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Esmeralda Santiago
Born in rural Puerto Rico in 1948, Esmeralda Santiago
was the eldest of 11 children raised by a single mother. When she was 13,
the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Santiago quickly learned English.
Accepted into the prestigious Performing Arts High School in Manhattan,
she then spent eight years in community colleges before eventually winning
a full scholarship to Harvard University. After graduating from a master's
program at Sarah Lawrence College, she and her husband, Frank Cantor, together
founded Cantomedia, a film and media production company. Her writing career
grew from her work there as a producer and writer of documentaries and educational
films.
Santiago's first book, the memoir When I Was Puerto Rican, was
published in 1993 and received great critical praise. Her first novel, America's
Dream, followed in 1997. A year later, she published Almost a Woman,
a second memoir that took up her life story at the point at which When
I Was Puerto Rican ended.
Santiago writes: "I suppose that my life today is about looking at and trying
to come to terms with ifs. Human beings are obsessed with the question of
'who am I'? For someone like me, issues of identity are weighted and complicated
by the event that has defined who I have become, because it was the migration
from Puerto Rico to the United States that made me who I am.
"I
was born in one place (Villa Palmeras) at a specific historical time (1948).
I was raised in a rural environment (Macún, Toa Baja) that was becoming
urbanized and developed to improve the island's infrastructure (a highway
destroyed most of our barrio). My first words were in Spanish, a language
that, in Puerto Rico, was degrading into Spanglish. I was raised to conform
to a culturally specific behavior of a time, a place, a language. It all
changed in less than a day, and has had repercussions for the rest of my
life.
"I was a different person in Puerto Rico from the one I became
in the United States. Not better, not worse -- different."
In addition to her writing, Santiago is an active volunteer for public libraries,
for arts programs for adolescents, and for battered women and their children.
She lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband and two children.
Works by the
Author
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Work:
When I Was Puerto Rican