Healing Memories: Puerto Rican Women's Literature in the United States

An exploration of the ways in which women writers of the Puerto Rican diaspora use their literary works to document the historical experiences of Puerto Rican women. These voices often have been marginalized in the larger national historical narrative of the United States. At the same time, they have created counter-histories tat are medicinal in the sense that they heal the trauma of silence and oppression.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Healing Memories analyzes the ways that Puerto Rican women authors use their literary works to challenge historical methodologies that have silenced the historical experiences of Puerto Rican women in the United States. Following Aurora Levins Morales's alternative historical methodology she calls "curandera history," this work analyzes the literary work of authors, including Aurora Levins Morales, Nicholasa Mohr, Esmeralda Santiago, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the ways they create medicinal histories that not only document the experiences of migrant women but also heal the trauma of their erasure from mainstream national history. Each analytical chapter focuses on the various methods used by each author including using the literary space as an archive, reclaiming memory, and (re)writing cultural history, all through a feminist lens that centers the voices and experiences of Puerto Rican women.