A fully just society in which human potential is never despised or thrown away is possible only if that invitation to a restoration of integrity and … - Aurora Levins Morales

The spiritual is whatever allows us to notice the miraculous nature of life, how it keeps coming back, asserting itself in the midst of destruction. Whatever allows us to notice that life is in fact bigger than all the mean-spirited cruelties and brutalities of unjust societies. Something large enough to entrust our sense of future to, so that we don't become mired in struggle.

Not one of those books that ignore us could have been written without our shopping, baking, mending, ironing, typing, making coffee, comforting. Without our caring for the children, minding the store, getting in the crop, making their businesses pay. This is our story, and the truth of our lives will overthrow them.

This is why we write: to see ourselves on the page. To confirm our presence. To clear a space where we can examine the lives we live, not as the sexy girlfriends, petty crooks, and crime victims of TV cop shows, and not as statistical profiles in which hardship, bravery, and resourcefulness lose all personality, but in our own physical and emotional reality. Where we can pull apart and explore this complex relationship we have with the island of our origins and kinship and this vast many-peopled country in which we are writing a new chapter of Puerto-Ricanhood. This necessity gives shape to our literature, to our urgent poetry of the streets, our ever so autobiographical fiction, our legends of collective identity. Most of what we write, we write under pressure.