Faith in Disguise: A Novella

Faith in Disguise follows Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian and research assistant to Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan scholar curating an exhibition in Chicago on enslaved and freed Black women in Latin America. As Martín becomes increasingly enmeshed in Fe’s intellectual and erotic orbit, his role as subordinate and interpreter exposes the entanglement of race, power, and desire in the production of historical knowledge. Through the interplay of archival fragments and contemporary encounters, Mayra Santos-Febres illuminates how the afterlives of slavery persist within Latin American racial and sexual imaginaries, and how the erotic, as both method and experience, may gesture toward forms of liberation from them.

Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican writer and professor who has published nineteen novels, short story collections, and poetry anthologies. Her literary work broadly focuses on themes of race and diaspora in the Caribbean, Black female sexuality, desire, and power across historical periods. Her short story collection Pez de vidrio was awarded the Letras de Oro Literary Award and, from this collection, her story ＂Oso Blanco＂ was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize. Her first novel, Sirena Selena vestida de pena, was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallego Prize for Novel and won the PEN Club of Puerto Rico’s award for best novel. Her third novel, Nuestra Señora de la Noche, won Puerto Rico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. Santos-Febres teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, focusing on African diaspora, Caribbean, and feminist literature, and is the executive director of Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra. Four of Santos-Febres’s works have previously been translated into English: Pez de vidrio (Urban Oracles), Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Sirena Selena), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (Any Wednesday, I’m Yours), and Nuestra señora de la noche (Our Lady of the Night).

John A. Mundell is a translator working between Portuguese, Spanish, and English and a poet working largely in Portuguese. He is also an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, and sexuality in literature and popular culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa.