In J. L. Torres’s second story collection Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize, a “sucio” goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip-hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These stories take us inside the lives of self-exiles, unhomed and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.

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In this stirring collection of eleven stories set in Latino communities in the northeast, J.L. Torres crafts deft reflections of Puerto Ricans living on the mainland. A son who follows his father’s wish to be buried in his beloved isla but can’t seem to meet his father’s other wish to not be covered with the American flag, a right he has as a veteran of World War II and Korea. A Nuyorican visiting his aunt in Cayey is fascinated with a run-down shack where a mysterious woman lives, surrounded by conflicting stories about her life and loves. In the Bronx, Ralph and Lou are unnerved by a spooky sight: eight red kerchiefs tied equidistantly apart on a cyclone fence. Torres’ characters reveal the circumstances that shape their lives in these thought-provoking stories that explore machismo, family relationships, love, and even santeria.

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When Rennie’s parents die, he does what they would have wanted and buries them in Puerto Rico, their homeland. There, he’s shocked to discover that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. A high-powered attorney, his birth mother Julia is determined to reclaim the son she gave up many years before.

Adrift, with no family and haunted by memories, Rennie is swayed by Julia’s constant pleading that he moves to the island. A teaching job in Puerto Rico decides it, and he finds himself flying “home.” Once there, he must deal with Julia’s strong-willed nature, a department chair not thrilled to have a Nuyorican on staff, squatters living in his house and a lover anxious to settle down. Most disturbing is the rumor that numerous people are dying from cancer because the campus, a former U.S. military base, is full of buried munitions.

Rennie soon finds himself working to expose the government’s lies, though he risks losing his job, his home and even the woman he loves.

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Roberto Clemente expected heaven. Instead, he wakes in Memorí, an afterworld where memory is alive and history refuses to stay buried. To move on, he must confront the truths of race, identity and legacy that shaped his life. Guided by illustrious historical Afro-Puerto Ricans, he confronts the truths he never fully saw in life. But Memorí is not just a place for reflection. It’s a test. To move on, Clemente must face the pain he carried, the truths he missed, and the lessons life never taught. Will he find peace with his past and move on to reunite with his family, or will he remain between worlds forever?

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