Toward a Genealogy of Water: Reading Julia de Burgos in the Twenty-First Century

Through a discussion of Vanessa Pérez-Rosario’s Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon, this essay argues that Julia de Burgos is an integral figure to consider in the development of a feminine genealogy of the uses of water in Caribbean and diasporic literature. Building on Pérez-Rosario’s documentation of Burgos’s relationship to water and paying particular attention to how water served as an escape route for the poet, this work places Burgos in dialogue not only with Puerto Rican literature but also with other Caribbean poets such as Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Ultimately, this essay discusses the uneasy relationship between rooted, land-based constructs of identity and flowing water imagery, arguing that exploring the tensions between them is productive not only in the case of Puerto Rico but also in other Caribbean settings.