The Five Legs of the Cat takes the reader on a journey beginning in Puerto Rico to different parts of the world, on foot. The reader does not have to actually be on foot. However, the reader might start seeing legs everywhere, perhaps themselves having more than two legs, like a cat more than two lives.
In Puerto Rico there is the common idiom, “She is always looking for the five legs of the cat.” It is said when someone is believed to try to complicate matters by overlooking and overanalyzing the situation. This book leaves it up to the reader to come to their final conclusion.
The Five of Legs of the Cat goes from a more narrative and prosaic to more reflective and experimental style; from the mundane to the existential, the local to the international, the simpler to the complex experiences in life. It covers a wide variety of topics. The book can be considered an autoethnography, a poetic ethnography or an ethnographic poetry within the context of literary anthropology and native anthropology.