There's a mosaic mural on 106th Street (by East Harlem artist
Manny Vega) just east of Lexington Avenue in honor of one of the most famous Puerto Rican poets who tragically spent her last days in anonymity. After moving from Puerto Rico circa 1940, Julia de Burgos eventually succumbed to alcoholism 13 years later and would be found unconscious just a block south of the aforementioned mural. The poet was rushed to a hospital on that day in 1953 where she later passed away at the age of 39 without anyone knowing her identity and thus was buried in an unmarked grave soon after. Relatives would eventually trace her final route in East Harlem and have the body exhumed so that it could be buried back in Puerto Rico. Today, the block around 106th Street and Lexington is called Julia de Burgos Boulevard and the former P.S. 72 is a prominent cultural center also named after the poet:
LINK. Click on top images to enlarge
It's distressing that Burgos has gotten so little scholarly attention. Here's a bit more:
ReplyDeleteBorn on February 17, 1914 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, she seems to have arrived in El Barrio around 1942 and settled on east 105th Street, working as a teacher in El Barrio. It wasn’t until 1948 that the first bilingual teachers were hired, and not as full-timers, but as substitute auxiliaries. A decade later, there were only 80 bilingual teachers citywide for almost 100,000 Puerto Rican children in the schools. Those developments were a source of intense distress to Burgos, who was not only an important educator but the premiere Puerto Rican poet of the American century. Her poems articulate the psychological struggle to acclimate to East Harlem’s America that she witnessed and herself experienced:
"The madness of my soul
cannot repose
it lives in the restlessness
in the disorder
in the imbalance
of things dynamic"
She died July 6, 1953. By the way, the old P.S. 72 was the first school in the city to take up a full city block.
Jonathan,it is a shame that de Burgos hasn't received much scholarly attention in English. Quite a bit has been written on her in Spanish. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Julia de Burgos and I've just finished a book-length manuscript on her that I hope will be in print soon. I'm curious to know where I might get more information about de Burgos' employment as a teacher in El Barrio. I haven't come across this information before. Thanks!
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