I wanted to write a book that everyone could relate to. My inspiration was Alex Hailey’s Roots, Gabriel Garcia Marques’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Each of these books were beautifully written giving me the feeling of being right there in that country, place, time,
and situation. I felt as those characters did.
Who couldn’t relate to the horror of being taken from their home and losing their identity, the loss of unrequited love, the heartbreak of sexual abuse, or the hurt of being invalidated as a human being? These three generations of women in Song of the Boricua have loved and lost. They have been raped and abused. Their dreams shattered. In the end, Song of the Boricua is about the triumph of the human spirit and how we should never ever lose hope.
