The Story Behind It All

There is a question I have been asked my whole life in one form or another.

Sometimes it sounds like where are you really from? Sometimes it sounds like but you do not look Puerto Rican. Sometimes it is softer than that — a raised eyebrow when I speak Spanish with an accent that does not sound quite right, a moment of hesitation when I try to claim something that is supposed to be mine by blood but never quite felt like it was mine by experience.

I did not write the Raices Series because I had a story to tell. I wrote it because I had a question I could not stop asking — and no book I picked up ever quite answered it for me.

I grew up in the Bronx. Puerto Rican household, Puerto Rican food, Puerto Rican music loud enough to bother the neighbors and not loud enough to bother us. My grandmother spoke to me in Spanish and I answered in English and we understood each other perfectly and somehow not at all. The island was always present in our home the way a photograph is present — visible, loved, and impossibly far away.

When I got older I studied Caribbean Studies because I needed to understand what I was feeling with more than just my gut. I needed theory. I needed history. I needed someone to have already written down the word for the specific grief of belonging to a place you have never fully lived in. I found some of those words in textbooks and academic journals. But I never found them in a novel. Not in the way I needed.

Then I moved to France — first to Paris, then to Toulouse — and something cracked open.

Being a Latina in Europe did something to my understanding of myself that four years of university could not. Suddenly I was not just Puerto Rican-American, caught between two identities. I was something else entirely — a third thing, an outsider in every room, a woman who carried her entire history in a language most people around her could not hear. I started writing in coffee shops in Toulouse because I had nothing else to do with all of it.

That writing became Salt in the Blood.

The Raices Series is not autobiographical. The main character is not me. But she carries the same question I have carried since I was old enough to understand that belonging was something you could be denied.

She is too American for the island. Too island for America. And she is trying to find her way back to something she was never fully given in the first place.

I wrote this series for every person who has stood at that intersection. For the diaspora kids who grew up with the island as mythology rather than memory. For the ones who feel guilt about not speaking the language fluently enough, not knowing the songs well enough, not having earned the right to miss a place they technically never lost. For the ones whose grief is complicated because it does not have a clean origin story.

I wrote it because I needed it to exist. And because I believe — I have always believed, as a reader and now as a writer — that the right story at the right moment can give someone language for something they have been feeling their whole life but could never quite name.

That is what I want Salt in the Blood to be for someone.

That is the whole reason.

Salt in the Blood is the first book in the Raices Series. If this story sounds like yours — even a little — it was written for you.