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Puerto Rican literature has had an ambivalent, at best, relationship with black subjectivity. This is seen in the purportedly "nationalist" trajectory that initially avoided Afro-descendants, in a quizzical and often burlesque take during the so-called "negroide" verse of the 1930s, and in the afroantillanismo that followed it decades later. The death by homicide and subsequent literary depiction of the (in)famous entrepreneur and brothel owner from Ponte, Isabel Luberza in 1974,tellingly exemplifies the misogynist and racist tenor of the larger national narrative, especially as it relates to black women. With Mayra Santos Febres' Nuestra Senora de la Noche (2006), we get a significant departure from racial speculation and mockery, and a narrative approach that humanizes instead of demonizing poverty and prostitution. The text simultaneously highlights the misogyny and false morality that underlies an otherwise racially exclusionary national self-image. In making this argument my paper suggests that Santos Febres has re-written the national allegory to expose its white racial narcissism and underscore the foundational role of Afro-Puerto Rican women.