Who is La Borinqueña?
If you’re like me and have a list of
favorite superheroes (and a few villains), then allow me to add another to
your list: La Borinqueña. I may be
five years behind (she debuted in 2016), but as they say, better late than
never.
La Borinqueña (Marisol Rios De La Luz) is an original
character created and written by graphic novelist, activist, and philanthropist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez. While many comics feature Eurocentric mythology in which characters battle otherworldly creatures,
La Borinqueña is of Puerto Rican descent (which includes African and Indigenous
ancestry) and focuses on real-life social issues.
Marisol is a Columbia University Earth and
Environmental Sciences undergraduate student living with her parents in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When she studies abroad in collaboration with the
University of Puerto Rico, she finds five crystals while exploring a
cave. Atabex, the Taino mother goddess, appears before Marisol
once the crystals are united. She summons her sons Yúcahu (spirit of the
seas and mountains) and Huracán (spirit of the hurricanes). They give
Marisol superhuman strength, the power of flight, and control of the storms. In addition to her powers being drawn from the history and mysticism found on the island of Puerto Rico, La Borinqueña is also fiercely patriotic. Her name is derived from the Puerto Rican
national anthem, which is a variation on Borikén,
the name the indigenous Taíno people called the island.
When Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez was invited to attend the 2016 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City, he asked the organizers if they were interested in La Borinqueña, who was only a sketch at the time. When he unveiled La Borinqueña at a press conference, she became a media sensation overnight.
(Image courtesy of Somos Arte)
Coming Together for a Cause
After Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017, Miranda-Rodriguez teamed up with former DC Comics co-publisher Dan DiDio to create a collection of short stories featuring iconic DC characters such as Wonder Woman teaming up with La Borinqueña to help hurricane victims. Artists and celebrities such as Frank Miller, Gail Simone, Rosario Dawson and Rubén Blades joined the collaboration. The collection, titled Ricanstruction, generated $200,000 in sales, all of which was given to grass-roots organizations in Puerto Rico.
In a quote to Publisher's Weekly, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez said this of La Borinqueña: "She is not liberal or conservative. She’s trying to figure it out. I intentionally wrote a story around the perspective of a college student who gets to go away. When you are living away, it’s a massive paradigm shift. It will either move you closer to the ideology you grew up with or take you in a completely different direction. That’s what I wanted to do with Marisol.”
If you missed when this anthology first debuted, check out these press releases:
(La Borinqueña pin-up by Wilfredo Torres & Juan Fernandez)
More to Come
Since La Borinqueña teamed up with the Justice League, Miranda-Rodriguez has created the La Borinqueña Grants Program. Most recently, he's partnered with Chocolate Cortes P.R. in which he created an original story that will be reproduced in a comic strip series in four limited edition chocolate bars. Proceeds from this chocolate bar will go towards Fundación Cortés as part of the La Borinqueña Grants Program. You'll also see La Borinqueña on the Masks for America initiative, which provides N95 masks to healthcare workers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
In the past five years, La Borinqueña has been drawn by world-renowned graffiti artist John "Crash" Matos, has appeared in the Kiki Koko children's book series by Ed Rodriguez, and had her costume displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History- and she's just getting started!
Watch and Learn
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