A language can carry a family’s history and still become a gate used against members of that family. The table of contents of Aurora Levins Morales’s Medicine Stories puts that tension in plain sight: an essay on not speaking Spanish appears in a collection that also names Puerto Rican and Jewish histories. The arrangement makes a familiar test of identity look less secure. Who gets to decide that a person’s fluency, ancestry or religious inheritance makes their belonging insufficient?
The Duke University Press account identifies Levins Morales as a Puerto Rican Ashkenazi writer. These are concurrent affiliations. Treating one as an exception to the other would make a community’s preferred picture of itself more important than the people who actually compose it. Spanish has an enormous place in Puerto Rican life; it does not follow that every Puerto Rican has the same relationship to speaking it. Jewish history likewise cannot be reduced to a geography that excludes the Caribbean. The collection’s named subjects make those easy exclusions harder to maintain.
That is a practical issue for cultural writing. An editor who treats Spanish fluency as an automatic measure of authenticity may confuse access to a language with loyalty to a community. An editor who describes Jewish and Puerto Rican experience as necessarily separate may turn a person’s daily life into an alleged contradiction. Neither problem is solved by adding a longer list of labels. The harder work is to stop making recognition conditional on a life fitting a category that was too narrow to begin with.
The title Medicine Stories brings another vocabulary into this question. The contents include “The Historian as Curandera,” placing historical work beside a figure associated with care. The pairing suggests a useful way to assess the act of naming: does a description help people understand an inheritance, or does it make their presence harder to explain? History can preserve the terms people used for themselves while also examining the institutions that insisted on different terms. Care with a person’s words and care with historical evidence belong together.
The book itself has changed across time. Levins Morales’s publication list dates the original collection to 1998. Duke’s expanded edition appeared in April 2019, with 28 essays, 21 new or substantially revised. Those figures mark revision as a major part of the later book, not a cosmetic addition. A collection concerned with how lives are described can return to its own descriptions. That openness is more demanding than a fixed test of authenticity: the terms of belonging must remain answerable to the people expected to live inside them.