Novelist Esmeralda Santiago never dreamed she’d create, much less learn to love, a character who owns slaves, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. Then into her head stepped Ana Cubillas, who became the willful heroine of Conquistadora, a book that Publishers Weekly has called a “Puerto Rican Gone With the Wind.” Ana, who grows up in 19th-century Seville reading about the lives of the Spanish conquistadores, ends up the widowed owner of a Puerto Rican sugar plantation. Santiago felt she had no choice but to see the story through. “When you consider the situation I put Ana in, she’d have to be a slave owner,” Santiago says. “I had to get over myself. I had to consider what could make a person live with something like that.”
Ana isn’t the typical plantation owner, said Gaiutra Bahadur in The New York Times. Though she metes out floggings, she’s not inured to the cruelty of the act. “She felt it, even if she wouldn’t sacrifice her own ambitions to change their circumstances,” says the author. Ana bristles when Spanish authorities issue a proclamation, taken directly from history, whose stated aim is to combat “the ferocity of the stupid African race.” Says Santiago, “I was chilled when I read it.” Ultimately, the author grew to admire her character’s toughness, a trait she drew from when she suffered a stroke two years into writing Conquistadora. “Something that’s life-threatening makes you more tenacious to finish what you start,” she says. “There’s a lot of Ana in me, and me in Ana.”
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