Fearless Puerto Rican cultural advocate, Lola Rosario presents her debut poetry book Daughter de Borikén for the first time to audiences in the city she called home for nearly her entire life. The collection – presented as a love letter to her ancestral motherland – is a reminder that there is still room for another voice within the well-established and renowned Nuyorican movement.

As someone who is what she terms “diáspora-displaced,” Lola’s work is crafted as a multilayered manifesto, one that weaves together the socio economic, political and cultural realities that many like her confront. In a boldly unapologetic voice, this Nuyorican-returned-to-her-true-home offers readers an un-sugar coated lens of struggles of her people. Daughter de Borikén brings another perspective to unlearning the myriad untruths under colonialism. It is an ode to the Guerreras from whom she and her beautiful people are descended.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all times.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

As Puerto Rican professor and poet, Yolanda River Castillo shares in the book’s prologue – “In a revised version of Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Lola’s fifth poem is entitled When I Was Nuyorican. Boricua daily life in New York City (“Fire hydrant summer splashes, watered down Kool-Aid, free cheese sandwiches”) emerges as a treasured memory because life in the diáspora is about much more than the oppression from “Gringolandia.” It’s also about the culture of the barrio(s) and the imagined Puerto Rico that is transmuted onto the lives of displaced Boricuas. [We find] family names (“Aponte Valentín, Rosario Sánchez”) intermingling with those of our heroes (“Lolita, Filiberto, Blanca”).

But the word diáspora in itself doesn’t establish how Boricuas of the metropolis culturally identify. Is it the diáspora of the body? If it’s only in a corporal sense, then it is not diáspora because Lola’s heart and culture are in the Matria and it has remained as such in a physical exile of a poetic land. She says – as if speaking to a lost lover “mi corazón siempre fue tuyo.”

This book is filled with love for la Matria – the heart of the entwined Boricua: with Spanish and Spanglish (Daughter de Borikén), with many levels of melanin (Mi negrura), with a history of exploitation, corrupt governments endorsed by colonizers, and with social struggles.

From the first to the last poem, this collection is an elegy for a denied ethnicity, a claim of belonging, a reaffirmation of what has been denied [to her] by the colonial powers. Lola Rosario represents the voice of those who return to where they always belong, of someone who is Boricua “aunque naciera en la luna.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lola Rosario is a Nuyorican spoken word poet, freelance journalist, and translator whose first poetry chapbook, Daughter de Borikén (Editorial Pulpo) was released in August 2024. Her poems are featured in The Acentos Review, Thin Air Magazine, La Libreta.online, Angel City Review, Hound Magazine, En La Masmédula (Mexico), and Diario Siglo XXI (Spain). Lola’s social justice journalism is found in Prism Reports, NACLA, HipLatina, Green Left (Australia), Latina Media, and Palabra, among others. After a three-week transformational trip to Tanzania in 2021, Lola realized it was time to leave the U.S. Later that same year, she moved to her ancestral motherland of Borikén and now lives in the picturesque coastal town of Loíza where she organizes cultural events in her spare time.