Rosario Morales: Puerto Rican poet, feminist, and communist

In August 2024, the Cleveland Club of the Communist Party launched an ambitious new project in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood of Cleveland. The club is seeking to build connections among the working-class people of the community by establishing a regular People’s World paper route, centering issues that are relevant and important to the people who live there.

Clark-Fulton is Cleveland’s Latino, predominately Puerto Rican, neighborhood. Local activists have produced a printed bilingual digest edition of the People’s World, naming it “The Rosario Morales Edition,” after the late Puerto Rican communist and Latina feminist poet from New York.

They’ve gone door to door, signing up households for the route and engaging in important conversations about the issues and crises that matter most for this community.

In commemoration of the anniversary of her birth and the launch of the Clark-Fulton paper route, below is a short biography of its namesake, Rosario Morales.

Rosario Morales was born Aug. 23, 1930, in New York City. As the daughter of working-class migrants from Puerto Rico, the family struggled to make ends meet in their new home, with her father laboring as a janitor and her mother working long hours in a garments factory. These were difficult times for any working-class person, let alone first-generation migrants who did not speak English fluently.

“The stories that I grew up on are the stories of the Depression, of their having no job, of hunger,” Morales would say, in an interview with researcher Kelly Anderson.

Though today New York City has a thriving diaspora community, at the time, very few Spanish-speaking, let alone Puerto Rican, people lived in the city. A young Rosario often struggled with this dynamic; she identified strongly with her U.S. birthplace but also felt a deep longing for her homeland and heritage. The social pressure she felt to integrate—speak in English, dress, talk, and act “American”—clashed with her Puerto Rican pride.

Joining the party

By the time she went to college, Rosario Morales had become increasingly disillusioned with her Catholic faith and the capitalist system, in large part because of the injustices and inequality she had experienced as a working-class first-generation migrant.

To her credit, though, Morales was thriving. After high school, she earned a seat at Hunter College, a rare achievement for a working-class Latina woman in 1930s New York. But she never forgot where she came from, who she came from, and her own personal success never overshadowed the cruelties of capitalism and white supremacy she’d experienced in her childhood. She was not one to close the door behind her, to say the least.

So, in 1949, when two friends at college recommended she attend a left-wing political workshop, she agreed. Though she was no ideologue, Morales was critical of the status quo, intellectually curious, and open-minded. She eagerly attended what was called the “Jefferson School of Social Sciences,” a Marxist education program hosted by none other than the Communist Party USA.

Founded in 1944, the Jefferson School was not unlike today’s Little Red Schoolhouse educational program put on by the CPUSA. Held in downtown Manhattan, the Jefferson School sought to gear curious activists and intellectuals with a crash course in Marxist theory. However, unlike today’s Little Red Schoolhouse, the Jefferson School was not focused on building up a cadre of dedicated party members but rather sought to inform the broader public on the importance of a Marxist perspective.

Though it was successful in its time, the Jefferson School would later become a victim of McCarthyite repression. Confronting grueling legal battles and government threats during the second Red Scare, the school was forced to shut its doors in 1956 after the program became too expensive to maintain.

But while it lasted, it had a deep impact on many attendees’ political development, and a young Rosario Morales was no exception. This was Morales’ first known exposure to the communist platform, and she walked away with a firm belief in Marxist theory and a commitment to political activism.

“I fell in love with that way of thinking, with dialectics, which I still do, the sense of understanding through the processes of history and the science—all of it was just wonderful,” Morales would say about her time at the Jefferson School.

For Morales, the Communist Party encapsulated ideas that were very personal to her. Though she said at the time she wasn’t a very politically-minded person, she was struck by the party’s commitment to fairness and equality. “With the family I grew up with, fair and just were really high on my agenda, personally as well as politically,” she said.

Her experience at the Jefferson School changed the trajectory of her life. But this wasn’t just because it set her on the path of socialist activism; it also introduced her to something dearly special: her soulmate.

In the left-leaning organizer circles dotting Hunter College, Morales would meet fellow activist and CPUSA member Dick Levin. The two swiftly fell in love, in no small part because of their shared passion for justice. In fact, one of their first dates was counter-demonstrating against white supremacists who were trying to shut down a Paul Robeson concert—the “Peekskill Riots.”

Though they fell in love quickly, they waited a year to marry, only because the couple worried their families would think they were tying the knot too young. So, they waited, as long as they could, but it seems a year was the most they could wait: In 1950, at ages 19 and 20, Rosario and Dick married.

Morales was particularly impressed by Dick’s firm interest in anti-colonialism. “Dick was particularly interested in politics in the colonies, knowing what was happening in Puerto Rico. One of the main things, I remember my father going out—people didn’t even know where Puerto Rico was, let alone what was happening in Puerto Rico. Dick knew more than me,” she recalled.

Young or not, they somehow knew their connection was special: Dick and Rosario would spend the rest of their lives together. When Morales passed away in 2011, Dick was at her bedside, 60 years of marriage later.

Though the two spent a lifetime together, their time in the CPUSA was short-lived. In the 1950s, they moved to Puerto Rico—partly out of curiosity to experience the island and partly out of fear that Dick would be drafted into the ongoing Korean War. Shortly afterwards, they joined the Puerto Rican Communist Party.

But Morales was critical of the lack of intersectionality in the PCP of the time, saying that in this era, the independence movement was dominated by classist nationalists, and had little conception of feminism or class struggle.

“So, it was not, like you say, a very, um, ideologically educated group,” she admitted.

After a pair of close friends were pushed out in a leadership dispute, Morales and Levin decided to leave the party, later returning to the mainland. They never formally rejoined CPUSA after their experiences in Puerto Rico, but still, they remained committed to the socialist and anti-imperialist cause, particularly in support of Puerto Rican self-determination.

But while Morales had criticisms, she looked back fondly on her political development in the party.

“What it did at this crucial point in my life was give me really a way to look at the world and understand it. It gave me a sense of history, of how societies are organized around class, about the racial injustice—which has served as the foundation for everything I’ve done in my life. So, you know, I left the Communist Party, criticized the party, but I’m really incredibly grateful for having been given an education,” she said.

Writings

Though her time in the party was ended prematurely by personal conflict, Morales and her husband Levin never let up on that Marxist perspective. They remained steadfast supporters of Cuban and Puerto Rican self-determination their entire lives. They never feared risking their comfortable lifestyle in academia to remain outspoken supporters of justice.

In 1964, the couple traveled to Cuba for an academic summit with Cuban scientists to help develop their biological studies. Authorities took notice, and in 1965, the untenured Levin was denied another contract with the university.

Morales saw this defeat as an opportunity for a new chapter. While in Puerto Rico, she began studying visual arts and anthropology. Eager to attend graduate school but concerned by the misogynistic culture of rural Puerto Rico, she convinced her husband to move to wherever she could get accepted for graduate school.

That same year, she was accepted into the anthropology program at the University of Chicago, and the young couple and their three kids moved back to the States. She began her studies while her husband took on research and teaching roles.

Ever the activist, within weeks on campus she found herself in a leadership role assisting students protesting the lack of anthropological faculty on campus. She wrote poems critical of the male-dominated nature of anthropological academia at that time, and her master thesis was a brutal deconstruction of the racist worldview of a French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Straus.

In this time, she also became a key member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, serving as a key voice for women’s rights and dignity in 1970s Chicagoland. She helped organize marches, including the very first renditions of “Take Back the Night,” a sexual assault awareness movement that continues to flourish on college campuses today.

But these were stressful times for her, and her mental health cratered between the harsh deadlines and hostile work environment. Morales swiftly grew tired of what she viewed as an elitist, racist academic culture in Chicago, particularly after her thesis was ignored for almost a year.

“I criticized Levi-Strauss, who was the god of the time. And they didn’t want to say, ‘No, you can’t be critical of Levi-Strauss. Couldn’t you do a Levi-Straussian analysis?’” she said. But she was unwilling to budge on her principles, and sensing that her career was stagnating in the male-dominated halls, the family planned yet another move.

“I wanted to leave. I wanted out of there.”

And leave they did. In 1975, the Morales-Levins family would make a final move to Massachusetts, where Dick took a role in Harvard’s School of Public Health.

In 1981, Morales contributed to a collection of feminist women-of-color-authored poems and stories called This Bridge Called My Back. Morales considers this a groundbreaking text in intersectionality.

“It was a coalition—it was not sort of organized—it was always talking about experience, our own [group’s] as well as a common one, I don’t know. Certainly, the first time I had had that experience, and I think that’s what was so important about it. It wasn’t sort of nationalist or narrow or, you know, they call it identity politics, which is rather dismissive. I think it was, in fact, this real understanding of a larger issue, beyond our own fights against racism, our own fights as women, and fights against homophobia. It was—we were all in it together in that sense,” she said of the project.

And in 1986, Rosario and her daughter Aurora Levins Morales would produce a collaborative masterpiece: a collection of short stories and poems analyzing their complicated relationship with their homeland, Puerto Rico. These two works have become seminal texts in many feminist and Latin American literature courses across the country.

Though Rosario Morales is best known in academic circles for her poetry on Puerto Rican identity, she realized late in life she wasn’t a writer at heart; she only wrote because she had things to say.

“I started with very specific kinds of things I had to say, joining the community, and said some more things, and then after that, I was writing because I was a writer, not because I had very specific things to say,” she said. It was a stark conversation with her daughter, Aurora, that convinced her she didn’t have to keep writing for the sake of writing.

“Aurora said, ‘Well, stop.’” Morales said. All she needed was someone to tell her: You’ve contributed enough; time to take your well-deserved rest.

After that, content with her published works, she took on a more passive role, editing her husband’s work on Cuba and Puerto Rico and doing a lot more reading than writing, as she put it.

“I haven’t done any systematic writing now for a long time. I’ve done a lot of reading. While I was writing, I did less reading. Now I’m making up for lost time,” she said.

The final years of her retirement were idle, happy days spent with Dick and her children. Morales passed away in 2011, and Dick in 2018. But their legacies and perspectives live on in their published works and in the active careers of their son and daughters.

Today, their daughter, Aurora Levins Morales, is a published poet and an ardent activist for the rights of individuals with disabilities. Aurora is proud to carry on her mother’s legacy, referring to Rosario as someone “insatiably curious,” a “supremely organic intellectual.”

Speaking of her mother, she wrote, “All my life has been a conversation with you.”