Who are we without our memory and without our context?

How do we come to understand the women who raise us and make us who we are when they themselves may not know?

These are among the driving questions in Esmeralda Santiago's new novel, Las Madres,

the story of a group of women and their daughters strung across five decades from Puerto Rico

to the Bronx, their traumas, their secrets, their love.

It has been 20 years since Asmeralda published her critically acclaimed memoir when I was

Puerto Rican.

I remember my mom insisting that I read it.

So, wow, to be in conversation with Esmeralda about everything from re-learning language in the wake of a stroke

to the cruelest feedback she has ever received, this was such a gift.

Esmerada, Santiago, what an honor.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for inviting me on this beautiful,

gorgeous day. When you auditioned to go to the School of Performing Arts, what was it that you were imagining for your life? I don't think that I really had a vision of my future at that time.

I think I went to performing arts high school, or I tried to audition to performing arts,

because my teachers thought I might be successful in being admitted there.

I was not really thinking really way beyond what was happening the next day.

I just, this is the kind of life that we had, as that we really couldn't predict our future.

We couldn't really envision it. So I paid a lot of attention to my teachers, to the adults around me. I was 12, 13 years old in a school in

Brooklyn had been arrived in the United States just over a year. And to hear anybody having a vision

for me was very, it was dramatic.

It really was.

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