The Geography of What We've Lost

A Reading of Esmeralda Santiago's "When I Was Puerto Rican"

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Dear friends,

I wake to the sounds of animals. Not an alarm clock, not traffic—the actual sounds of creatures starting their day. Birds first, their calls layered and distinct if you know what to listen for. Then horses moving in the barn, hooves on packed dirt. Cows lowing. The farm wakes in stages, each animal announcing itself in turn.

The smells follow. Dew on grass, that clean wet-earth scent that only comes at dawn. Manure, which sounds unpleasant but isn’t when you grow up with it—it’s just part of the morning’s catalog, along with hay and horsehide and whatever the wind carries from the neighbors’ fields. Then from the house: bacon, eggs, coffee. Breakfast smells sharp enough to pull you out of bed even when you’d rather stay buried under blankets.

The house is a white, old-fashioned two-story farmhouse, with a big porch that wraps around two sides. Barns surround it. Towering trees. A massive yard that seems endless when you’re a kid. We have a grapevine in the backyard, twisted and thick, producing purple grapes every summer. My mother makes jam. The process takes all day—boiling, jarring, sealing. The kitchen smells like sugar and fruit for weeks afterward. We have a tree house built in one of the old oaks. We play baseball and football in the yard, marking bases with whatever’s available. In spring, giant spider webs appear overnight, strung between fence posts and branches. Yellow-and-black garden spiders the size of quarters sit in the centers, looking dangerous but harmless. They eat flies and mosquitoes. My mother won’t let us destroy the webs.

The property has ponds—not fishing ponds, just shallow collections of water in low-lying fields. Frog ponds. They fill with tadpoles in spring, and by summer you can hear the chorus from the house at night. Maybe a few small fish, but mostly frogs. The countryside teems with wildlife. Deer move through at dusk. Rabbits everywhere. Turkeys in the fall. Squirrels chattering in the trees. The land is alive in a way that cities never are, never can be.

These details are still inside me. Not faded or general—specific, sharp, undiminished by the decades since I left. I can close my eyes and walk through that farm room by room, tree by tree. I can smell the grape jam, hear the frogs, feel the rough bark of the tree house oak.

Place doesn’t just shape us. It embeds itself in our senses, becomes part of our body’s memory. Which is why Esmeralda Santiago’s memoir When I Was Puerto Rican lands with such force. She understands this truth. Her book is built from the same kind of memories—not abstract recollections but sensory resurrections of a world that no longer exists for her.

Santiago’s memoir traces her childhood in rural Puerto Rico, then San Juan, then the forced transplant to Brooklyn at age thirteen. Not an adventure. Economic necessity. Her mother moved the family because Puerto Rico offered no future, because poverty there was inescapable, because America—cold, concrete, English-speaking America—at least promised the possibility of something better. Santiago writes in the past tense: When I Was Puerto Rican. Not I Am. Not even I Am Still. Was. Past tense. Finished. She’s claiming she’s no longer fully Puerto Rican, not because she rejected it but because leaving Puerto Rico, losing fluency in Spanish, gaining American education, learning to be ashamed of her mother’s accent—all of it transformed her into something between. Neither fully Puerto Rican nor fully American. Something new, something less, something she’s still trying to name.

Her descriptive technique makes this loss tangible. The memoir opens with guavas—not just seeing them but tasting them, feeling their texture, understanding the specific knowledge required to pick them at the right moment. She describes the zinc roof of her grandmother’s house during rain, the sound and the feeling of being inside while water drums overhead. The mud roads of Macún. The outdoor latrine. Her grandmother’s kitchen with its wood-burning stove and the specific smells of Puerto Rican cooking that she can’t find in Brooklyn. This is embodied memory. She’s not writing nostalgia. She’s writing archaeology—digging up the sensory bedrock of who she was, documenting a self that no longer fully exists.

In my first essay in this series, I examined James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain, where John Grimes struggled with inherited structures that remained constant—the church, his family, Harlem. His question was what to do with stable roots, however oppressive. Santiago’s struggle is different. Her roots were torn away. The question she forces us to confront is harder: What happens when the place that made you becomes inaccessible? When your roots are forcibly transplanted? Can they survive in hostile soil? Do they adapt or wither? And if they adapt, are they still the same roots?

The Soil She Grew From

Santiago identifies as jíbara—country, rural, peasant. The word carries weight in Puerto Rican culture. It’s not just geographic. It’s a complete way of being. Jíbaros know the land. They know how to find water, which plants are edible, how to survive without money. They’re self-sufficient in ways city people can’t imagine. They’re also looked down on. City Puerto Ricans see jíbaros as backwards, ignorant, unsophisticated. Santiago carries both the pride and the shame.

She’s proud of her grandmother’s strength, her mother’s resourcefulness. These women manage households without running water or electricity. They cook on wood-burning stoves, wash clothes by hand in rivers, grow vegetables, raise chickens. They know things Santiago will never fully learn—traditional remedies, folk wisdom, the intricate social codes of rural Puerto Rican life. This knowledge is survival. It’s also culture, passed down through generations, embedded in the landscape itself.

But she’s also aware of how others see her family. When they move from Macún to Santurce—from countryside to city—she learns that jíbara means lesser. It means unrefined. It means not knowing how to act in proper company. The city kids at her new school mock her accent, her ignorance of urban customs, the mud still metaphorically clinging to her shoes.

The countryside she describes is beautiful and brutal. Lush but unforgiving. The natural world provides—fruit from trees, fish from streams—but it also withholds. Poverty in Macún isn’t quaint. It’s concrete. No indoor plumbing. Hunger. Her father’s drinking. The violence that alcohol brings into their home. Santiago doesn’t romanticize jíbara life. She renders it accurately: both the beauty of connection to land and the harshness of trying to survive on that land when you’re poor.

This is her root system. Not perfect. Not something she’d choose if given better options. But hers. The soil she grew from. Understanding the memoir requires understanding this: she’s not choosing to leave Puerto Rico. She’s being uprooted. The difference matters.

Contradictory Inheritances

Santiago’s parents don’t marry. They live together, separate, reunite, separate again. Papi drinks. He disappears for days. When he’s home, he’s either charming or violent. The children learn to read his moods, to disappear when necessary, to become invisible. Mami endures this. She loves him, or loved him, or can’t figure out how to stop loving him. She stays, leaves, returns. The pattern repeats.

Santiago writes: “There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling in the night, more long absences. Until it seemed as if anything would be better than living with these people who hated each other.” This is a child’s perception—not nuanced, not understanding the complexities of adult relationships, just registering the emotional climate of a home where love and hate coexist so closely they become indistinguishable.

Yet Mami also teaches her something else. She teaches Negi to become a jamona—an old maid who doesn’t need men, who survives independently. The lessons are explicit. Don’t depend on a man for money. Learn skills. Be able to support yourself. Don’t let love trap you. But Negi watches her mother’s dependence on Papi, watches her suffer because of him, watches her take him back repeatedly despite everything. The counter-lesson undermines the explicit one.

This is the inheritance Santiago receives: be strong, but watch strength fail. Be independent, but recognize that independence doesn’t protect you from needing people. Love makes you vulnerable, so avoid it—except Mami can’t avoid it either, so maybe the lesson is that vulnerability is inevitable and the best you can do is survive it.

The family moves frequently even within Puerto Rico. Macún to Santurce, different houses in Santurce, back to the countryside, then elsewhere. Each move disrupts school, friendships, any sense of stability. Santiago is always the new girl, always adjusting, always slightly out of step with wherever they’ve landed. This prefigures the larger displacement to come. She’s learning to uproot herself before the final uprooting makes it necessary.

I recognize this pattern. During my Navy career, my family moved constantly. South Carolina, New York, Connecticut, Washington, California, Georgia, Tennessee. Just when we’d settled in, just when the kids had made friends and we’d learned the local rhythms, orders came through and we packed again. Every move felt like uprooting. We never quite fit. We were always slightly foreign—not Southern enough for Georgia, not Northern enough for Connecticut, too transient to fully belong anywhere. My wife, who grew up in Peru, understood this differently than I did. She’d already experienced the major displacement, the language shift, the permanent sense of being between worlds. For her, the Navy moves were just smaller versions of what she’d already survived.

Santiago captures this exhaustion. The child in the memoir doesn’t understand why they keep moving, why nothing stays stable, why parents make decisions that upend children’s lives without explanation. She writes: “I scrambled out, irritated, wondering why parents never answered questions but seemed to have all the answers.” That irritation—that sense of powerlessness in the face of adult decisions you can’t control or even fully understand—is universal. But for children whose families are already marginalized, already struggling, that powerlessness compounds. You’re not just navigating childhood. You’re navigating poverty, instability, displacement, all while being told to trust adults who are themselves overwhelmed.

The Language Your Roots Speak

The memoir’s title contains a linguistic crisis. When I Was Puerto Rican—but the key word is ‘puertorriqueña,’ which Santiago can pronounce perfectly in Spanish but struggles with in English. Identity becomes literally unspeakable in the new language. The sounds don’t transfer. The r’s roll differently. The emphasis lands on the wrong syllables. What was natural, unconscious, embodied in Spanish becomes awkward and foreign when translated to English.

This isn’t just vocabulary. Language carries worldview. It carries ways of thinking, ways of being. Puerto Rican Spanish has expressions, concepts, rhythms that don’t exist in English. When you lose fluency in your first language, you lose access to parts of yourself that only existed in that tongue. The thoughts you could think in Spanish but can’t quite articulate in English. The jokes that don’t translate. The emotional registers that English doesn’t capture.

Santiago fills the memoir with untranslated Spanish—phrases, sayings, folk wisdom. She doesn’t italicize it, doesn’t always explain it. English-only readers experience linguistic exclusion, are forced to feel what it’s like when a text doesn’t fully belong to you. This is deliberate craft. She’s making form mirror content. The memoir is about being between languages, so the language itself refuses to settle into only English.

She also preserves Puerto Rican sayings that contradict each other. One grandmother says one thing about life and marriage. Another relative says the opposite. Folk wisdom isn’t coherent—it’s accumulated contradiction, reflecting life’s actual complexity. You’re supposed to honor your elders but also think for yourself. You’re supposed to trust in God but also work hard. You’re supposed to be independent but also recognize you need community. These contradictions aren’t flaws in the culture. They’re features. They give you multiple tools, multiple frameworks, and you choose which to deploy when.

I understand linguistic code-switching from a different angle. Growing up rural meant speaking a certain way—informal, local idioms, farm vocabulary. The Navy required different language—precise, technical, hierarchical. Military culture has its own dialect, its own codes. Then there’s the language of literary analysis, of educated discourse, which requires yet another shift. My wife navigated the larger chasm: Spanish to English, Peruvian culture to American culture, complete transplantation. Some places we were stationed had other linguistic influences. In Georgia, the Deep South’s particular English—different from Midwestern, different from military—required its own adjustment. On the West Coast, Tagalog phrases mixed into everyday English. You learn to shift registers constantly, to read context and adjust your speech accordingly.

But here’s what Santiago forces us to see: code-switching isn’t just practical adaptation. It’s existential fragmentation. When you speak one language at home, another at school, another in the street, you’re not just translating words. You’re translating yourself. You become different people in different contexts. Which one is real? Or are they all performances? And if you’re always performing, always adjusting, always translating—when do you get to just be?

Hostile Soil

The move to Brooklyn isn’t Santiago’s choice. It’s her mother’s, driven by necessity. Puerto Rico offers no future. The poverty is inescapable. Papi’s drinking isn’t getting better. Mami has too many children and no reliable income. So she makes the decision: they’re going to New York. They’re going to el norte, where at least there’s work, where at least the children might have opportunities that don’t exist on the island.

The contrast is immediate and overwhelming. Puerto Rico: warm, green, open spaces, Spanish, extended family, poverty but at least familiar poverty. Brooklyn: cold, gray, concrete, English, strangers, poverty in a cramped apartment with thin walls. Santiago makes readers feel the cold—not just temperature but the emotional chill of displacement. The buildings block the sky. The streets are hard. The winter penetrates in ways island-born bones can’t prepare for.

School is taught in English. Santiago is smart—genuinely, measurably smart—but suddenly rendered inarticulate. Teachers assume she’s slow because she doesn’t speak English well. Classmates mock her accent. She can’t ask questions. She can’t defend herself. Everything she knew in Spanish—literature, history, her own intelligence—becomes inaccessible. She has to learn English while learning in English, which means she’s always behind, always struggling to catch up to classmates who speak the language of instruction natively.

Then comes the shame. Not just her own—she starts being ashamed of her mother’s accent, her family’s poverty, her own origins. She sees how Americans look at Puerto Ricans. She learns which parts of herself to hide. Mami gives voice to this brutal calculus when someone suggests Puerto Ricans are taking American jobs: “They think we’re taking their jobs. / Are we? / There’s enough work in the United States for everybody, but some people think some work is beneath them. Me, if I have to crawl on all fours to earn a living, I’ll do it. I’m not proud that way.”

Mami’s pragmatism is grim but clear. Dignity is a luxury the displaced can’t afford. If survival requires crawling, you crawl. If it requires being looked down on, accepting insults, doing work that natives won’t touch—you do it. You don’t get to choose. This is the inheritance Santiago receives: resilience, but resilience born from having no other option. Her mother brought them to America for opportunity, but opportunity costs identity. To succeed in American terms means unlearning Puerto Rican ones.

Santiago’s intelligence finds outlet eventually. American education, despite its initial alienation, recognizes her gifts. Teachers notice. She gets placed in special programs. She excels. She learns English not just competently but beautifully. She starts to succeed by American standards.

But success alienates. The more she learns, the more distant she becomes from her family, her community, her origins. Her mother speaks Spanish at home. Santiago starts answering in English. Her mother’s accent embarrasses her. Her family’s poverty embarrasses her. The neighborhood’s Puerto Rican-ness—the bodegas, the music, the Spanish everywhere—starts feeling provincial. She’s learned to see through American eyes, which means she’s learned to see her own people as backwards.

This is assimilation’s trap. You’re told: work hard, learn, succeed. And you do. But success means becoming a stranger to your own family. Your education creates distance. You learn vocabulary they don’t know. You reference books they haven’t read. You think in frameworks they don’t share. The very thing that’s supposed to lift you up—education, opportunity, the American Dream—also separates you from the people who loved you before you succeeded.

The question Santiago doesn’t answer but forces readers to confront: Is this worth it? Is individual upward mobility worth communal loss? Can you keep your roots while growing wings, or does flight require severing? The memoir doesn’t resolve this. It can’t. Santiago is living the question, not the answer.

Multiple Selves, No Whole

Santiago learns to navigate multiple codes. Jíbara versus city. Puerto Rican versus American. Spanish versus English. Child versus young woman. Each context requires a different performance. At home with her mother, she’s one person—still connected to the island, still speaking Spanish, still embedded in Puerto Rican family dynamics. At school, she’s someone else—studious, English-speaking, trying to fit American expectations. In the neighborhood, she navigates yet another identity—Puerto Rican but Brooklyn Puerto Rican, which is different from island Puerto Rican.

Code-switching is survival. You learn what language, what behavior, what identity is safe in which space. You become fluent in reading context and adjusting accordingly. This is a skill, and not a small one. It requires constant awareness, constant monitoring, constant translation. You’re always performing, always choosing which version of yourself to present.

But code-switching creates fragmentation. You’re never fully yourself anywhere because ‘yourself’ doesn’t exist as a single coherent thing—it’s a collection of context-dependent performances. Which one is real? The Spanish-speaking daughter or the English-speaking student? The jíbara who knows how to pick guavas or the Brooklyn teenager who’s learning to navigate subways? Or are they all performances, all translations, all approximations of something that can’t quite be captured in any single context?

The exhaustion of this is profound. It’s not just linguistic. It’s existential. Santiago is always translating—words, yes, but also behaviors, expectations, ways of being. She can never just be. She’s always monitoring which version of herself is appropriate, which parts to show, which to hide. This is the work of displacement. This is what it costs to be between worlds.

The memoir’s title makes this explicit: When I Was Puerto Rican. Past tense. This is the memoir’s most provocative claim. Santiago isn’t saying she is Puerto Rican. She isn’t saying she’s still Puerto Rican despite leaving. She’s saying she was—past tense, finished, complete. She’s claiming that the girl who was Puerto Rican existed in Puerto Rico, speaking Spanish, eating guavas, understanding the land. That girl doesn’t exist anymore. She can’t exist anymore because the conditions that created her no longer apply.

What does this mean? That identity is contingent on geography, language, community? That you can’t be Puerto Rican without Puerto Rico? That departure equals loss of self? Or is she saying something subtler—that the girl she was has transformed into something else, something between, something that can’t be named in either Spanish or English because it doesn’t fully exist in either world?

The question cuts deeper than autobiography. Can cultural identity survive displacement? Do roots require soil? If you’re transplanted, can you grow—or do you just survive, diminished, carrying memories of what you used to be? Santiago’s story raises the possibility that some losses can’t be recovered. That transformation isn’t always addition. Sometimes it’s subtraction. You become something new, but you lose something irreplaceable in the process.

Who Gets to Belong

Santiago’s experience of being forced to perform legibility—to translate herself into terms Americans can understand, to make herself palatable, to prove she belongs—speaks to broader contemporary dynamics. Immigrants and marginalized communities face impossible demands: assimilate but stay authentic, succeed but don’t forget where you came from, speak English but don’t lose your accent’s charm, be American but stay ethnic enough to be interesting.

The current moment makes this urgent. Debates about immigration dominate our politics. Who belongs? What does ‘real American’ look like? Should schools teach in multiple languages or English only? Should immigrants maintain their native cultures or adopt American ones? These aren’t abstract policy questions. They’re Santiago’s lived experience. They’re the daily negotiation millions of people perform, trying to satisfy contradictory demands that can’t all be met simultaneously.

Recent events have amplified these tensions. The rhetoric around immigration has become harsher, more explicitly hostile. People like Santiago’s mother—who would crawl on all fours to earn a living, who sacrificed everything to give her children opportunities—are characterized as threats, as invaders, as people who don’t belong. The work they do is invisible until someone suggests they’re taking jobs, at which point suddenly the work matters.

Santiago shows us the human cost of displacement. Not statistics about immigration numbers or economic impacts. The actual work of losing yourself and trying to build something new from the fragments. The child who can no longer speak her native language fluently. The mother who works multiple jobs and still can’t escape poverty. The family fractured by the distance between those who speak English well and those who don’t. The shame that accumulates when you’re constantly told—explicitly or implicitly—that who you are isn’t good enough.

The memoir forces a recognition that we often avoid: authenticity requires soil. You can’t transplant people to hostile ground, demand they maintain their roots and assimilate completely, then blame them when they struggle with both. Roots don’t thrive in concrete. They need nourishment, space, time. When we uproot people—whether through economic necessity, political violence, or family circumstance—we can’t then demand they remain unchanged. Survival requires adaptation. Adaptation means transformation. Transformation means loss.

A Glimpse of Flight

The memoir ends with Santiago’s audition for the High School of Performing Arts. She performs a monologue. She’s nervous, uncertain, aware that this is a test she might fail. But she does it—speaks someone else’s words in English, performs for judges who don’t know Puerto Rico, who can’t see where she came from or what it cost to stand on that stage.

She’s accepted. The epilogue confirms she graduates from Performing Arts, goes to college, becomes a writer. This is wings. This is transformation. This is claiming agency, creating a new identity through performance—both literal performance on stage and the metaphorical performance of becoming someone new.

But notice what this requires. Performing in English. Performing someone else’s words. Performing for an audience that judges her by American standards. Her wings are American wings. The agency she claims exists within American frameworks, American institutions, American definitions of success. The question the memoir never fully resolves: Has she gained freedom or just learned to navigate a different cage?

This series will explore wings more fully as we move into spring and summer. Books about coming of age, about claiming independence, about learning to fly. But we’re still in winter. Still in the season of ancestral voices, of understanding roots. Santiago’s wings emerge from the ruins of her roots—or perhaps from their transformation into something that can survive in new soil. The distinction matters, and the memoir won’t make it clear for us. Both things are true. She’s lost something irreplaceable. She’s gained something valuable. The loss and the gain can’t be separated.

What Memory Preserves

I still carry the farm. Those sensory memories—the dawn sounds, the smell of grape jam, the yellow-and-black garden spiders in their webs, the frog chorus from the ponds—they’re intact inside me. Decades of moves, different climates, different cultures, different languages encountered and partially learned, none of it has eroded those memories. I can close my eyes and be there completely.

How long can roots survive without soil?

I already know the answer. The farm is gone. A highway runs through where the house stood. The rest was swallowed back into open farmland—no porch, no barns, no tree house, no grapevine. You can drive past and see no evidence that a family ever lived there, that children ever chased each other through that yard or watched spiders build their webs between the fence posts. The land holds no trace of us. And yet I carry it precisely—every smell, every sound, every detail intact. The place exists nowhere now except inside the people who lived there. That’s exactly where Santiago’s Puerto Rico lives too. Not in Macún, which has changed beyond recognition, not on the island she can no longer fully claim—but in her body, her memory, her prose.

Santiago’s memoir is an act of preservation. She’s writing down what she can’t return to, documenting the world that formed her before it disappears entirely from memory. The guavas she describes don’t exist in Brooklyn. The zinc roof during rain, the outdoor latrine, her grandmother’s kitchen—all gone, inaccessible except through writing. Even the language she uses to remember them is compromised, translated, filtered through English because her Spanish has eroded from disuse.

The work of this essay—and this month’s reading—is recognizing that roots aren’t always chosen and aren’t always stable. Some people inherit stable ground. John Grimes, for all his struggles, knew where he came from. The church and Harlem and his family remained constant, however oppressive. He could reject them or claim them, but they stayed in place. Santiago doesn’t have that luxury. Her ground was torn away. The roots that formed her were damaged in transit, forced to grow in hostile soil. The question isn’t whether to accept or reject her inheritance. The question is how to survive when inheritance itself becomes inaccessible.

For readers examining their own lives: What parts of yourself have you lost to circumstance? What roots were torn away not by your choice but by necessity—economic, familial, historical? Can they be recovered? Should they be? Or is the work of adulthood learning to carry loss without letting it define you, learning to build new roots in whatever soil you find yourself planted, learning to honor what was without pretending you can return to it?

Santiago offers no easy answers. The past tense in her title refuses comfort. She was Puerto Rican. She isn’t claiming she can be again, isn’t suggesting that memory or writing or even return to the island would restore what’s been transformed. Transformation is real. Loss is real. The girl who ate guavas in Macún is gone. The woman who writes about her carries the memory but can’t resurrect the reality.

What remains is this: roots that live in the body even when the soil is gone. The taste of guavas. The sound of Spanish. The way rain sounds on zinc roofs. The specific knowledge of how to move through jíbara country. These aren’t abstract memories. They’re physical, embedded in muscle and nerve and tongue. Santiago still tastes the guavas she can no longer find. Still hears the Spanish she can no longer speak fluently. Still carries Puerto Rico in her flesh even as she acknowledges that being Puerto Rican—as a complete identity, as a coherent self—belongs to her past.

This is what we carry forward from winter into spring. The recognition that ancestral voices speak through us whether we understand them or not, whether we can still hear them clearly or not. That roots matter even when they’ve been damaged. That loss is real but doesn’t have to be total. That transformation costs something but might also give something back. That the work of becoming requires understanding what we’re becoming from.

The wings will come. But first, we excavate. We dig deep into the ground that formed us, even when that ground is far away, even when we can’t return to it, even when what we find there is painful. Because you can’t fly without knowing what you’re pushing off from. You can’t choose where to go until you understand where you’ve been.

Santiago walks out of her Performing Arts audition into a future she’s just begun to imagine. The girl who was Puerto Rican is becoming something else—something that doesn’t have a name yet in either Spanish or English. The transformation isn’t complete. It may never be complete. But she’s moving, she’s surviving, she’s carrying what she can carry and leaving behind what she must. That’s all any of us can do. That’s the only honest work there is.

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You can find the other essays in the Roots and Wings journey at this link along with a list of the books we will read throughout the rest of the year.

Roots and Wings

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Here’s to the books that take us beyond the shelf and into deeper waters,

Matthew Long is a writer and retired sailor living in rural western Tennessee.

Affiliate links: You can click on the title of any book mentioned in this article to purchase your own copy. These are affiliate links from Bookshop.org, earning me a very small commission for any purchase you make.