjected to teasing and bullying by fellow students for being a “jibara,” a disparaging word used for poor people who lived in the outskirts of San Juan, the capital city.
Esmeralda’s mother Ramona is a hard working, independent woman who eventually travels to the United States mainland to escape an unhappy relationship with Esmeralda’s father Pablo, a ne’er-do-well who can never bring himself to marry Esmeralda’s mother and settle into family life.
Esmeralda Santiago was born and spent her early years in Puerto Rico. As she narrates it, her relationship with her mother was mainly a tender one, while her father was estranged from the family by his own actions. As she grows up, Esmeralda worried that her parent’s’ tattered relationship would never be mended, and she wondered how this reality would affect her future and those of her siblings. The author is the eldest of 11 children. Her younger sisters Delsa and Norma, and brothers Hector and Raymond each make appearances in her book.
After her brother Raymond has an accident and is taken to a hospital,things get complicated. Esmeralda’s mother travels with him a few times to a hospital in New York. While there, Esmeralda becomes a stronger woman and decides to move to New York, which happens soon after.
However, life on the United States mainland involves new struggles for Esmeralda. She is completely isolated due to barriers of language and culture. She also feels alienated by her new classmates, who are remarkably unlike her Puerto Rican peers. She is isolated by the danger of the streets that surround her. But through it all, Esmeralda finds her way, graduates from middle school, studies acting, and ends up in a performing arts high school. While the book was first published in 1993, her struggle to find her way in a new land is just as timely for teenagers going through similar transitions today.
Throughout her journey and the struggles she endures, the difficulties never eradicate Esmeralda’s will to succeed, as we learn in the book’s epilogue, which was written when she was preparing to graduate from Harvard University.
— Jasmin Avila
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