I guest-post at the charming Patti Nase Abbott’s blog today, a “How I Came to Write This Story” feature about my short story “Juracán,” which was published in Indian Country Noir (Akashic Books, 2010). Here is an excerpt:
MY KOOKY, BAWDY, college-educated Aunt Terry and I had often discussed our family’s Taíno roots. My family comes from Puerto Rico, and the Taínos were the Native Americans who inhabited the Greater Antilles and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean at the time when Christopher Columbus arrived to gentrify the ‘hood. Some say every trace of Taíno blood was erased by the Spanish and by time. But, according to the study funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA. Indeed, Taíno showed on the faces of all the women in my family, especially Terry, high cheek-boned and reddish skinned.