Hurtado, R. (2019). Envisioning Empowerment: Recodifying the Meaning of Historical Trauma. In Decolonial Puerto Rican Women’s Writings (pp. 89-110). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Abstract

This chapter explores Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s novel Daughters of the Stone via psychoanalytics of historical trauma and studies regarding the effects of coloniality on genetic predispositions within epigenetics. This chapter examines how Llanos-Figueroa recreates narratives of Puerto Rico’s history of slavery. Importantly, this chapter contends that her renarration shows how women have been specifically inculcated into this system, both in its previous instantiations and the gaps in narratives in which slavery became a silenced trauma. This novel also critiques social shaming of Afro-Latinidades at both the individual family and larger socio-structural levels. This novel reclaims ancestral lineage as part of an empowered world-traveler consciousness. Analysis of this text in conjunction with recent studies in biological responses to trauma indicates the more insidious reach of colonialism and the importance of new narratives regarding historical trauma and narratives of pathologized bodies.