SOURCE: Foreword to Papeles de Pandora: The Youngest Doll, University of Nebraska Press, 1991, pp. ix–xiv.

In the following essay, Franco provides a brief thematic overview of the stories in Papeles de Pandora.

In her essay “The Writer's Kitchen,” Rosario Ferré asserts that imagination is “irreverence towards the establishment,” that it is “always subversive.” Ferré's irreverence is directed toward the class into which she was born, and beyond that to the patriarchal ties that bind the overprotected lives of upper-class women and the oppression and marginalization of working-class women of color. The heritage of slavery in Ferré's native Puerto Rico not only continues to mark the underclasses with both its concealed and not-so-concealed racisms but it has affected the telling of Puerto Rico's official history in which the people of color have been all but invisible.

The problems of Puerto Rican identity have been compounded by...