Olga Dies Dreaming

In a letter to Prieto, Blanca expresses how proud she is that he ran for office. She was skeptical of his political ambitions at first, but when Prieto was arrested for protesting, she saw him as working for the liberation of Puerto Rico. She adds a hint that Prieto should marry, pointing out that a wife would provide comfort for Prieto in private as “[s]omeone to be soft with when they took off the armor they needed to survive in the White Man’s world” (85), and would also be beneficial when Prieto runs for office again in the future. In her postscript, Blanca criticizes Olga’s boyfriend and asks Prieto to talk to her.

In 2017, Prieto remembers his first drive. After bailing out his father from Rikers Prison, he spotted a Kaposi sarcoma lesion on his father’s neck. Knowing that it was a sign of fatal illness, Prieto drove around, finding peace in the act.

In college in Buffalo, Prieto was inspired by a class on environmental justice. When he transferred to NYU to be close to his family when his father was sick, Prieto lobbied against the building of a waste-processing plant in Sunset Park and succeeded.