They take her in, questions hanging from their eyes. (chapter 16, p211) - Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

Pola closed her eyes. She thought about all that had already been taken from her; her lovely fingers, her teeth, her body, her untouched womanhood, her laughter. But they hadn't taken everything. She clung to her faith, her soul, and her secret-the seed she knew was growing deep within her.

From the time she walked away from the tortured captives, she never has a moment that is not recorded in the book of their collective memory. Their wrath lives in the atmosphere like the charged air before a hurricane. (chapter 17, p230)

In my experience, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets was the first novel that addressed the existence of the Afro-Boricua in the U.S., and it was an incredible achievement at that time. But even with all its merits, that novel represented one version of our reality. The totality of the Afro-Puerto Rican life experience and community, like any other cultural group, went much further and was a much more complicated construct than could be addressed in one novel. I found that, in general, the black characters created by the media were treated as addendum rather than central figures. Theirs was a world of supplementary existence rather than one of primary agency or universal humanity. The media images of Latinos were olive-skinned, stereotypical, and absent of any of the dignity and humanity of the world I saw around me. I wanted to break that stereotype and start from the beginning, in Africa, because I wanted to write about the entire journey of my people from West Africa to colonial Puerto Rico to urban America.