The Sovereign [Paperback]

13 October?????01??and inching toward??midnight, Lieutenant Frances Villegas sits at a Steinway trying desperately to play Stravinsky???s??Petrushka??while the Colonel watches, wheezing from a wing chair. They are waiting on the enigmatic voice of the people, Adjutant General Arj??n J. Joglar, due to arrive at any minute from Lares. Downstairs, Baldomero Richter, presiding over a captive body stripped bare of clothes, hair, genitals, and one ear, awaits an order to terminate. It is the eve of the Evangelist Insurrection and in a few hours the great city of XXX XXXX will go up in smoke, swallowed by the warm waters of the Caribbean. All of this to declare, finally,independence.

2 March 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act determined that Puerto Ricans would forever thereafter be mainland American citizens. One hundred years later,??The Sovereign??marks the centennial anniversary of the Jones Act as both paean and polemic for the history of the island nation. A hybrid chronicle stretching itself in every temporal direction, the charming magical realism of the Latin Boom (that forgot about Puerto Rico) is here warped by the uncanny spectacle of an emancipated colonial imaginary.The Sovereign??is an extended meditation on what it means to be ecstatically free???and the blood price a people must pay for that freedom.

??The Sovereignnarrates the efforts of revolutionaries to free Puerto Rico from U.S. control at an unspecified time late in the twenty-first century. The novel focuses on several key revolutionaries, exploring their present motivations as well as their family histories on the island. Through these family histories, we learn about the history of sugar production in Puerto Rico, as well as the roles racial subjugation and slave labor played in Puerto Rico???s history more generally. The novel is also told through a variety of materials???traditional narration, poems, text messages, military transcripts.