Each one of his visits to Puerto Rico was a reunion with a friend who
 brought us new experiences, other "ways of seeing" that would enrich every
 one of his lectures and conversations. Our own journal benefited
 tremendously from his participation in the Caribbean 2000 Symposium and
 the West Indian Literature Conference, resulting in the publication of
 perceptive and entertaining essays such as "Significaci6n del ritmo de la
 est6tica caribefia" (Caribe 2000, I (1996); re-Definiciones: Espacio-global /
 national / cultural / personal -caribeio) and "Nueva AtlAntida: El filtimo
 archipi6lago" (Sargasso Special Issue (1999); Performance and Text in
 Caribbean Literature andArt). In 2002, Benitez Rojo offered a series of lectures
 and public conversations also at the University of Puerto Rico's Rio Piedras
 Campus. His visit was co-sponsored by the graduate programs in English,
 History, Hispanic Studies, and the School of Communication. These programs
 recognize him as an outstanding scholar in literary criticism and cultural
 studies. One of the talks he presented during this visit, "Novela
 Latinoamericana, novela caribefia y novela afro-atlAntica: notas para una
 taxonomia de la novela" is published in Sargasso 2002, I.
 In May 2004, 1 asked Antonio Benitez Rojo a gigantic favor: to read the
manuscript of What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary
Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers. If he concluded that the manuscript
was worthy of publication, then I had a second favor to ask: an endorsement
to be included in the first pages of the upcoming book. Not only did he agree
to both petitions, but he read the manuscript and wrote the endorsement in a
very short time. In Bellagio, his summer was already committed precisely to
developing several interdisciplinary projects on the Caribbean. These are the
words he so kindly wrote and of which I am most proud:

 In an age of travel, exile, and human displacement of all sorts, how have
 marginalized women undergone the trials of the migrant experience? Maria
 Cristina Rodriguez's book brilliantly answers this question by examining
 the works of a well-known constellation of women writers from the
 francophone, hispanophone, and anglophone Caribbean, among them
 Maryse CondO, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, Michelle
 Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid. Their narratives, shaped out of their own lives
 and different backgrounds, are analyzed through a rich array of readings,
 from the historical to the sociological, from the anthropological and cultural
 to the geographic. Moreover, this groundbreaking work not only represents
 the three major linguistic areas of the Antilles, but also proves that Caribbean
 women, while reinventing themselves in their new socio-cultural
 environments, are able to preserve their Caribbean cultural origins.

 In September I thanked him for his faith in my book. I never knew that he
was very ill and had been hospitalized. I was shocked and enormously sad
when I read in the newspaper about his death. My book was published in