In 1928, when Julia de Burgos was fourteen, Hurricane San Felipe devastated Puerto Rico.

Every line of De Burgos’s verse is imbued with passion, feminist self-assertion, and love of homeland.

In January, I traveled to Puerto Rico with my father, carrying a copy of Julia de Burgos’s letters, visiting the places she had lived, trying to hear her voice.

On March 5, teachers from Naranjito, the mountain barrio where De Burgos herself had worked as a teacher, marched against these closures.

In the mutual aid centers, Puerto Ricans could practice a prefigurative politics of independence—handle their own affairs, build power, and rid themselves of the self-contempt that their colonial status had fostered in them.