Writing freedom: Puerto Rican women's literary conceptualizations of motherhood and memory beyond archives

My dissertation project examines how Puerto Rican women conceptualize freedom and independence while considering their body, diasporic, feminist, and independentista politics. To do so, I focus on Julia de Burgos’ poetry, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s historical fiction, and Nicholasa Mohr’s novels to trace a genealogy of women defining freedom in their own terms and providing spaces and ideas of freedom for women, Puerto Ricans, and Latinxs. I study how space, community, and genre contribute to Burgos’, Figueroa’s and Mohr’s definitions of freedom to complicate how body politics inform notions of liberation. By examining each author’s positionality: Julia de Burgos’ was an exile – first in Cuba then New York City, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and was raised in both Puerto Rico and New York City, Nicholasa Mohr is a product of diaspora living in New York City, I consider how body politics shape Puerto Rican women’s conception of freedom and their accessibility to it. Because these women are writing freedom(s) in their own terms, they are actively writing against a colonial empire and its ideas of patriarchy, masculinity, and colonialism among other ideologies. However, these authors’ portrayals and notions of freedom in their texts depends on their individual investments in feminist, independentista, gender, and race politics. I engage with Puerto Rican women’s literature, theories of biopolitics, the body, the archive, and cultural studies to analyze and distinguish the definitions of freedom provided by Burgos, Llanos-Figueroa, and Mohr in their literary works while navigating gender, race, class, motherhood, womanhood, and Puerto Rican identity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference