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When I Was Puerto Rican

A Memoir

Contributors

By Esmeralda Santiago

Formats and Prices

Price

$9.99

Price

$12.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. ebook $9.99 $12.99 CAD
  2. Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 28, 2006. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

One of “The Best Memoirs of a Generation” (Oprah’s Book Club): a young woman’s journey from the mango groves and barrios of Puerto Rico to Brooklyn, and eventually on to Harvard

In a childhood full of tropical beauty and domestic strife, poverty and tenderness, Esmeralda Santiago learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs, the taste of morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby’s soul to heaven. But when her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually a new identity. In the first of her three acclaimed memoirs, Esmeralda brilliantly recreates her tremendous journey from the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years, to translating for her mother at the welfare office, and to high honors at Harvard.

On Sale
Feb 28, 2006
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Da Capo Press
ISBN-13
9780786736867

Da Capo_Esmeralda Santiago_Author Photo

Esmeralda Santiago

About the Author

Esmeralda Santiago is the author of two other highly acclaimed memoirs, The Turkish Lover and Almost a Woman, which was made into a film for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. She has also written a novel, America’s Dream, and has co-edited two anthologies of Latino literature. She lives in Westchester County, New York.

Learn more about this author