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ABSTRACT
Jesús Colón's stated mission about writing in English to address the misconceptions about Puerto Ricans points to his archived letters to his wife Concha as the foundation of a story never told: an authentic Puerto Rican love story that grows up, politically and emotionally, on the page. Before he wrote political articles in radical newspapers and vignettes, he wrote letters to Concha professing love, exploring his ideas about life in New York, writing, art and politics; essentially his love letters allowed his writing, and his desire to write, to emerge in the safety of love. It is a love that becomes a foundation for the love that drove his work in his community and his writing. [Keywords: love letters, Jesús Colón, Concha Colón, early Puerto Rican migration, love and social activism, coming of age]
Mi muy querida Concha, mi negrita linda, mi querida negrita, negrita de mi corazón, mi negrita de papa, estimada Concha de mi corazón, lo que más se quiere, mi negrita linda y buena, estimada negrita de mi vida, la única...This is a small sample of the many terms of endearment with which Jesús Colón opened his letters to his beloved Concha, not only when he first arrived in New York alone, at seventeen years of age, in 1918, but for seven years, till she arrived in 1925 and they were married, and then for many years after when she was away in Puerto Rico during their thirty-two years of marriage.1 These are terms filled with affection and steeped in Puerto Rican cultural traditions that remain firmly entrenched even after more than thirty years of married life in New York City, active political work as socialists and organizers, and extensive transmigration for Concha, and a more limited transmigration for Jesús.2 These letters, when I first read them in the archives at Hunter's Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, echoed my uncle, Tío Fin, telling stories about my aunt, his beloved Viña, la negrita de su corazón. The letters ground the historical in the personal and illuminate a space, in between the hyperbolic paternalism of machismo and the exaggerated Latin lover of Hollywood lore, where an actual Puerto Rican man in love might be found expressing tenderness, commitment to family, loyalty and the...