Raising Cane

Esmeralda Santiago’s Literary Harvest

by Nina Shengold, August 26, 2011

Esmeralda Santiago is in transit. This isn’t unusual for the bestselling author, who often commutes between northern Westchester and coastal Maine, but in the weeks since her new novel Conquistadora (Knopf, 2011) was published, her travel map has included a bicoastal swath of American cities.

Conquistadora’s book tour began in Puerto Rico, where most of the novel is set—and where Santiago’s memoirs When I Was Puerto Rican (Da Capo, 1993) and Almost a Woman (Vintage, 1999) are frequent flyers on high school curricula. The reception was “awesome, amazing. Big crowds,” Santiago reports. “Readers love to tell me their own family stories. My signings are marathon affairs. They like to talk, I like to talk—it can go on for hours.”

Set in the mid-19th century, Conquistadora launches a projected series following multiple generations of the same family through the twists and turns of Puerto Rican history. Its complex, willful heroine, Ana Cubillas, dreams of leaving her native Spain for the island where one of her ancestors landed with Ponce de Leon. Marrying one of a pair of identical twins who covertly share her affections, she becomes mistress of an ill-fated sugar plantation, Hacienda los Gemelos.

Ana chafes at her oppression by men, but willingly accepts her role as a slaveholder, even while forming deeper human connections with certain slaves than with her own son. Even Severo Fuentes, the sensual plantation manager who falls in love with Ana, describes her as “hard, hard, hard.” Her unswerving passions are land and legacy: “She never asked why she’d focused all her energy and sorrow on the fate and fortunes of Hacienda los Gemelos. She only knew that from the moment she saw it, the land and everything and everyone within its borders were essential to her existence. It couldn’t be questioned, challenged, or explained. It just was.”

“Women like this exist today: CEOs, political women,” Santiago observes. “This is what they must do. If a man did it, it would be okay, but if a woman is single-minded, willing to sacrifice her personal life to reach her goals, that’s negative.”

Though she clearly admires her heroine’s drive, Santiago says, “I don’t think she would like me. I’m not as focused and visionary—I have a lot of family and close friends who are important to me. She deliberately isolates herself to follow her vision.”

So does the author, in shorter stints. Santiago and her husband of 31 years, documentary filmmaker Frank Cantor, share a spacious, art-filled house in Katonah and a second home overlooking a working lobster pound outside Port Clyde, Maine. Though she and Cantor frequently go there together or with their two grown children, Santiago also uses it as a getaway for solo writing binges, during which her car may sit in the driveway untouched for a week between grocery-shopping excursions. She keeps in touch with her husband by phone and iChat, with an occasional neighbor dropping by to make sure she’s all right. Other than that, her only companions are the voices in her head.