I grew up listening my grandmother´s stories. She visited us whenever she could.

My grandmother was born in Las Marías, Puerto Rico, and like thousands of other Puerto Rican farmers, she emigrated to the great city of New York at the end of the 1940s. The Second World War had just ended.

It was fifty years after the U. S.

invasion of the island during the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the United States was determined to change the name of our colony. We would now be known as a commonwealth.

At the beginning of the following decade, and, as a result of the constitution, this commonwealth would now be led by Luis Muñoz Marín. The nationalists and the “independentistas,” the group to which Muñoz Marín belonged, would be persecuted, demonized and imprisoned.

The escape valve, then, became the great emigration of those years. This great emigration meant that thousands of Puerto Rican families were separated.

This separation caused an entire nation to be displaced. For us, the great emigration meant that my family on my maternal side had been splintered forever even before I was born.

We were the product of a military intervention against the previous government and now the new regime was in the process of dividing and scattering us. .