America's Dream (1975) by Esmeralda Santiago

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

America's Dream (1975)

by Esmeralda Santiago

Westchester County, New York

New York: 6/105

Upstate: 5/23 *

* this book is mismapped. 

   This title is mis-mapped on the actual map- they have it as the most far-northern book in New York state period when it is actually set in the close in suburb of Westchester County.  It's labelled properly but simply mapped onto the long Westchester I suspect. Obviously no one checked this chapter or this is a mistake that would have been caught.

    America's Dream is very much exactly the sort of book I had in mind when I started reading the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  It's a novel about the experience of a Puerto Rican woman who escapes a violent abuser on Vieques island (where the US Army tests bombs) for a job as a house keeper/nanny in Westchester County circa 1970.   I get the sense that it's a minor classic on the grounds that Santiago is a pioneer in the field of Puerto Rican representation- it's still in print, though the last editions looks like it was published in 2009.  

  The frank depiction of domestic violence circa 1970's Puerto Rico is what the kids call "triggering," as a hardened criminal defense attorney who has tried twenty domestic violence case and represented defendants in dozens more, I was shocked, even allowing for the culture of "Machismo."   If I understood the plot correctly, the protagonist was the third generation of single mothers who gave birth at 14.  That is shocking to me but I've been exposed to enough of the world to know that it happens.   Here, her babydaddy would have gone to prison for twenty years, there, he doesn't even get arrested.  

  I'm not sure whether Puerto Rico is even covered by the 1,001 Novels project, but certainly it's right to expect more than one title from New York from the Puerto Rican community of that state- actually I know it's at least three because I'm listening to an Audiobook of a Puerto Rican Police investigator and a book by National Book Award winner Justin Torres, who also identifies as Puerto Rican.

   Like many books depicting characters with limited formal education the range of observations are limited- we are talking about the life experience of a woman who got pregnant at 14 and has literally never left her home island before the events of the book- but that's the same reason everyone needs to read books like America's Dream, it's an empathy generator for someone you might not have thought in detail about before reading.