Latina's legacy will be honored with US Stamp

Latina's legacy will be honored with US Stamp

By Adrian Perez

Julia de Burgos

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - It’s not too often Latino poets are honored by naming museums, cultural centers, schools, and streets after their name.  This is not the case for Puerto Rican born Julia de Burgos, whose poetry, continues to inspire poets, feminists, poetry aficionados, and even politicians.  To further honor Julia’s powerful literary art, the United States Postal Service will be releasing a stamp in her honor next month, recognizing National Hispanic Month.  But, who is Julia de Burgos?

Julia was born on February 17, 1914 and grew up to be perhaps the greatest poet from Puerto Rico and is considered one of the greatest poets from Latino American, along side of Gabriela Mistral.  As the youngest of 13 children, Julia’s family was very poor, with six of her siblings dying of malnutrition.  Through her determination to succeed, she attained a scholarship at age 13 to attend the University of Puerto Rico. 

Julia graduated from the University at age 19 with a degree in teaching and immediately began to work as an elementary teacher as well as a writer for a children’s public radio program.  It was 1933, when she also met Ruben Rodriguez Beauchamp, a man she married that same year.  She was soon fired from the radio program when it was learned that Julia was consorting with a militant group called the “Daughters of Freedom,” a Nationalist group.  This is also when Julia began to write poetry, with her most noted work “Rio Grande de Loiza.”

Julia left teaching to focus on her marriage and writing, of which some of her work was published in journals and newspapers.  While her writing grew, her marriage began to suffer as she spent more time with the activist group.  She and Ruben divorced in 1937. 

That same year, Julia published her first book “Poemas Exactos de Mi Misma.”  A year later, she published her second book “Poema en Veinte Surcos.”  To promote her books, Julia traveled around the Island, conducting book readings and drawing the attention of critics.  Three years later, she moved to New York City.

In New York, Julia got by working as a journalist.  It was here where she met Dr. Juan Isidro Jimeses Grullon, whom they say she fell madly in love with, although they never married. Dr. Jimses Grullon took Julia to Cuba where she studied at the University of Havana.  Their relationship fell sour and two years later, in 1942, Julia returned to New York by herself, without much money.

Working as a receptionist then as a secretary, Julia did not write any longer, instead turning to alcohol to relieve her heartache until a year later, in 1943, when she met and married Armando Marin, a musician.  It is not clear what caused their marriage to dissolve, but this second divorce in 1947 pushed Julia into a deeper depression and serious alcoholism.

Not having been heard from since June 28, 1953, Julia’s family and friends initiated a search and found she had been buried in New York’s potter’s field.  In backtracking what happened to her, it was found that on July 26, 1953, Julia had collapsed on a sidewalk in Spanish Harlem and taken to the hospital where she later died of pneumonia.  She was only 39.

Some believe Julia had predicted her death in the only English poem she wrote in August of 1953, “Farewell In Welfare Island” which read:  “It has to be from here,/right this instance,/my cry into the world./My cry that is no more mine,/but hers and his forever,/the comrades of my silence,/the phantoms of my grave.”

Upon discovering Julia’s tragic death, the people of Puerto Rico created a commission to bring her remains back to the Island in September of 1953, where she was given a hero’s burial.   Since then, the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico has named schools and avenues after the famous poet.  A shelter for physically abused women bares her name and the Julia de Burgos Museum of Arts and Sciences was also established.  In 1987, Julia de Burgos was granted a doctorate in Human Letters and Arts.

The U.S. has also honored Julia’s legacy with the Julia de Burgos Latino Center at Yale University, the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center in Harlem, and numerous other centers and schools bare her name.  Now, the United States Postal Services will be honoring Julia with a stamp baring her image, which will be unveiled in September 2010, in time for Hispanic Heritage Month.

There is no question today that this Latina continues to reach the old, the young, the feminist, and the inspired.  Some of her famous works can be found here.

Hispanic slur furor at Museo

Hispanic slur furor at Museo
NY Post, December 5, 2009

El Museo del Barrio says it was attempting to redefine a Hispanic slur by employing it in the title of its spoken-word series.

The evening program was initially titled "Spic Up/Speak Out!" It was established to offer a venue for Hispanic poets.

But the East Harlem museum dedicated to Latino, Latin American and Caribbean cultures said yesterday it had changed the name after receiving numerous complaints.

The program has been renamed "Speak Up!/Speak Out!"

Latino Cultural Center presents 'dichos'

Exhibit at Latino Cultural Center: Dichos: Words to Live, Love and Laugh By in Latin America
By BEATRIZ TERRAZAS / The Dallas Morning News April 16, 2009

When Fernando Salazár, 35, recently walked into the Latino Cultural Center, his eye was immediately drawn to one of the Spanish sayings in the new Dichos exhibit: Fe en Dios, y adelante. Loosely translated, the saying means "Faith in God, and onward."

For Fernando Salazár, sayings such as those displayed at the Latino Cultural Center were life lessons taught by family. These two signs translate to 'God willing, I'll return' and 'Blessed Panama.'

"That kind of really talked to me as a dicho," says SMU's coordinator of Hispanic Student Services. Particularly since the Spanish sayings have long played a role in his personal life.

The exhibit, "Dichos: Words to Live, Love and Laugh By in Latin America," runs through April 25 and features photos of an art that has all but disappeared – the whimsical custom of painting scenes with popular sayings on the sides of large trucks and buses.

Alejandrina Drew, children's book author and general manager of the center, recalls such buses while growing up in Mexico City. However, she says, as large urban centers throughout Latin America modernize transportation, people are no longer using buses as canvases to display these kernels of humor and wisdom.

But dichos themselves continue to serve as an anchor for Latinos, grounding them in culture and connecting them through a common language, says Drew.

"Language takes you to your roots, and every language has its own traditions," she says. "It's good for Latinos to go back to their roots and see what's common in our Latino world."

That seems counterintuitive in a high-tech world where people increasingly connect through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet, she appears to be right. Many local Latinos continue to find profound meaning in the dichos they grew up with.

For Salazár, who was born in Oak Cliff but still has family in Mexico, the sayings were life lessons taught by his grandmother and mother. For instance, when concerned about his friendships, they were apt to repeat, "Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres," which means that you're known by the company you keep.

But the saying that has become a way of life for him is "Mejor solo que mal acompañado," which advises that it's better to be alone than in a negative relationship.

"I use that on so many different levels, in professional relationships – relationships period," he says. "I'd rather be alone than in with bad people, or be surrounded by bad people in general."

It's a model for healthy living, says Salazár, who uses it to counsel students regularly. "You put yourself in a situation; is it a good situation or a bad situation?"

For Nadia María Martínez Cepeda, 25, an engineering doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington, dichos connect her directly to family and cultural experiences. She was born in Mexico City, and grew up in Saltillo, Coahuila.

"How do you remember all these words, all these phrases?" she says. "I remember everything because of some other experience ... with my family or friends."

She can't hear "Más vale una vez colorado que mil descolorido" without thinking of her grandmother's advice when Nadia was having problems with a boyfriend. Although it doesn't translate literally to English, it's about getting issues out in the open and dealing with them at once rather than letting them fester, she says.

She keeps a book of 500 popular Spanish sayings and whenever she hears a new one that has meaning for her, she writes it down.

"I enjoy saying dichos in Spanish because they make more sense to me," she says. "In English they don't sound the same."

Isaac Faz, 33, a native Dallasite with Mexican roots, is in his final year at Texas Southern University's Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston. He points out that dichos often communicate messages that extend far beyond their literal meaning.

For instance, Faz, who helped found the Dallas network Vida Social, recalls a television ad from South Texan Tony Sanchez's gubernatorial run in 2002 that sparked a lively discussion in his own family. In the ad, Sanchez said, "Aquí nomás mis chicharrones truenan." Again, the saying doesn't translate directly, but means "Around here, only my word matters," or "Here, I'm the only boss."

Although the saying made his family laugh, it also drew them together.

"We even discussed it, aunts and uncles," he says. While many Latinos, particularly immigrants to this country, often feel disenfranchised when it comes to politics, Sanchez's use of this saying "was like letting us into that group. That message was, now we're part of this race, he's communicating directly to us."

And it's this kind of human connection that Drew fears will be lost, one word at a time, as customs such as adorning buses with dichos fade away.

The sayings are about a common language and culture, she says. "It's our hope that this representation of culture is preserved.

Beatriz Terrazas is a Southlake freelance writer.

Some dichos and their meanings

Hoy por mí, mañana por ti.

You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours.

Lo que el agua trae, el agua lleva.

Easy come, easy go.

Los burros se buscan para rascarse unos con otros.

Birds of a feather flock together.

A donde fueres, haz lo que vieres.

When in Rome, do as Romans do.

Como quitarle un pelo al gato.

It's just a drop in the bucket.

Con dinero baila el perro.

Money talks.

The free exhibit runs through April 25. Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak at Good Latimer. 214-671-0045. www.dallasculture.org/

latinoculturalcenter.cfm

Hispanic immigrant stories captured through poetry

Line by Line, Poets Capture the Immigrant Story, New Jersey Style
Juan Arredondo, New York Times

WOODBRIDGE, N.J. - In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately... Wait. Wrong Xanadu.

Still, if you were poetically inclined you could have done worse on Friday than to cruise past the still-dormant retail-entertainment project, all phantasmagoric shapes and colors, along the New Jersey Turnpike, toward the phosphorescent glow of the refinery world around Exit 13, past the Swan Motel and the anti-Xanadu of the East Jersey State Prison, with its own hulking displeasure dome glowering in the night. Eventually you would arrive at the Barron Arts Center, a Romanesque revival marvel built in 1876 and 1877 as a library of churchlike arches and gables, a clock tower and stained-glass windows.

And if you came at the right time, you might have found Gretna Wilkinson, an energetic woman born in Guyana, declaiming like a soul on fire under the vaulted beams of the main room about saltfish and hot cungapump tea, Marvin Gaye and how Genesis caused Exodus:

i had hoped

to be intelligent about this

believe time could help me

strip this poem of metaphors

then i would write about

how, in a kinder world

one mother buries another

but saves the grip of her sons

for her own casket

i would write it raw. selfish. like that

And so it went, Peter E. Murphy’s view of ships passing under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, José A. Rodriguez on his family of Hispanic laborers looking for work in Dimmitt, Tex., Timothy Liu’s erotic take on “Five Rice Queens,” Irina Mashinski’s sharp-eyed Russian émigré’s view of life in New Jersey and beyond. A cynic once said writing poetry is like ice fishing — you have to really want to do it to do it. But here we were Friday night in Woodbridge on the first day of the My New Life, My New Poem Festival of Contemporary Immigration Writing, reminded of how many people from such diverse backgrounds seem to want to do it.

Most, but not all, of the readers had New Jersey ties. Some were children of immigrants. Still, as a snapshot of our assorted diasporas, here it was : Emanuel di Pasquale from Ragusa, Sicily; Sheema Kalbasi from Tehran; Paul Sohar, a Hungarian native who for years combined being a chemist at Merck with writing poetry; Rich Villar of Paterson, part Puerto Rican and part Cuban; Heather Raffo with excerpts from her one-woman play about Iraqi women, “Nine Parts of Desire.”

THE festival came together largely because this stretch of Central New Jersey reminded L. E. McCullough, the township’s grants officer and the festival director, of Central Texas, where he had once lived. This is not a completely irrational thought if your frame of reference is the mix of cultures down there: Hispanic, Anglo, Cajun, Texas Czechs, African-American — and the you-name-it-it’s-there population mix in Central Jersey.

And anyone who has been around for a while, like Mr. Sohar, 72, has watched the incessant ebb and flow of ethnic demography in the area.

“Take New Brunswick,” he said. “It used to be solidly Hungarian. All around there were Hungarian clubs and five or six Hungarian restaurants. Now it’s all Mexican, Puerto Rican, Indians and everyone else. Some of these things change overnight, like all the Asians in the big new houses out here.”

So some of the themes in the poetry were very much about the immigrant experience, like Mr. Rodriguez’s “Resident Alien Card.”

This is what I know of that day: 5 years old

and being walked through the immigrant process

the photo first, two copies

one for the eventual alien card

and one that gets lost in a cardboard box

without a label

until today.

And others were the world we share: sex, family, visiting a mother’s grave.

Sometimes the differences among them seem more striking than the commonalities. But, no, most of the readers seemed to agree that what united them all was that outsider’s eye viewing our strange green oasis, which even in hard times still seems a place of heedless plenty — or at least the omnipresent dream of it.

There was Mr. Murphy, from Wales.

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry from Staten Island

did not close the doors of the orphanage inside him

On that boat he studied Casper the Friendly Ghost

and ate a hot dog and Coke, the first supper of a life

he hoped not to suffer.

Or Ms. Mashinski:

Traffic lights shine from bushes

steppe wolves

Passaic, Passaic! Your quiet but hissing name is

like Mongol campfires

squeezing the fortress

I am the last one to defend.

A Peruvian band, Viento Andino, played Andean music, the poets read and mingled. Other readings were set to be held on Saturday and Sunday.

When it ended on Friday, the musicians packed up their instruments and the hall emptied out like the slow exodus from church. Nearby young men sat on the tailgate of a pickup, drinking beer. The streets were dark and quiet as the nice woman inside the GPS led you this way and that as you headed back, way up the Turnpike, toward Xanadu.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

Chicano/Latino literary awards

35th Chicano/Latino Literary Prize
Xicano Poetry Daily January 16, 2009

35th Chicano/Latino Literary Prize
is now accepting manuscripts in the genre of poetry.

Manuscript must be unpublished full-length poetry (80 typed pages maximum, 60 typed pages minimum). Due date is June 1, 2009

Past recipients include: Alma Villanueva, Juan Felipe Herrera, Francisco X. Alarcon, and Carmen Tafolla, among others.

Visit the University of California at Irvine for submission details