BOOK REVIEWS


the city can be. These kids remind the reader of Marie Ursule the great-
mother, Queen of the Sans Peur regiment who in At the Full, envisages a
generation of young people who would willingly forget their past and thus
fail to understand their future.

 Elsa Luciano Feal
 University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo




Esmeralda Santiago. The Turkish Lover. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004.

In a recent article published in Revista Foro, Esmeralda Santiago comments
on the reasons why she writes memoirs by referring to an encounter with an
Asian American reader during one of her book presentations.' The young
woman had gone through a similar experience of moving to the United States
at the age of thirteen, one that closely paralleled Santiago's own migration
process. Reflecting upon this encounter, Santiago asserts that the writing of
memoirs takes on dual purposes for her. First, her main concern is to insert
her own experience as a diasporic Puerto Rican woman into the American
literary tradition, a tradition that is increasingly becoming more multiethnic
and multicultural as writers from diverse backgrounds publish their works.
Santiago shares this concern of preserving her language, culture, and customs
within the context of U.S. society with writers such as Alba Ambert, Nicholasa
Mohr, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Aurora Levins Morales, Sandra Maria Esteves, as
well as with other U.S. Latino/a authors at large. Second, Santiago's intent in
writing memoirs is to show how the experience of migration, linguistic and
cultural hybridity, and the preservation of customs/traditions outside of the
country of origin is by no means exclusive to Puerto Ricans but shared by
millions of immigrants throughout the United States. She ends the article
by pointing out that:

 ... en algin lugar de este pais [refiribndose a Estados Unidos] hay una nifia o
 un nifio solitario sentado en un sal6n de classes preguntindose si deben tenerle
 miedo al compafiero que estA al lado sin saber que (l o ella estin
 preguntandose lo mismo. Por eso es que yo escribo memories: para que sean
 visible los unos a los otros.... (7)

 In 1994, I1 was among a small group of interested readers who gathered in an
Old San Juan bookstore for the presentation of Santiago's first book of mem-
oirs, When I Was Puerto Rican (Vintage Books, 1994). At the time, Santiago

I El Nuevo Dia, 2004, p. 7-9.