Fractal Families in New Millennium Narrative by Afro-Puerto Rican Women

Since 2007, Afro-Puerto Rican women have been revising the foundational myths of the island and the diaspora to create a new vision of family as a national allegory that includes powerful Black protagonists. Novelists Mayra Santos-Febres and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa tell the diasporas history, beginning with trans-Atlantic slavery. Santos-Febress allegories use sadomasochism and healing in the novels Fe en disfraz and La amante de Gardel. Short story writers Arroyo Pizarros las Negras and Yvonne Denis-Rosarios Cap prieto chronicle the struggle to create and preserve an empowering history of slavery and Black people on the island and in the diaspora. Llanos-Figueroas Daughters of the Stone envisages a sugar plantation in which Afrodescendants are free and respected. They remake the great Puerto Rican family to give greater agency to Afro-Puerto Ricans and include the diaspora in a fractal family. While liberating, these novels also depict the traumas wrought by both the maintenance and the dissolution of patriarchal, heteronormative, colonial and racist structures.