Read an Excerpt
Becoming Julia de Burgos
The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon
By Vanessa Pérez Rosario UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09692-1
CHAPTER 1
Writing the Nation
Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Generación del Treinta
In December 1938, at the age of twenty-four, Julia de Burgos self-published her first collection of poetry and traveled around Puerto Rico selling copies. She was raising money to help cover the cost of her mother's cancer treatments. This story, like many others about her, circulated for decades and contributed to the myths shrouding her life. Traditionally read as a story of daughterly devotion, it can also be seen as an example of Burgos's ambition, self-promotion, and determination to establish herself as a writer. Burgos's praxis and writing during the early part of her career reveal her savvy ability to fashion herself as a writer and to seize opportunities.
This chapter explores the creation of a feminist nomadic subject in Burgos's first poetry collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938), written during the height of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement. While committed to the idea of political nationalism throughout her life, Burgos nonetheless employed a feminist nomadic subject in her poetry, aligning her with the Puerto Rican literary vanguardias, that allowed her to find points of departure from the phallocentric and patriarchal Puerto Rican cultural nationalist project of the 1930s. This subject subverts conventions and anticipates her later departure from the island. As developed in her poetry, nomadism refers to a "critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior."
Various literary trends and currents circulated in Puerto Rico during the 1920s and 1930s. The members of the Generación del Treinta were committed to articulating a sense of Puerto Rican cultural identity in the face of U.S. colonialism. The result was a paternalistic literary canon that was written primarily by men, concerned with nation building, and characterized by the metaphor of colonialism as illness. The treintista writers privileged totalizing genres such as the novel and the interpretive essay as varieties that could heal the wound of colonialism. They sought to define a national identity or "essence" characterized by the natural landscape and geography of the island. Antonio S. Pedreira, Tomás Blanco, Luis Palés Matos, Vicente Geigel Polanco, Manrique Cabrera, Luis Muñoz Marín, and Enrique Laguerre are some of the canonical writers and intellectuals of this generation whose works defined and dominated Puerto Rican letters at least until the 1970s. In his famous essay, Insularismo (1934), Pedreira expressed the need to define Puerto Rican identity as tied to the island's geography. Images of the land dominated poems and novels of the time, exemplified by Enrique Laguerre's La llamarada (1935). The lyric and poetry were considered inferior genres.
This national or cultural identity emerged from the myth of the jíbaro, scripted by the novelists of the 1930s as a peasant farmer of European descent who embodies traditional values of fraternity and brotherly love. Although this identity stands in direct contrast to U.S. colonialism and imperialism, it is also fraught with contradictions. Rooted in linguistic purism that recognized Spain as the motherland, the jíbaro is grateful to Spain for the island's "noble" heritage. The jíbaro-based national identity fails to acknowledge the centuries of Spanish colonialism, the struggles for independence from Spain, and the legacy of slavery on the island. While many of these writers called for a return to the land, most of them lived in the city. This nostalgic identity shuns modernization and urbanization while rejecting U.S. imperialism. The idealization of the jíbaro ignored the island's labor movement as well as the problems associated with poverty, such as poor hygiene, disease, malnutrition, and lack of education.
The 1920s and 1930s also produced another group of writers, primarily poets, whose words may have been less widely read but nevertheless challenged and rebelled against the balanced and harmonious world depicted by the treintista writers, providing counternarratives. The Latin American vanguardias have been defined by their search for something new, the redefinition of art, the creation of manifestos published in small magazines, experimentation, and the autochthonous. Their work explores the present and the future, the urban, and a hybrid and fragmented world. During this era, Puerto Rico featured no fewer than fifteen "isms," including pancalismo, panedismo, diepalismo, euroforismo, ultraista, noísmo, los seis, atalayismo, integralismo, transcendentalismo, and Grupo Meñique. Periodicals published by these movements included Faro (1926), Vórtice (1926), hostos (1929), and Indice (1929–31). Among the important literary vanguardias were Evaristo Ribera Chevremont, Jose de Diego Padró, Luis Palés Matos, Graciany Miranda Archilla, and Clemente Soto Vélez. Vicky Unruh notes that the Atalayistas "supported the incipient Puerto Rican nationalism and separatism being disseminated by Pedro Albizu Campos." The vanguardias' activity was marked by autochthonous concerns, a focus on nationalist and Antillean cultural affirmation, African cultural influences, and an Americanist continental orientation. The various writers participated in men-only tertulias (literary salons) that did not welcome Burgos. Diego Padró recalled that he and the other leading poets of the era "gozábamos la alegría de vivir y no emancipábamos por completo de las formas pesadas y asfixiantes de la civilización.... Era una bohemia de solitarios que no admitía ni de broma el elemento femenino [rejoiced in the joy of life and emancipated ourselves completely from the heavy and asphyxiating forms of civilization.... It was a solitary bohemia that did not admit the feminine element even as a joke]."
Technological advancements shifted American poetry traditions. Lesley Wheeler notes that "technologies of presence—especially radio broadcast in the early part of the twentieth-century—altered the cultural role of poetry recitation in American life." Prior to these technological developments, poetry recitations had been displays of interpretation by someone other than the poet, but they increasingly became "spectacles of authority" that would "manifest the authentic presence of the poet for audiences." In the 1920s and 1930s, the practice of poets reading, reciting, and performing their own work was novel, but it would become an important source of income and prestige. Julia de Burgos was working at the edge of this cultural shift as a declamadora (someone who recites and interprets poetry) and was exploring the possibilities of radio's potential to unify and socialize. From 1936 to 1937, Burgos had a contract with the Department of Public Instruction's Escuela del Aire, a radio education program for children that sought to combat illiteracy and share public information on social and economic problems as well as daily events. Her husband, Rubén Rodríguez Beauchamp, was a broadcast journalist and may have helped her get the contract to write for Escuela del Aire. During the summer of 1936, Burgos recited her poetry for La casa del poeta (House of the Poet), an extension of a literary salon hosted by poet Carmen Alicia Cadilla that aired on a local radio station at nine in the evening. Both the literary vanguardias and technological developments played a role in the development of Burgos's literary voice.
In Poema en veinte surcos, Burgos experimented with various styles of writing prevalent among Puerto Rican writers of the time, including telurismo and neocriollismo, the negrista poetry of Luis Palés Matos, and the eroticism of Luis Lloréns Torres. These styles influenced her work and contributed to the development of her unique lyrical voice. Political activity on the island informed Burgos's life and her commitment to poetry, but her nomadic subject championing freedom and justice fundamentally and ideologically distinguishes her work and aligns her with the vanguardias. Burgos always speaks for oppressed sectors of the population, those excluded from the dominant national identity of the time. The nomadic subject becomes a "form of political resistance to hegemonic, fixed, unitary, and exclusionary views of subjectivity." Burgos also distinguished herself from her contemporaries stylistically, focusing not on the land, as the neocriollistas did, but instead on waterways, the sea, paths, and the open space of the cosmos. Her primary image, the fluidity of the sea (which isolates the island in Pedreira's work) connects Puerto Rico to other islands and nations in Burgos's poetry.
A close look at Burgos's points of convergence and divergence from the intellectuals of the time reveals that through her poetry, she attempted to define Puerto Rico as a heterogeneous place steeped in history. Because she understood identity as fluid and unbound by geography, her poetry is still read today by Puerto Ricans and Latino/as in the United States and on the island. The Afro-Antillean ideas expressed in Burgos's poetry make her work a precursor to later island writers such as Mayra Santos Febres as well as 1970s writers of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York and 1990s U.S. Latino/a writers.
The Mighty River of Loíza
Many critics have noted the importance of the poem "Río Grande de Loíza" in Julia de Burgos's work. Most often, however, critics read it as a neocriollista poem or a love song to the river of her childhood and a tribute to Puerto Rico's natural landscape. In this poem, Burgos creates a premodern world in which humans and nature exist in harmony. As with much of her work, critics have read this poem as a way to understand her biography. Poetry conventions changed over the twentieth century, emphasizing the presence and authenticity of the poet in an increasingly modernized world. In many ways, Burgos's writing moves away from modernists' theories of impersonality and takes up the self, authenticity, and intimacy as topics. Burgos invents her own origin myth and cosmology in this poem. In the final stanzas, she lays bare the violent wounds of history, refusing to mask the traumas of time. The treintistas focused on the land; Burgos focuses on the river, using it to create a nomadic subject that, like water, cannot be contained.
The poem opens with the speaker employing the rhetorical figure of apostrophe—the calling out to an inanimate thing—and in the speech act turns the river into an interlocutor through the power of language. As a figure of speech, apostrophe involves addressing a dead or absent person, an animal, a thing, or an abstract quality or idea as if it were alive, present, and capable of understanding. In Burgos's poem, the river appears as a man/river throughout, and the speaker invokes a pantheistic river god. In awakening the river, the speaker and the river fuse; subject and object become one. Where pleasure and eroticism constitute excess for the nation builders, these stanzas reveal pantheistic ideas and the eroticizing of nature. In the next stanza, the influence of the vanguardias is felt as Burgos personalizes the poem and unveils her own cosmology. She reveals her origins and describes herself as if she were born from the natural landscape of the world. The vanguardias create images that "embody connections between personal and cosmic beginnings" and take place not in a specific sociohistorical context but in "a mythical time-out-of-time and in the imaginary spaces of human and universal origins."
¡Río Grande de Loíza! ... Alárgate en mi espíritu
y deja que mi alma se pierda en tus riachuelos,
para buscar la fuente que te robó de niño
y en un ímpetus loco te devolvió al sendero.
Enróscate en mis labios y deja que te beba,
para sentirte mío por un breve momento,
y esconderte del mundo y en ti mismo esconderte,
y oír voces de asombro en la boca del viento.
Apéate un instante del lomo de la tierra,
y busca de mis ansias el íntimo secreto;
confúndete en el vuelo de mi ave fantasía,
y déjame una rosa de agua en mis ensueños.
¡Río Grande de Loíza! ... Mi manantial, mi río,
desde que alzóme al mundo el pétalo materno;
contigo se bajaron desde las rudas cuestas,
a buscar nuevos surcos, mis pálidos anhelos;
y mi niñez fue toda un poema en el río,
y un río en el poema de mis primeros sueños.
Llegó la adolescencia. Me sorprendió la vida
prendida en lo más ancho de tu viajar eterno;
y fui tuya mil veces, y en un bello romance
me despertaste el alma y me besaste el cuerpo.
Río Grande de Loíza! ... Undulate into my spirit
And let my soul founder in your rivulets,
To seek the fountain that stole you as a child
And in mad haste returned you to the path.
Wind into my lips and let me drink you,
To feel you mine for a brief moment,
And hide you from the world in myself
And hear voices of fear in the wind's mouth.
Come down for an instant from the earth's spine,
And look for the intimate secret of my longing;
Confounded in the sweep of my bird fantasies,
Drop a water rose in my dreams.
Río Grande de Loíza! ... My source, my river,
After the motherly petal raised me into the world;
With you went down from the rough hills
To seek new furrows, my pale desires,
And all my childhood was like a poem in the river,
And a river was the poem of my first dreams.
Then came adolescence. Life surprised me
Fastening to the broadest part of your eternal voyage;
And I was yours a thousand times, and in a beautiful romance,
You woke my soul and kissed my body.
In these stanzas, the speaker sees herself as a part of the natural world. The river, the flower, and the natural landscape create and inspire her. The speaker's oneness with the river evokes a primordial world. She travels and visits distant lands, creating new avenues for exploration.
At the close of the poem, Burgos cannot deny the island's violent history of colonialism and slavery. She abandons the concept of a harmonious world suspended outside of time and acknowledges the complexity and heterogeneity of the modern world and of Puerto Rico.
¡Río Grande de Loíza! ... Azul. Moreno. Rojo.
Espejo azul, caído pedazo azul de cielo;
desnuda carne blanca que se te vuelve negra
cada vez que la noche se te mete en el lecho;
roja franja de sangre, cuando bajo la lluvia
a torrentes su barro te vomitan los cerros. (14)
Río Grande de Loíza! ... Blue. Dark. Red.
Blue mirror, fallen blue fragment of sky;
Nude white flesh that turns you black
Every time night goes to bed with you;
Red band of blood, when under the rain
The hills vomit torrents of mud.
The three isolated words, "Azul. Moreno. Rojo," follow the invocation of the river to reference the blue sky, brown river, and red earth. The lines that follow these three words recall the island's history of slavery and widespread miscegenation. This stanza suggests the importance of the process of creolization and syncretism in defining the Americas and the Caribbean. As the river runs red, the closing lines of this stanza highlight the violence and bloodshed deeply entrenched in the island's history of colonization, the slaughter of the indigenous population, and the legacy of slavery.
Although the Río Grande de Loíza was important in Burgos's childhood experiences, it also played a significant role in the history of the region and by extension the island. According to anthropologist Edward Zaragoza, Loíza Aldea, a coastal village fifteen miles east of San Juan, is in many ways a microcosm of Puerto Rican history. The Taíno Arawak Indian village of Loíza is where the Spanish first landed on the island. In the early decades of the conquest, the Taínos and later enslaved Africans mined the Loíza River for gold. In the nineteenth century, Loíza Aldea became a sugar-producing area. African customs, carnivals, and religious rites are still practiced there, as they are elsewhere in Puerto Rico.23 By evoking the image of the river and this region as a metonym for the island, Burgos affirms the importance of the African presence on the island and in the Americas.
In the poem's final stanza, Burgos continues to conjure the pain and violence the river has witnessed over the centuries:
¡Río Grande de Loíza! ... Río grande. Llanto grande.
El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,
si no fuera más grande el que de mí se sale
por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo. (14)
Río Grande de Loíza! ... Great river. Great tear.
The greatest of all our island tears,
But for the tears that flow out of me
Through the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people.
By juxtaposing the phrases Río Grande (great river) and Llanto grande (great tear), she suggests their interchangeability. The river, composed of tears, has witnessed vicious history. Burgos decries the enormity of the pain, love, and anguish she carries in her heart for her native land and its "enslaved people," claiming that her pain is as great as the collective weeping reflected in the river. The poet mourns the lost unity of the world but knows it can only exist outside of time. The lines suggest the suffering and violence of colonialism, simultaneously denoting the present condition of U.S. colonialism. Through this modern image of a heterogeneous and fragmented world, her prayers for the people and island of Puerto Rico continue to resonate strongly today. The Río Grande de Loíza opens into the Atlantic Ocean in the town of Carolina, a rural area at the time Burgos wrote the poem. Today, Carolina is surrounded by metropolitan San Juan and as a result is overdeveloped and devastated by crime and poverty. The persistently high unemployment rate and lack of local industry not only here but throughout the island give new meaning to her words "enslaved people."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Becoming Julia de Burgos by Vanessa Pérez Rosario. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
