Vanessa Perez Rosario - Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon

On Prez Rosarios brilliant reconstruction, Julia de Burgos recovers the thrill and the sting of her own legacy. She also glows with the flashes of brilliance her work ignited in Latin American artists who found her, and themselves through her, in the de-territorialized nowhere or utopia of New York. From that same fraught city, where heritage identities and trajectories become burdens akin to the Holy Grail, this book brings a major poet and activist into focus as incitement to read more and to write bravely.

Doris Sommer, author of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

Becoming Julia de Burgos is a smart and original study of this important poet and cultural figure. Vanessa Prez Rosario is an astute and insightful reader of Burgoss poetry, letters, and journalism. Prez Rosario is also a talented cultural historian: in addition to [offering] readings that yield political and aesthetic dimensions of Burgoss writing, Prez Rosario also contextualizes Burgoss life transnationally, placing her at the center of debates among Puerto Rican intellectuals about gender, colonialism, and cultural identity. An important study from an exciting and talented new critical voice.

Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever

In this beautifully written and thoroughly researched study, one of the most important artistic and literary icons of the Nuyorican and Latino diaspora finally gets her due. Vanessa Prez Rosario gives us the most current and definitive resource to understand not only Julia de Burgoss extensive body of work, but also the expansive cultural movement that continues to find inspiration in her legacy.

Arlene Dvila, author of Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas

Becoming Julia de Burgos makes a truly significant contribution to multiple fields as it demonstrates the commitment and attention to local histories and locations, set into larger contexts, that marks the best work in Puerto Rican and Caribbean Studies.

Elizabeth Rosa Horan, co-editor of This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo

BECOMING JULIA DE BURGOS

published with a grant

Figure Foundation

where the road wind poet

BECOMING JULIA DE BURGOS

The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon

VANESSA PREZ ROSARIO

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2014 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950831

ISBN 978-0-252-03896-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-252-08060-9 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-252-09692-1 (e-book)

To my parents,
Carmen and Frank Prez

The voice of an epoch is in the words of its poets.

Victor Hernndez Cruz

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

Color plates

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the most enjoyable parts of working on this project has been the opportunity to sit with many of the writers and artists of the Nuyorican community and beyond who have inherited Julia de Burgoss legacy and continue to extend it in interesting and meaningful ways: Jack Ageros, Andrea Arroyo, Caridad De La Luz, Marcos Dimas, Martn Espada, Sandra Mara Esteves, Yasmn Hernndez, Aurora Levins Morales, Mara Teresa (Mariposa) Fernndez, Belkis Ramrez, Sonia Rivera-Valds, Bonafide Rojas, Fernando Salicrup, Juan Snchez, Luz Mara Umpierre, Manny Vega, Chiqui Vicioso, Emmanuel Xavier, and the members of Taller Boricua. Without them, Julia de Burgos would not be the icon she is today.

This project has undergone many transformations on its way to becoming the book you now hold in your hands. I am grateful for the institutional support I have received along the way from the Chicana/Latina Research Center at the University of California, Davis, the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program at City University of New York, the American Association of University Women American Fellowship and Publication Grant, the Library Fellowship from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, the Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, and the Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

The many conversations that I have had with friends, conference panelists, colleagues, librarians, archivists, and research assistants have helped shape the book. Thank you to Emilio Bejel, Yarimar Bonilla, Arnaldo Cruz-Malav, Arlene Dvila, Juan Flores, Pedro Juan Hernndez, Ins Hernndez-vila, Elizabeth Horan, Regine Jean-Charles, Neil Larsen, Laura Lomas, Helvetia Martell, Jorge Matos, Edwin Melndez, Oscar Montero, Joan Morgan, Frances Negrn-Muntaner, Crystal Parikh, Rich Richardson, Consuelo Saez Burgos, Virginia Snchez-Korrol, Doris Sommer, Maritza Stanchich, Salamishah Tillet, and Arlene Torres. A special thanks goes to all of the staff at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies library and archives and to the Centro Journal for granting permission to publish a version of Julia de Burgos Writing for Pueblos Hispanos: Journalism as Puerto Rican Cultural and Political Transnational Practice (25.2 [Fall 2013]: 427) in .

Thank you to my editors at the University of Illinois Press, Larin McLaughlin and Dawn Durante, who believed in the project from the very beginning. Both have been helpful and generous with their time. Thank you to my readers at the press for their careful and detailed comments.

I am especially grateful for my family for being supportive, loving, and patient through the writing process.

BECOMING JULIA DE BURGOS

INTRODUCTION

In the early morning hours of 5 July 1953, two New York City police officers spotted a figure on the ground near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. As they approached, they saw the body of a woman with bronze-colored skin. Once a towering woman at five feet, ten inches, she now lay in the street, unconscious. They rushed her to Harlem Hospital, where she died shortly thereafter. The woman carried no handbag and had no identification on her. No one came to the morgue to claim her body. No missing persons case fit her description. She was buried in the citys Potters Field. One month later, the woman was identified as award-winning Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos. Her family and friends exhumed and repatriated her body.

When I began writing about Julia de Burgos, I hesitated to mention her notorious death, seeking to move away from the narratives of victimhood that have shrouded her life for more than half a century. I wanted to focus on her poetry, her activism, and her legacy. Most Puerto Ricans already know her story, and many both on the island and in New York have been captivated by her life. However, I soon realized the importance of recounting even the most difficult details as I introduced her to new audiences. Her migration experience and her death on the streets of New York capture the imaginations of readers everywhere. Becoming Julia de Burgos builds on recent approaches to her work that focus on movement, flow, and migration. This book proposes a new way of reading Burgoss work, life, and legacy, focusing on the escape routes she created to transcend the rigid confines of gender and cultural nationalism.

In Puerto Rico, the Generacin del Treinta (Generation of the 1930s) writers created cultural works that responded to Antonio S. Pedreiras