This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get to be a judge for the National Book Awards? And what is something about that experience you’re looking forward to?

The process is mysterious in the sense that you just suddenly get contacted by the National Book Foundation. They choose a very diverse group of writers, critics, academics, translators, and booksellers. So even in our committee of 5–10 people, I think it’s got a little bit of everything. And a lot of us do multiple things. So that’s one of the things they’re going for. I was part of this cohort of Puerto Rican authors that [the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation] recognized a few years ago, and I imagine that’s how I ended up on the horizon. I think it’s been going on since 1950, and at first, the pool of judges was very male and white, and that’s been changing. It’s nice to be part of this bigger thing.

Some people take the National Book Awards as a quick view of what happened in a year in literature. So, we are judging a book, but also in our conversations, we have to take into consideration, “What does choosing a book mean for literature this year?” You sort of can’t lose the horizon of what you’re doing.

Can you talk a little bit about your recent publication, Mexico, Interrupted?

I’ve done three things in the last year, each of which represents a different part of what I do. As a scholar, I work on 19th-century cultural studies, intellectual history, and that book Mexico, Interrupted, which was a small section of my dissertation 10 years ago and looks very directly at how the elites from after independence in Mexico tried to explain why if Mexico was so rich in resources, it is so underdeveloped nowadays. And what I look at is how they answer that question. They answer that question through a very limited, misanthropic look at what they thought were the populations of Mexico. They didn’t have the tools to understand that the indigenous didn’t want to be part of this new country, that the mixed race populations and Mestizo populations really didn’t feel they were included in this project. I look at all the ways they misunderstood what was happening and how these misunderstandings were actually the grounds for the country’s laws and economic policies. I also published a translation that came out this year, which is a Spanish translation of a memoir by a writer from Montserrat, which is an island in the Caribbean that had a volcano erupt in 1996. Those are the two big things I’ve worked on in the last few years. And I’ve been working on a novel, a historical novel that hasn’t come out yet.

You have such a wide variety of writing, ranging from fiction to translations to scholarly articles. What is your writing process like for different kinds of work, and how do you determine when is the right time to publish something?

I always have a literary project, because in Puerto Rico I was a fiction writer, and that’s always been my horizon. Writing fiction comes first, and then everything happens after that. I kind of went to grad school by accident — it was not my long term plan — but eventually through doing grad school, I realized that scholarly research allowed me to look at things a different way. It relieved a little bit of the pressure that I feel when writing fiction. Scholarly writing, for me, even though you have to write pretty, is a way of looking at different things and exploring something else, something even more outside myself than literature. So that’s why in scholarly work, I study Mexico and I study the 19th century because I can’t think of anything that’s further from Puerto Rico, which is what I write about when I write fiction. Even though fiction is my main thing, scholarly writing, in a very weird way, is more relaxing than fiction. It gives me an opportunity to look at and analyze something that is not me.

I always translated, but I got into it sort of by accident. People asked me to translate things for money, and I started doing that. I’m part of this small press that we launched in Puerto Rico, and part of our project is to publish more Caribbean literature in Puerto Rico. So the Caribbean — even though we have so many things in common, each of the islands is sort of siloed, and we are all very distant from each other. One of the ways to diminish that distance, I thought, was through translation: How I could translate this writer or any other writer and have them circulate in Puerto Rico. So translation is more of a practical, strategic thing, a project to insert Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean into Puerto Rico. Translation is scholarly work, and I’ve normally been able to balance that. I feel like now that I have a 5-year-old, whatever is the next deadline is what’s driving me. But the grand scheme still applies, that literature is my main objective every day.

You’ve been talking a lot about Puerto Rican literature; how are you trying to bridge the gap between the Puerto Rican and mainland American literary worlds?

When I write, my main interest is that I’m writing about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico as a national tradition is what I’m interested in, more than the U.S. Writing in Puerto Rico and still being active in the literary world here serves as a good reminder that Puerto Rico is not the U.S. in many ways. I feel often, for better or worse, when people in the U.S. talk about Puerto Rican literature, they talk, of course, about the literature from the Puerto Rican diaspora, which is Puerto Rican literature, but it conforms more to U.S. traditions. The literature written by the Puerto Rican diaspora, which I love and teach, still responds to some demands from American literature. Puerto Rican literature has developed in a completely different way, closer to Latin America and other aesthetic demands. So I try to remind people that Puerto Rican literature is in relztion to U.S. literature, but it’s not U.S. literature. That’s my main thing that I always insist on.

What are you currently working on and what are some of your plans for the future?

A few years ago, I finished a historical novel that looks at the effects of the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean at large. It’s kind of like a Caribbean Western. I’m still working on a new version. And right now, because of the Book Awards, for the next few months, I have to read between 150–200 books, out of which we have to choose 10 books by September, so after this semester ends, that’s what I’m going to be doing the whole summer. That’s the only thing that I’m looking at right now, which is exciting because if reading is a way of getting outside of ourselves and seeing the world from another perspective, reading translated literature is a way to do it at an even greater level. So I’m reading. I can’t say the names of the books, but I just read a book of essays by an Afghan writer, I read a book by a Korean author and another one by a young Spanish female writer. That’s already three books that I would have never read and are so different.