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JULIA DE BURGOS
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Ø Julia de Burgos 88 Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes almost fall. Fall comes to us as a prize to rouse us toward our fate. My house is made of wood and it’s made well, unlike us. My house is older than Henry; that’s fairly old. If there were a middle ground between things and the soul or if the sky resembled more the sea, I wouldn’t have to scold my heavy daughter. 1969 JULIA DE BURGOS 1914–1953 Arguably puerto rico’s greatest poet, Julia Constanza de Burgos García is enjoying a renaissance of interest in her lyrical poetry, her politics of social change, and her feminism. One major cultural indicator of her rise to the top of contemporary American poetry is her selection for a stamp issued in her honor by the U.S. Postal Service in 2010. In addition, many schools and parks have been named for her, in both Puerto Rico and the mainland United States. She is also one of the few poets to have a cultural center established in her name—the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center in Harlem. Not surprisingly, such hemispheric Nobel poets as Pablo Neruda and such leading Puerto Rican modernists as Luis Llorens Torres praised and supported de Burgos as she moved through her career. Her lyrical talents have brought many musicians to her poetry, including Leonard Bernstein. Today she is considered a peer of Gabriela Mistral, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and other leading women poets of the Americas. Gifted with the ability to combine both social conscience and personal introspection with the formal subtleties of traditional lyricism, de Burgos wrote against patriarchal marriage, female subjugation, social conformity, and machismo as well as colonialism and dictatorship. Among her pioneering contributions was her absorption of African influences in her poetry and her insertion of an African dimension (or Négritude) into Latin American modernism (or modernismo ). An equally important contribution was her early feminist awareness A Julia de Burgos Ø 89 of the position of women in a society dominated by men. Also a journalist, de Burgos pursued an internationalist framework in her politics and opposed such dictators as Franco in Spain, Somoza in Nicaragua, and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic as well as U.S. and European colonialism. Born into agrarian poverty in 1914, sixteen years after the United States had assumed control of Puerto Rico from Spain, de Burgos was the eldest of thirteen children. Six of her siblings died of malnutrition. She eventually learned that she was of African heritage, a direct descendant of slaves. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico with a degree in teaching, she taught for several years. In 1934, she married (the marriage ended in 1937) and began working at a publicly run day care center in order to deepen her social awareness. She also began publishing articles in newspapers, and she wrote poetry, plays, and songs for radio. In 1936 she joined the Daughters of Freedom, the women’s branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Toward the end of the 1930s, she published two books of poetry, one of which included “To Julia de Burgos.” After becoming romantically involved with Dr. Juan Isidro Jiménez Grull ón, a physician and public figure in the Dominican Republic, she lived in Havana , Cuba, Washington, D.C., and New York City. During World War II, she married a Puerto Rican musician named Armando Marín and worked in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in Washington. After the war, she moved permanently to New York City. Divorced for a second time in 1947, she became active in New York literary circles and leftist political causes. But she gradually fell into deepening depression and alcoholism. She collapsed on a street in Spanish Harlem and died of pneumonia in a hospital at the age of thirty-nine. further reading Julia de Burgos. Song of the Simple Truth: Obra Completa Poética / The Complete Poems. Comp. and trans. Jack Agueros. Willamantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1997. Melissa Hussain. “‘La masa explotada despierta’: Recovering Julia de Burgos’s Poetics, Politics, and Praxis.” Panini: NSU Studies in Language and Literature 4 (2006–7): 56–106. Vanessa Pérez Rosario, ed. Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. A Julia de Burgos Ya las gentes murmuran que yo soy tu enemiga porque...