Becoming Julia de Burgos: the making of a Puerto Rican icon (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ambitos Feministas, 2024
This article analyzes national identity construction in Puerto Rico in terms of gender dynamics and how contemporary artistic production has questioned patriarchal constructions within the nation. I argue that by voicing the narratives of Puerto Rican communities in the public sphere, Colectivo Morivivívalidates the active participation and contribution of women, Afro-descendant minorities, and LGTBQ+ groups within the national body, forcing the national discourse to re-envision its purpose, values, and mission.
Art as History in The Barrio, in Puerto Rico and Beyond: Interview with Diógenes Ballester
CENTRO Journal, 2020
The first time I met Puerto Rican artist and arteologist Diógenes Ballester was in a community summit in el Barrio. As a researcher interested in Puerto Ri- can art as history—as opposed to art history—I was introduced to Diógenes, one of the few artists who can navigate the art of the diaspora and in Puerto Rico given his long trajectory as an artist in both Puerto Rico and el Barrio. Diógenes is eager to share his extensive and precise knowledge of the history of art and how it intersects with the socio-political realities of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans; for Claudia and me, it’s shocking how Diógenes recites dozens of facts--names, places, years, and so on—with near-impeccable precision. His personal story, like his art, is profoundly influenced by the political history of Puerto Rico and the art history of the world.
When I was Puerto Rican as borderland narrative-Bridging Caribbean and U.S. Latino literature
Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultural y Literatura , 2009
"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.
Julia de Burgos was a regular contributor to the Spanish-language weekly Pueblos Hispanos published in New York City during the 1940s. Early twentieth-century Hispanic newspapers played an important role in the development of the Puerto Rican community in New York. De Burgos’ writing for the paper reveals that it helped to organize the community around political causes. It was created in defense of the community and facilitated the development of institutions serving Latinos. Her essays convey her interest and understanding of the development of transnational and fluid identities that were not bound to the geographical borders of the nation. [Keywords: Pueblos Hispanos; Julia de Burgos; transnationalism; early twentieth-century Hispanic press; migration; diaspora cultural expressions; New York City Puerto Rican community]
Ida y Vuelta / Arrivals and Departures: Migration Experiences in Puerto Rican Contemporary Art
UPRRP / CENTRO PR, 2023
"Ida y Vuelta: Experiencias de la migración en el arte puertorriqueño contemporáneo" is an expansive exhibition of 19 Puerto Rican artists whose works express their varied interpretations of the experience of migration—often formulated from direct experience—whether they refer to their own emigration or to the process of adapting to a new environment. This is the exhibition catalog, a Spanish-English edition (3rd). Previous editions: UPRRP 2017, Taller Puertorriqueño 2023. Featuring artists Abdiel Segarra Ríos, Adál Maldonado, Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, Anaida Hernández, Antonio Martorell, Brenda Cruz, Carlos Ruiz Valarino, Edra Soto, John Betancourt, José Ortiz Pagán, Máximo Colón, Marta Mabel Pérez, Mónica Félix, Nayda Collazo Llorens, Norma Vila Rivero, Osvaldo Budet Meléndez, Pedro Vélez, Quintín Rivera Toro, Víctor Vázquez. Curated by Laura Bravo, PhD., with Assistant Curator Donald Escudero. This publication was part of a research project , with Dr. Laura Bravo as principal investigator, financed by the Institutional Research Fund (FIPI, by its Spanish abbreviation) of the Office of the Dean for Graduate Studies and Research (DEGI) of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. ISBN 978-0-692-84310-9
Redefining the Image of the Afro-Puerto Rican Woman in Recent Narrative by Mayra Santos-Febres
2017
Many 20 th century Puerto Rican writers focused on establishing a national identity through their works. Although the island has very diverse culture, some aspects of Puerto Rican identity have been ignored entirely or inaccurately represented in popular and literary culture. In this thesis I use Nuestra señora de la noche and La amante de Gardel by Mayra Santos-Febres to examine how the writer depicts race and gender based issues in Puerto Rico. With post-colonial theory and otherness theory, I examine how Santos-Febres-a descendant of colonized Puerto Rican people-decolonizes the Afro-Caribbean woman through her writing techniques and reconstructs the image of the Afro-Puerto Rican woman in her texts. Instead of reproducing negative stereotypes, through her characters Santos-Febres creates a new Afro-Puerto Rican woman who exists and thrives outside of the restrictive social "norms."
Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2006
This book is a welcome addition to the emerging literature on the intersections of gender, race, and class in modern Latin America and the Caribbean. It effectively straddles the boundaries between history and literary criticism, and it consistently demonstrates how literature is a product of social relations, historical change, and conflict. Roy-Féquière shows how elite cultural and intellectual production in Puerto Rico throughout the 1920s and '30s informed the island's populist colonial political reforms of the midtwentieth century in a variety of sites-informal social networks, the university, intellectual journals, the popular press, and fiction writing. She also carefully traces the impact of twentieth-century popular culture and political mobilizations on Puerto Rican elites' anti-imperialism, nation building, and gender politics. This social class, Roy-Féquière reminds us, can only be understood in relation to those who challenged them in politics and cultural production. Thus, Julia de Burgos, Luisa Capetillo, Rafael Cortijo, and Pedro Albizu Campos haunt these pages as well. The result is a sweeping intellectual and cultural history of twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Roy-Féquière's broad argument, that the famous Generación del Treinta-a group of men and women who created a nationalist literature as well as the scholarship which exalted that prose and poetry to canonical status in Puerto Rico-was both patriarchal and racist, is not particularly surprising in the context of the new critical historiography of the past decade on the exclusionary role of race and gender in Latin American nation building. Her innovation on this count-and it is considerable-lies in her careful tracing of the subtleties and, in her words, "ambiguities" of how women and people of African descent continued to be excluded from the twentieth-century criollo concepts of nation and legitimate culture, even as they were acknowledged more than ever before. Roy-Féquière builds on the work of renowned historically minded cultural critics such as Juan Flores, Arcadio Quiñones, Julio Ramos, José Luis González, and Mary Louise Pratt to construct a simultaneously sensitive and critical portrait of an embattled bourgeoisie struggling with a host of "demons," both external and internal. Roy-Féquière also places women intellectuals and activists at the center of her retelling of the history of national Puerto Rican cultural production. University educators such as