Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century.

In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Pérez-Rosario situates Julia de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Becoming Julia de Burgos departs from the prevailing emphasis on the poet and intellectual as a nationalist writer to focus on her contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture. It moves beyond the standard tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to place her within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture to consider more carefully the complex history of the island and the diaspora. Pérez-Rosario unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
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Cover Title Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Writing the Nation: Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Generación del Treinta 2. Nadie es profeta en su tierra: Exile, Migration, and Hemispheric Identity 3. Más allá del mar: Journalism as Puerto Rican Cultural and Political Transnational Practice 4. Multiple Legacies: Julia de Burgos and Caribbean Latino Diaspora Writers 5. Remembering Julia de Burgos: Cultural Icon, Community, Belonging Conclusion: Creating Latinidad Notes Bibliography Index|

"An eye-opening study on a poet and political activist in the ranks of Gabriela Mistral and Luisa Capetillo, this is a must-have for Latin American, Puerto Rican, women's, and Caribbean studies collections."—Library Journal

"A phenomenal work by a remarkable scholar, this absorbing volume is required reading for those intrigued by the relationship between Latin America and the US. Highly recommended."—Choice

"Perez-Rosario interrupts the dominant narrative of Latina tragedy, showing us instead a resilient Julia de Burgos who struggled against gender discrimination, poverty, and racism. . . . Perez-Rosario's rewriting of Burgos as Latina highlights the poet's fight for self-determination and recognition, autobiographical writing style, and political commitment to decolonization and social justice."—Women's Review of Books
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Vanessa Pérez Rosario is associate professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement.