In Her Words: Esmeralda Santiago
"Her dark eyes peered at me from the cover, inviting me to discover what had made her Puerto Rican in her childhood."
To celebrate Dandelion Revolution Press’s fifth anniversary, we’re running the essay series “In Her Words: Celebrating Women in Literature” throughout 2025. We’re seeking personal essays recognizing women authors and/or characters that have impacted your life. To submit your personal essay, please read our full submission guidelines.
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you Lauren Brockmeyer of
where she often finds herself connecting her experiences to whatever she’s reading at the moment. In this essay, Lauren explores what it means to find one’s family history in the story of another and how that feels when the people who raised you are hesitant to share their stories. Enjoy!As a teenager, I spent what time I could at the library or my local Barnes & Noble just looking through books. I’ve always devoured books and thirsted for knowledge and understanding that I could only find in an author’s words. Peering into someone’s mind to help make sense of the world and all its changes and inconsistencies. Even if I couldn’t verbalize it as a teenager, I longed for stories that reflected the family I was a part of. A large extended Puerto Rican family, nine brothers and sisters, some who were born on the island, others born in New York City.
As I grew up, I had so many questions about life on the island and the life that my titis and uncles experienced living in New York City in the 60s and 70s. While they had been all too eager to share stories with one another when I was very young, as I got older and began asking more questions, they became more and more closed off.
“Why do you want to know?” they asked, never satisfied with whatever answer I gave them at the time. Curiosity was not a good enough reason to pry into the lives that they were trying to forget. Lives of making do with what they had, from parents who were children themselves.
It was on one of these trips to Barnes & Noble, that I discovered When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago. Her dark eyes peered at me from the cover, inviting me to discover what had made her Puerto Rican in her childhood. A little girl born in the town of Macún, Santiago’s life was shaped by the tropical sounds of the island and the poverty she endured in the 1950s. The United States’ constant interference in the day-to-day lives of Puerto Ricans made it difficult for her family to stay on the island. Jobs were becoming scarcer, forcing many Puerto Ricans to travel to the mainland United States, in New York City, to find new opportunities for work and a better education for their families, her family.
In Santiago’s memoirs, When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, I could trace my family’s migration and see some of the difficulties they spoke about, very briefly, within Santiago’s story. Her story began to both satisfy a very small part of me and leave me with a hunger to know more—more about the culture of the island, more about what the United States was doing to make the lives difficult for people on the island, more about the struggle and triumph of the Puerto Rican people.
Santiago’s words still influence me; they’ve followed me into adulthood and been the source of motivation to continue to seek out as many history books and other memoirs by Puerto Ricans as I can. They’ve inspired me to reclaim my culture as a woman who grew up in the diaspora by learning the Puerto Rican dialect. I’ve learned to fill in the blanks of my family story with accounts from history and her story.
Lauren Brockmeyer is an emerging writer, her work tends to explore themes of polyamory, and being a queer Latina born and raised in the United States. She currently lives in Germany with her husband and their adorable dog, Coco. She’s been published in The Closed Eyes Open and Free Spirit. She’s currently finishing up her BA in Social Psychology and is working on her first novel. In her free time, she reads lots of books and posts about them on her Instagram as @literary_migration.
I can relate to this. I would spend hours at B&N, and I remember reading profound works that still resonate with me especially Sandra Cisneros.
What a beautiful essay! I have never read Esmeralda Santiago before, but now I want to.