Told from the perspective of Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian working at the University of Chicago, Fe en disfraz details the sexual relationship between Martín and his boss, Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan historian and museologist who is putting together an exhibition on black women freed from slavery in Latin America at the University of Chicago. Martín himself becomes an interpreter and scribe of black women’s voices through the recounting of Fe’s work and their sexual encounters. Functioning as chapter-length interludes, historical documents that Fe sends him to review from a mysterious collection—many of which Santos-Febres admits in the author’s note that she compiled or made up—interject the twenty-first-century narrative. These interludes detail white men’s sexual subjugation and humiliation of black and mixed-race women during slavery across various sites of Latin America as testaments of white supremacist power and desire.

Meanwhile, the sadomasochist bent of Fe and Martín’s interracial sexual encounters, where Fe sets the rules of engagement and manipulates Martín to her whims, brings this historical archive into the present moment and inverts the racial and gender hierarchy of social relations in Latin America, past and present. Mayra Santos-Febres’s novella is one of the most descriptive pieces of literature to demonstrate the afterlife of slavery, especially in the context of Latin America. Its availability in English for the first time will bring a new readership and engagement to this complicated text.

Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican writer and professor who has published nineteen novels, short-story collections, and poetry anthologies. Her literary work broadly focuses on themes of race and diaspora in the Caribbean, black female sexuality, desire, and power across historical periods. Her short story collection Pez de vidrio (1994) was awarded the Letras de Oro Literary Award and, from this collection, her story, “Oso Blanco,” was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize. Her first novel, Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000), was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallego Prize for Novel and won the PEN Club of Puerto Rico’s award for best novel. Her third novel, Nuestra Señora de la Noche (2006), won Puerto Rico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. Santos-Febres teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras where she teaches courses on African diaspora, Caribbean, and feminist literature and is the Executive Director of Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra. Four of Santos-Febres’ works have been translated into English, including Pez de vidrio (Urban Oracles, 1994/1996), Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Sirena Selena, 2000/2000), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (Any Wednesday, I’m Yours, 2002/2005), and Nuestra Señora de la Noche (Our Lady of the Night, 2006/2009).
 
John A. Mundell is a translator working between Portuguese, Spanish, and English and is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, and sexuality in literature and popular culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa. Mundell’s scholarly work has been published in Luso-Brazilian Review, Palimpsest, and Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies where he has also worked as a translator. His forthcoming work will appear in Latin American Research Review. He is also a poet, working largely in Portuguese, and won second place (2013) and honorable mention (2014) in two national poetry competitions in Brazil sponsored by Editoria Litteris. Currently, Mundell is a postdoctoral fellow in African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis where he teaches courses on blackness in Latin American film and photography, Afro-Brazilian studies, and intellectual thought and cultural exchange between Latin America and Africa.

Translator’s Introduction
Preface
Faith in Disguise: A Novella
Acknowledgements
Appendix: Interview with Mayra Santos-Febres