Charles Allen, Puerto Rico’s first US-appointed civilian governor, had spent his career after politics ruthlessly advancing the interests of the American Sugar Refining Company until it had swelled to become the largest such in the world. In 1914, the year of Julia’s birth, the area around Carolina was sugar cane country. During her final days, De Burgos wrote to her sister: “It honors and satisfies me that while the government of this country repudiates me for struggling for the welfare of humanity, including its own people, my Puerto Rican gente honor and protect me, materially and spiritually.” In Puerto Rico and the US, her name adorns two parks, six monuments, seven buildings, five schools, a shelter for battered women, and an arts center in East Harlem’s El Barrio, opposite a wall showcasing a mosaic of her face. Her likeness has appeared on a postage stamp and in a mural by Yasmin Hernandez. February 17 (her birthday) is Julia de Burgos Day in Carolina. The archive’s binders were thick with announcements of honors, conferences, and centenaries for De Burgos. I leafed through laminated copies of the letters Julia wrote to her sister, Consuelo Burgos, who was a lawyer and Communist organizer. “Julia is one of the premier figures of literature, and she surpasses the borders of Puerto Rico,” said Irma Santiago Torres, director of the town’s archives, whose antechamber boasts two giant paintings of De Burgos. Their departure recalls the mass migration to the US, spurred by the Depression, that occurred in De Burgos’s generation. Over 250,000 people have left the island since Hurricane Maria hit last fall, driven out by poverty and lack of electricity, to sleep in FEMA-funded hotel rooms and to work far from home in places like poultry-processing plants in South Dakota. The central square of Carolina, Julia de Burgos’s hometown, is empty. In January, I traveled to Puerto Rico with my father, carrying a copy of Julia de Burgos’s letters, visiting the places she had lived, trying to hear her voice. The problems Puerto Ricans face today, as their impoverished island fights for survival in an era when the international order seems to be coming apart, are the legacy of the struggles De Burgos faced.
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Yet, outside of Puerto Rican communities, she is largely unknown despite the fact that her poetry, while firmly rooted in place, addresses the universal human subjects of love, war, and self-creation.ĭe Burgos’s life spanned Puerto Rico’s full entrenchment as a colony of the United States, while her public life as a writer took place against the backdrop of the twentieth-century’s global conflict between fascism and democracy.
As with many female artists, De Burgos’s life story added to her legend, though her romantic life and untimely death threatened to overshadow her work by turning her into an allegorical figure for the patria’s humiliations. Every line of De Burgos’s verse is imbued with passion, feminist self-assertion, and love of homeland. Puerto Rico’s most famous poet and greatest literary figure, De Burgos is as significant a cultural icon for the island commonwealth as the artist Frida Kahlo is for Mexico. Julia de Burgos did not record her experience. Three hundred people died in what would be, for the next ninety years, the most violent storm in the island’s history.
The Category Five storm left not a single building unscathed, least of all the wood casita in a mountain barrio in Carolina where De Burgos was born. In 1928, when Julia de Burgos was fourteen, Hurricane San Felipe devastated Puerto Rico. She had many sins because she always lived in verseĪnd what you do on earth, on earth you pay for.” They will say: “it is the fatal conscience of that girl,