Capetillo, Luisa

CAPETILLO, LUISA (1879-1922). Anarchist, woman’s rights activist, and writer, Capetillo was one of the most prominent Puerto Rican labor activists of her generation. During her early twenties, she began build unions among farm workers and started her own newspaper. She moved on to organize cigar workers, mainly women, in Puerto Rico, New York, and Florida and traveled to Cuba and the Dominican Republic to support strikers.

Capetillo was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to an immigrant family, her father from the Basque region, her mother from Corsica, and grew up in a progressive environment. Her French mother believed in women’s independence and forsook formal marriage. Capetillo later recalled her mother as the parent who urged her to “inquire freely” and her father as her teacher of reading and writing. Both parents served her well in encouraging her childhood pursuit of Spanish, French and Russian literature, particularly the works of Leo Tolstoy. Reaching adulthood, she considered herself both an anarchist and a spiritual person, a Christian but one unfettered to any particular religion or church. Adhering to her mother’s philosophy, Capetillo advocated free love, never married, and bore two children in the late 1890s before her brief relationship ended. A third relationship dissolved in 1911.

Capetilllo took notice of the burgeoning anarcho-syndicalist La Federacion Libre de Tabajadores de Puerto Rico (FLT), which began organizing industrial and agricultural workers in 1902. When she joined the movement in 1905, she focused on women tobacco workers and highlighted women’s issues in the newspaper she later published, Le Mujer. She worked as a lectora, reading aloud to women cigar workers during their twelve-hour shifts and providing them with a sampling of classic literature as well as anarchist and socialist ideas. She likewise pushed labor unions to endorse women’s enfranchisement and secured official approval from the FLT in 1908. Capetillo excelled as an itinerant organizer. She hit her stride as a lectora, writer, and speaker in South Florida in 1913, where she found a supportive congregation of radical women among the cigar workers of Ybor City. There she cemented her transgressive legacy: she dressed in men’s attire, a full suit of clothes, complete with tie and hat. In Puerto Rico, in 2019, was arrested and ultimately released for this alleged indiscretion. She died of tuberculosis.

Capetillo, Luisa. A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out/Mi opinion sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer. Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, ed.

Hewitt, Nancy A. “Luisa Capetillo: Feminist of the Working Class.” In Vicki Ruiz and Virginia Sanchez Orroll, eds. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 120-34. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2011.

Valle-Ferrer, Norma. Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist. New York: Peter Yang, 2006.