Rosario T. Ferré '60
Week of May 28, 2001

"I really wanted to be a dancer," author Rosario Ferré told the audience at Wellesley's "Women Who Will" conference in April. "And apart from a dancer, I would have been a nun. [But] because I liked boys a lot, becoming a nun was very difficult. I had an aunt . . . who was a very beloved nun in Puerto Rico, and she was my favorite aunt, and I wanted to be like her. Since I couldn't, because I was never going to give up boys the way she had, I decided that I could perhaps become a writer."

Rosario Ferré has made the most of that childhood decision. Now one of Puerto Rico's best-known authors, she began writing professionally at the age of 14, publishing articles in Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Día newspaper. The House on the Lagoon, her first novel written in English, was a 1995 finalist for the National Book Award. Since then, Ferré has added two more English-language novels—the epic Eccentric Neighborhoods, published in 1998, and this year's Flight of the Swan—to her extensive list of articles, essays, poetry, short stories, novellas, and biography in both Spanish and English.

The fact that Ferré must decide which language to use each time she writes highlights the identity conflict that has marked her life. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Ferré attended Catholic schools there before coming to the United States at age 13 to attend Dana Hall School, in Wellesley, Mass. By the time she came to Wellesley College in 1956, she was in the throes of a crisis of faith. "I wanted to be a nun," she explains, but "I liked Protestantism a lot, because I didn't have to go to confession, and I didn't have to do a lot of things. . . . When I was at Dana Hall and even [at Wellesley], I was always defending my Catholic religion against Protestantism, in spite of the fact that I was very suspiciously attracted by it."

Ferré left Wellesley after only a year, unhappy, "colder than I had ever been at Dana Hall," and plagued by religious doubt. She finished her degree at Manhattanville College outside New York City, which, at the time, was a Catholic school.

After college, despite having wanted as a child to be like her independent, missionary aunt—"She didn't have to stay home and take care of kids like me, who were always bothering their parents"—Ferré married and had three children. She continued to write, but, she says, "I never could write fiction until my youngest kid was 12. That was when I could sit down and write my first short story. . . . The truth is that when children are around you and you have to be looking after them, it's terribly difficult. Once they are . . . adolescents and they can look after themselves a bit, then you can find that space and that silence."

To this day, Ferré feels a tension between being an independent-minded writer and a dutiful wife. "My husband doesn't like it when I work until late," she told the Wellesley audience in April. "So I go to bed when he goes to bed, I wait until he falls asleep, and then I get up and I go down to my study and I work until two or three o'clock in the morning."

Ferré dealt with a similar conflict between desire and duty when her father, Luis Ferré, was governor of Puerto Rico (1968–1972). He supported statehood for Puerto Rico; she backed independence. And just as her husband's preferences don't keep Ferré from doing what she wants to do, neither did her father's politics. In two different plebiscites, she voted for independence.

But in the years since then, Ferré has changed her mind about her island's political identity—that either-or question that so clearly reflects Ferré's questions about herself—and in the most recent plebiscite, she backed statehood. "To be Puerto Rican is to be a hybrid," she wrote in the New York Times in 1998. "Our two halves are inseparable; we cannot give up either without feeling maimed."

Ferré is now a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Puerto Rico; she has also been a visiting professor at Rutgers and Johns Hopkins universities. She holds a doctorate from the University of Maryland, and in the early 1970s, she was editor and publisher of Zona de Carga y Descarga (Loading and Unloading Zone), a journal of Puerto Rican literature. She has been a longtime writer for several Puerto Rican newspapers, including the San Juan Star and El Mundo, as well as El Nuevo Día. She lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Written by Liz Ruark