Once in English-speaking public school, Rosario and her sister began to primarily speak English, because it was the language they used for the longest parts of their day.
Morales attended public school in New York City, which she cites as the time when English transitioned to being her primary language.
She felt a strong kinship with the land and nature of the island, as described in her poem “Happiness as a Coquí”, but was also adamant that the United States is her home.
I’ll always be clumsy with the language always resentful of the efforts to remake me.”[3] While studying at Hunter College in New York, she met Ukrainian heritage Jew Richard Levins, also known as Dick, through mutual friends and her political activism.
Although they had a sometimes challenging personal relationship, Rosario cites her daughter as her closest ally in her work surrounding Latina Feminism.
During this time she also met anthropologist Anthony Leeds, part of a group of young radical social scientists, and became interested in the field.
Rosario pursued her interests in visual art and women's crafts, and began studying anthropology on her own, and during summers at the University of Michigan.
Rosario wanted to go to graduate school in anthropology, and was concerned about the role models available to her daughter in rural Puerto Rico, so they decided to leave.
Within the first weeks of the semester, the students went on strike to protest the fact that many of the anthropology faculty were away doing field work, and few classes were being offered, and Rosario found herself in a leadership role in campus activism.
Her Masters thesis was a critique of the racism of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus, entitled "Tropes Tipique," a satirical play on his famous work, Tristes Tropiques.
In 1981, Rosario and Aurora were both contributors to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cher'rie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
In 1995, she took a leadership role with the Women's Community Cancer Project partially due to her own health decline, but also as an attempt to revitalize her old interest in a more scientific field.
An artist and intellectual with wide-ranging interests, Rosario Morales studied botany, philosophy of science, feminist history and political writings, and fiber arts.
She is survived by her husband, her sister Gloria, her three children and five grandchildren, including Minneapolis-based hip hop artist Manny Phesto.
She first discovered her interest in socialist ideology when two of her close friends in college enrolled her a course at the Jefferson School – a program run by the Communist Party.
Rosario and Dick became close friends with César Andreu Iglesias, a prominent labor leader and journalist, who was in the leadership of the Party, and his wife, Jane Speed, an Alabama communist organizer.
[1] Both share a focus on the themes of personal identity, multiple consciousness, critical reflections on gender relations, and social commentary.
She fuses her identities as a U.S. Latina who grew up among Eastern European Jews, and married one, through language; her poetry combines English, Spanish, and Yiddish.
Working and connecting with women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds that shared her passions gave Morales a new perspective on the world.
Instead, she began to read a lot and took a bigger role in editing her husband's work on communism in Puerto Rico and Cuba.