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Podcast: Art Works Podcast
Episode: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month: A Conversation with Novelist Marisel Vera
Description: With her second novel “The Taste of Sugar,” Marisel Vera has created an epic tale with an intimate heart. It tells the story of small coffee farmers in late 19th century Puerto Rico whose lives had been shaped by Spanish colonialism and upended by the 1898 US Invasion and the devastating 1899 hurricane San Ciriaco which left thousands dead and a quarter of a million people without food and shelter. Vera’s protagonists, Valentina and Vicente, join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations where they find themselves instead captive laborers in a strange...