Is When I was Puerto Rican (1993) CHUD or WOKE?
chudrank score: 58 / 100 (slightly WOKE-leaning). 0 is CHUD (right-wing), 100 is WOKE (left-wing).
Book by Esmeralda Santiago, 1993.
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Why: Immigrant identity memoir; sympathetic to Puerto Rican experience
Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. 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 take on a new identit…