Julia de Burgos

Julia Constancia Burgos García was born on the seventeenth of February 1914 at the Santa Cruz neighbourhood of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the eldest of thirteen children of Francisco Burgos Hans — a small farmer of mixed African, Spanish and German descent — and Paula García de Burgos, of substantial African and Taíno descent. Six of her younger siblings died in infancy under conditions of rural poverty that across her life shaped her political imagination. She was educated at the Muñoz Rivera Public School at Carolina through her thirteenth year and at the University High School at Río Piedras from 1928 to 1931 — on a scholarship from her aunt's small inheritance — and at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras from 1931 to 1933, completing the normal-school teaching diploma at nineteen.

She taught at a rural one-room school in the Naranjito district of central Puerto Rico from 1934 to 1936 and worked subsequently as a writer of children's programmes at the Puerto Rico Department of Education radio service. She was active from her university years in the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party of Pedro Albizu Campos (placed in this archive) and edited the Party's organ Acción during the early Albizu years.

Her first collection Poema en veinte surcos of 1938 — the volume she sold herself house to house across the principal Puerto Rican towns — established her at twenty-four as the principal female voice of the post-1898 Puerto Rican national-poetic canon. Her second collection Canción de la verdad sencilla of 1939 won the Puerto Rico Institute of Literature Prize the same year. Her third major collection El mar y tú — the volume of forty-seven poems on the conditions of her later New York exile — was completed in late 1952 and published posthumously in 1954.

She moved to New York in 1942 at the age of twenty-eight, in part to follow the Dominican intellectual Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón with whom she had begun a relationship. She lived for the following eleven years in the East Harlem Puerto Rican diaspora under conditions of substantial poverty and increasing alcoholism.

She collapsed on a Manhattan sidewalk on the sixth of July 1953 and died at Harlem Hospital. She was identified as Jane Doe and held without identification for nineteen days before family recognition. She was thirty-nine.

She is honored here as the foremost female voice of Puerto Rican national poetry.