Enriqueta Cartagena Mayuga's book, Speckled Prism, is not a book of protest, nor does it contain litanies of past ordeals and privations that dotted her previous writings. It is not a confessional. Her previous books chronicled her coming to America in 1963 at the age of twenty-six at the height of the civil rights strife. It also detailed her journey of pain that she and others like her have experienced due to racism and discrimination. Speckled Prism, her sixth book, is different. There is no flurry of bitterness or regrets. Gone are the plethora of emotional and career upheavals from inequities and injustice. It is necessary, however, to glimpse at the past for the reader to understand the present.
