Julia de Burgos

Julia Constancia Burgos García was born on the seventeenth of February 1914 in the Santa Cruz barrio of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the eldest of thirteen children of Francisco Burgos Hance, a farmer and member of the Puerto Rico National Guard, and Paula García. Though the family lived in hardship — six of her younger siblings died of malnutrition — her gifts were recognised early, and a scholarship carried her through University High School to the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, where she earned a teaching degree in 1933.

An Afro-Puerto Rican woman writing against the confinements of race, class, and gender, she gave Puerto Rican letters one of their most fearless twentieth-century voices. Her first published collections, Poema en veinte surcos (1938) and Canción de la verdad sencilla (1939), fused intimate lyric with a defiant claim to selfhood, most enduringly in "A Julia de Burgos," where she severed the public mask from the free woman beneath it.

Her art was inseparable from her politics. She joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, its women's branch, championing independence for the island and dignity for African and Afro-Caribbean writers. Migrating to New York, she lived the diaspora's precariousness while continuing to write, her later poems gathered posthumously in El mar y tú (1954).

On the sixth of July 1953 she collapsed on a Manhattan sidewalk and died of pneumonia at thirty-nine, at first unidentified. Her body was returned home to a hero's burial in Carolina. Julia de Burgos remains honoured as the great poet who taught a people to speak themselves whole.