Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month: A Conversation with Novelist Marisel Vera

With her second novel “The Taste of Sugar,” Marisel Vera has created an epic tale with an intimate heart. It tells the story of small coffee farmers in late 19th century Puerto Rico whose lives had been shaped by Spanish colonialism and upended by the 1898 US Invasion and the devastating 1899 hurricane San Ciriaco which left thousands dead and a quarter of a million people without food and shelter. Vera’s protagonists, Valentina and Vicente, join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations where they find themselves instead captive laborers in a strange land. In this podcast, Vera talks about her life as a storyteller, her need to write a book that explored the history of Puerto Rico—a history most people don’t know—her meticulous research and 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 embracing that in her writing which moves fluently between Spanish and English.