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Your book reads as a counter-history of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis projects of liberation, but also as an acknowledgment of the history of psychoanalysis' complicity in repression. The link made in the book between psychoanalysis and psychologies and theologies of liberation suggests something of your personal history.
In true psychoanalytic fashion, we'd have to go back to my mother. It's not a book about Puerto Ricanness, but yet it is insofar as it is grounded in my life experiences. When I was a kid, my mom was the secretary of our pastors at our church; the pastors were a curious bunch. One of them was getting his doctorate in clinical psychology, and our head pastor was exposed to psychoanalytic thought in his seminary training. Psychology and psychoanalysis informed how they thought about community, and mental health and well-being were key issues in our church. My mom would bring home these older nosological books that were translated into Spanish, and talk to me about them, which made for a different kind of bedside story! She would engage in armchair psychoanalysis of our island politics, people we knew, and at one point “diagnosed me” as a colérico melancólico—as having a melancholic-choleric temperament. I brushed her off, thinking, but I'm so gregarious and outspoken! It was only in hindsight that I realized my gregariousness and sense of humor was a defense—and my mom saw through me. In the way that most kids want to be firefighters or doctors, from about age seven or eight, I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. All of those ideas were in the ether.
Also influential was growing up noticing all of these unspoken things in our culture in Puerto Rico. On the one hand, my body was idealized because I have light skin and “good hair.” People would say things like, “oh, your son is so beautiful,” and eventually, someone would say the quiet part out loud, “because he's so white.” Colorism and White Supremacy textured the immense poverty, inequality, and violence happeni