Powered by Puerto Rico’s ancient spirits of wind, water and mountains, La Borinqueña—aka Afro Latinx college student Marisol Rios de la Luz—is a superheroine who’s moving heaven and earth to call attention to the island’s environmental and debt crises. But that’s not all. La Borinqueña and her creator, Nuyorican artist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, are holding up a mirror for people consistently left out of mainstream superhero comics. From her proud black-boricua heritage, to her realistic body proportions, to her presence as a bilingual STEM student at an Ivy League college, to her friends and family rendered in a refreshing variety of skin tones and hair types, Marisol is not the kind of heroine one usually sees in print. Her costume is also based on the Puerto Rican bandera and her name is the title of the Puerto Rican national anthem, which literally translates to “The Puerto Rican Woman.” La Borinqueña just debuted in winter 2016 through Somos Arte, Miranda-Rodriguez’ own indie imprint, but the artist has been working for years to address this lack of representation. He curated an art exhibit on longtime Cuban-American Marvel editor, writer and artist Joe Quesada, bringing the cultural aspects of his legacy into focus. There was also… Read more »
Source: Star Power: A Puerto Rican Superheroine and Her Creator Are Flying High – Vanguard Seattle
Good that it is original and not taking established character and changing gender
Bad that she is fostering SJW drivel and the new Captain Planet
What we should probably do with a comic like this is take out all the annoying preachy identity-politics nonsense from the word balloons and replace it with the kind of sexy stuff that a vivacious, sassy and voluptuous Latina would be saying in both Spanish and English if she was dressed in a tight spandex costume.
Oh, wait…….
I stumbled upon an interesting controversy. First of all, there’s been a long history of Latin and Puerto Rican superheroes, stretching from White Tiger in the 70s to the more recent Araña, the Puerto-Rican girl who’s been a prominent
part of the Spiderverse. A good amount of these Latin superhero characters were already getting their powers from mythical/magical sources..for example, Huitzilopochtli from Hawk & Dove. So it’s not like the idea of a Puerto Rican Shazam is that original. (I came up independently with a Puerto Rican character for my video series…so you can imagine how many people have thought of it – probably half the Latinos who read comics!).
Then apparently it came up that the creators of La Borinquena were bullying a comic creator who had already come up with a similar character called Bori Girl several years earlier. Looks like politically correct progressives are not so nice after all, and the fighting amongst the PC identity-politics left continues……
https://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/06/17/la-borinquena-vs-bori-girl/
Very interesting! I’d say bullying is correct and I wonder how this whole thing will unfold. Being a retro kind of guy I actually like the Bori Girl costume better…
https://cdn.bleedingcool.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/13312903_1092990684072584_5853726452246725713_n-1-e1466170782316.jpg
I’ll be keeping my eye on this for sure. Wonder what George Perez has to say about it!
Any pics from the comic that can be added here?