Like most of us, emerging writers will only succeed through hard work and the humility to accept that they don't have all the answers. My advice is t… - Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

I came from an Afro-Puerto Rican middle class family that was hard-working and very proud of its heritage and personal accomplishments. So the images of Puerto Rican gangsters, loose women and heroin addicts that were paraded in the media had nothing to do with my reality. Some of our people did lead those lives, but they weren't the majority in my community. The negative images that were ascribed to us all incensed the adults in my life who were too busy providing for their families to raise a potent political voice. As I grew older, I realized that the stereotypes were not just offensive but dangerous as well. Regardless of my experience, those images persisted, shaping the cultural perceptions of my community. I still meet people who can't believe I'm Puerto Rican because I speak English so well or, as I was told lately, insist that I couldn't possibly be Puerto Rican because Puerto Ricans are white. Those stereotypes and racist caricatures are out there still. It's my job to keep creating new and authentic images for our community.

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.

These are the stories. My stories, their stories—just as they were told to my mother and her mother and hers. They were given to me for safekeeping, and now I give them to you. (first lines, Prologue)