From PEOPLE.ORG: PEOPLE magazine has just shared the cover of The Girls from Humboldt Park, a new novel from the celebrated author out next year through Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Set in 1976, the novel follows Rosalinda Acevedo, a girl caught between two worlds: the rapidly-changing Chicago neighborhood where she grew up alongside her friends, and her ancestral land of Puerto Rico.
As the United States Bicentennial approaches, Rosalinda and her friends meet a group of Puerto Rican independentistas, who teach the girls about the history of revolution and resistance hidden by their community and parents.
Uplifting the Puerto Rican diaspora is central for Vera, the author of If I Bring You Roses and The Taste of Sugar, and her next novel continues this work.
“I wrote The Girls from Humboldt Park because I believe that if we are not in the literature then we are not in the history,” Vera tells PEOPLE. “I claim our existence, our struggles, our humanity for the Puerto Rican people from Humboldt Park, including my own family.”
“This is important because since the 1970s, Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood has been under gentrification — another word for colonization — and The Girls from Humboldt Park is the way I fight back from this erasure, my own way of plantando bandera,” she continues.
