Julia de Burgos: the poet who named herself

Julia de Burgos lived from 1914 to 1953, and by the time of her death she had already worked as a poet, journalist, teacher, and advocate for independence. Her political commitments ran deep: she served as secretary general of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Nationalist Party, under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, the same man behind the 1950 uprisings covered in another lesson on this site.

She published two collections of poetry in her lifetime, Poema en 20 surcos in 1938 and Canción de la verdad sencilla in 1939, before moving to New York in the early 1940s, where she worked as a journalist for the progressive newspaper Pueblos Hispanos. A third collection, El mar y tú, appeared only after her death, published in 1954 by her sister. One of her final poems, "Farewell in Welfare Island," was written in English during a hospitalization in 1953, and today it reads as an unsettling omen of what came after.

De Burgos disappeared from a relative's home in Brooklyn on June 28, 1953. She was found collapsed on a sidewalk in Spanish Harlem in the early hours of July 5, and died of pneumonia shortly after midnight on July 6, at thirty-nine years old. No one at the scene knew who she was. She received a pauper's burial on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field, an anonymous end for a woman whose poetry was already well known at home.

Friends and relatives eventually traced and claimed her body, and a committee based in Puerto Rico arranged for her remains to return. They arrived on the island on September 6, 1953, and she received a heroine's burial in the Municipal Cemetery of Carolina, a hard reversal of the anonymity of her final days in New York. Recognition kept coming long after. In 1986, the University of Puerto Rico posthumously awarded her a doctorate in Humanities and Letters, and in 2010 the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor.

Sources: Julia de Burgos. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.