Faith in Disguise: A Novella

An academic novel that blurs the lines of history, fiction, identity, and belonging when a scholar and her object of study become intertwined Faith in Disguise follows Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian and research assistant to Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan scholar curating an exhibition in Chicago on enslaved and freed Black women in Latin America. As Martín becomes increasingly enmeshed in Fe’s intellectual and erotic orbit, his role as subordinate and interpreter exposes the entanglement of race, power, and desire in the production of historical knowledge. Through the interplay of archival fragments and contemporary encounters, Mayra Santos-Febres illuminates how the afterlives of slavery persist within Latin American racial and sexual imaginaries, and how the erotic, as both method and experience, may gesture toward forms of liberation from them.