Carlota Ruíz de González, my great great great grandmother, was born in Cuba in 1829.

She emigrated to New Orleans in the 1860s and did all manner of odd jobs before becoming Adeline’s right-hand woman at the boarding house. As yellow fever comes, Carlota decides to go back to her Cuban home to see her son, Mateo, and his family. 

The following letters trace my family line from Carlota the Cubana all the way to me, Carlota the New Orleanian. Both of us lived through epidemics in our time.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
-Arundhati Roy