With her second novel The Taste of Sugar, Marisel Vera has created an epic tale with an intimate heart. Her two protagonists Valentina and Vicente are small coffee farmers in late 19th century Puerto Rico whose lives had been shaped by Spanish colonialism. Then in 1898, Puerto Rico was invaded by the United States which assumed control of the island, devaluing the peso and levying property taxes. This was followed in 1899 by the devastating hurricane San Ciriaco which left thousands dead and a quarter of a million people without food and shelter. Losing their farm to these “twin catastrophes,” Vicente and Valentina join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations. Lured by the promise of good wages in exchange for hard work, they find themselves instead captive laborers in a strange land. It is a powerful and moving story, deserving of all its considerable praise. But while this is a saga, it’s also a close look at family: we see this young couple grow and mature-- seizing whatever agency they can in the face of hardship. In this podcast, Vera talks about her need to write a book that explored the history of Puerto Rico—a history most people don’t know—her determination to get that history right, and the deep impact of colonization on the island. She also discusses her own struggle to find herself in books when she was growing up in Chicago, her sense that she was always living in two worlds, in two languages, and how writing helps her to bring these together and create something new.
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