Introduction: Cuerpo, Conjuro Y Memoria

In March 2019, Mayra Santos-Febres was the featured artist-in-residence for the Womxn of Color Initiative at Michigan State University. While there, she offered a series of creative writing workshops and events which attracted writers, critics, and community members from across campus and from cities all over Michigan. In fostering this space for women writers, the Womxn of Color Initiative allowed Santos-Febres to bring a communal practice of writing and reflection—which she refined at the University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras) and in her island-wide writing workshops—to the Midwest. At each event, Santos-Febres continually underscored how critical it was for writing to be done in community, in the company of others, and in relation to other stories and memories. For each workshop, she brought out her own well-worn deck of tarot cards as a way to soften and knead our senses into conjuring stories and eliciting our bodies to produce writing that stemmed from within our deepest memories. These workshops culminated in the creation of Conjuros, a risograph chapbook, and a community open mic where many people came to participate, listen, and share prompted (pie forzado) and unprompted poetry.

The excavation of corporeal memory and the conjuring of ancestors, histories, and self-knowledge through remembering practices and reflection became a central focus of our work that month. We discussed at length the criticality of memory and forgetting in Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean women's writing and traced how the exclusion of Afro-Puerto Rican women, from the official and quotidian archive, led to erasures and omissions that left reverberations felt across generations. We further considered the embodied experience of the loss of memory; sharing from the deepest of places the impact of diseases such as Alzheimer's, which tears at the seams of the self, and discussed the ontological experiences of Afro-diasporic women, who work fastidiously to remember who they are in the face of systemic erasure, anti-Black racism, and cisheteropatriarchy. By thinking through and with the work of Afro-Puerto Rican women writers, a vastly understudied literary corpus, we began to rethink ourselves, our language, our histories, the sacred, and our diasporic experiences. The body conjures memory, memory conjures the body, and conjuring practices elicit the body to remember.

By the end of the residency we developed a series of creative and collaborative projects around the theme Cuerpo, conjuro y memoria, the most important of which would be a collection of out-of-print works by Afro-Puerto Rican women writers in order to re/introduce them to the public. The theme of this special dossier for Hispanófila is born from that visit and represents a small gesture toward the engagement with, and the tending to, the works of Puerto Rican women writers in general and the lived experiences of Afro-Puerto Rican women in particular. Each piece in this dossier has a vested interest in the creative and critical works, sensibilities, and desires of Puerto Rican women scholars and artists both on the island and in the diaspora.

The theme does not translate neatly into English, for the phrase Body, Conjure, and Memory cannot hold the same layers of potentialities, possibilities, and meanings that Cuerpo, conjuro y memoria offer. As such, we write this introduction between languages and feelings in both the literal and ephemeral sense. Our drive to bring Boricua women's literary and critical thought to the center of a journal whose name denotes a particular form of veneration of Spanish culture is political and necessary. We turn to the Spanish-speaking Caribbean—and in particular to what is commonly known as "the world's oldest colony," Puerto Rico and its diasporas—as a source of saberes built on its own genealogies of resistance and legacies of insurgent Black feminist scholars, artists, and activists. In this collection, Puerto Rican Women Conjuring Embodied Memory, we have curated critical and creative essays written in both English and Spanish by Milagros Denis-Rosario, Keishla Rivera-López, Judith Rodríguez, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and Mayra Santos-Febres...