Lyrical Mobilities: William Carlos Williams and Julia de Burgos in the Latinx Grain

This chapter imagines potential and as yet unexplored rapprochements between William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Julia de Burgos (1914–53), two contemporaneous writers on the brink of Latinx identification, as it is currently conceived. Observing their generically and linguistically diverse writing practices – marked by distinct introspections about Puerto Rican, Caribbean, pan-Hispanic, Anglo-American, and European identities – I open a discussion of the authors’ experiences of everyday spaces (the city street, the hospital ward, the intergenerational home). What I call “lyrical mobilities” constitutes the process of imagining Williams’s and de Burgos’s movements through hemispheric histories as well as geographic and linguistic spaces. It is also a critical attempt to read these two canonical authors in terms of the spaces they had in common, which, in turn, helps extend our understanding of Latinx lives across disciplines that have contained Williams and de Burgos within discrete silos.