Los silencios en cartas a Consuelo

Abstract

While examining the lovely epistolary of Julia de Burgos to her sister Consuelo, we realized she
does not provide details of her political activism. Neither the sender seems to be interested on the
fate or conditions of colleagues incarcerated due to political ideas. As part of the function and structure
of the epistolary gender, the sender may create an internal design of the communication event
that propitiates a particular semantic and social frame, as Guillermo Soto Vergara theorizes. At the
time period when these letters were written, the independence and nationalist movements suffered
an intense political persecution and repression on behalf of the U. S. Government both in Puerto Rico
and the Continent, which could explain the apparent silence perceived in these letters. On the other
hand, some letters seem to indicate that they targeted a “different receiver”, besides her sister. This
epistolary not only helps us clarify apparent erroneous aspects of Julia’s personal life, but to have a
better understanding of the social and political conditions suffered by Puerto Ricans, living both on
the island and the United States during last century’s decade of the forties.