Rosario Morales

Rosario Morales (August 23, 1930 – March 23, 2011) was a Puerto Rican author and poet.

Rosario Morales was born in August 1930 to two immigrants from Naranjito, Puerto Rico, both from landholding families.

Her mother worked in a hospital laundry, and later in a garment factory.

Her father was a janitor and then an electrician.

She was raised Catholic, and, although the family was not very devout, Rosario was very firm in her religious beliefs and even considered becoming a nun early in her life, although this religious fervor diminished over time.

She grew up in El Barrio of New York City at a time when the Puerto Rican population was still very small.

There were only 52,774 first-generation Puerto Ricans in the US in 1930.

This profoundly impacted her identity; she learned to identify with other minority groups such as her Eastern European Jewish neighbors.

The Morales family spoke Spanish at home until the children entered primary school.

Once in English-speaking public school, Rosario and her sister began to primarily speak English, because it was the language they used for the longest parts of their day.

Rosario's father was very controlling and fought often with her mother during their childhood.

Due to this conflict, she says she would not describe her relationship with her parents at this point in her life as close.

Her younger sister used to urge them to divorce after the fights.

They did so briefly when Rosario was in her late 30s, but remarried soon after.

Her father was diagnosed with dementia soon after her parents returned to live in Puerto Rico.

Morales attended public school in New York City, which she cites as the time when English transitioned to being her primary language.

The family began to speak what Rosario defines as Inglañol rather than Spanglish, because Spanglish is Spanish that uses English words, whereas they spoke English that incorporated Spanish words.

Her primary school is where she first discovered her passion for writing.

As a young adult, Rosario had a complicated relationship with her Puerto Rican heritage.

She felt a strong kinship with the land and nature of the island, as described in her poem “Happiness as a Coquí”, but was also adamant that the United States is her home.

She describes her feelings in her work “Puerto Rican Journal”: “This is not home eleven years couldn’t make it home.

I’ll always be clumsy with the language always resentful of the efforts to remake me.”

While studying at Hunter College in New York, she met Ukrainian heritage Jew Richard Levins, also known as Dick, through mutual friends and her political activism.

Within two weeks of meeting, the two decided to become informally engaged.

They waited several months before breaking the news to their families due to a fear of being seen as too young for marriage.

In 1950, at 19 and 20 years-of-age, they were married.

In 1951, Rosario moved with Dick to Puerto Rico.

He had recently graduated and was trying to avoid the draft for the Korean War.

While in Puerto Rico, the two became active in the Puerto Rican Communist Party and the Fellowship of Reconciliation while working a small farm in the mountains.

They had their first child, Aurora Levins Morales in 1954.

Rosario and Aurora both became public writers as participants in the Second Wave of U.S. feminism.

Although they had a sometimes challenging personal relationship, Rosario cites her daughter as her closest ally in her work surrounding Latina Feminism.

Rosario and Dick's second child, Ricardo Manuel, was born in 1956.

Shortly thereafter, Rosario and Dick moved to New York City while Dick pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, and Rosario studied at City College.

She was an accomplished visual artist in multiple genres, an interest she shared with her son, Ricardo, who is a well-known activist artist.

During this time she also met anthropologist Anthony Leeds, part of a group of young radical social scientists, and became interested in the field.

She is best known for her book Getting Home Alive which she co-authored with her daughter Aurora Levins Morales in 1986.

She was also significant within the Latina feminist movement and the Communist Party.

She describes her own complicated identity in her poem "I am what I am", “I am Puerto Rican I am U.S. American… I am Boricua as Boricuas come… I am naturalized Jewish American… I am what I am.

Take it or leave me alone."