In July 1915, a woman named Luisa Capetillo was arrested in Havana for wearing trousers in public. She didn't apologize. She told the judge she always wore pants, and the charges were dropped. It's the only part of her life most people have heard, if they've heard anything at all.
For a decade before that arrest, and years after it, Capetillo worked as a lectora, reading newspapers, novels, and anarchist theory aloud to cigar and tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, on factory floors across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and New York. She wrote one of the most direct early arguments in the Spanish-speaking world for women's liberation as part of the revolution, not an issue to deal with afterward. And she organized: in 1916 she helped lead a sugar strike that pulled out over forty thousand workers across Puerto Rico, still one of the largest labor actions in the island's history.
This episode covers her childhood in Arecibo, the practice of the lectora and why factory owners fought to ban it, her writing on marriage and free love, the 1916 strike, a political compromise in 1919 that's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over, and the farm school she built at the end of her life on the theory that reading and organizing were never really separate.
There's a harder question underneath it too: why a woman who organized forty thousand workers into her country's largest strike is harder to find in the history of anarchism than men who wrote considerably less and organized considerably fewer people.
Further reading: Norma Valle-Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist (Peter Lang, 2006; originally published in Spanish as Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita, 1990) Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out / Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez (Arte Público Press, 2004)
Tags: Luisa Capetillo, anarchism, feminism, Puerto Rico history, labor history, women's history, tobacco workers, lectora, general strike, free love, Caribbean history
Show notes:
The reader, the trousers, the tobacco floor A Thousand Small Fires
Luisa Capetillo read anarchist theory aloud to tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, wrote one of the earliest direct arguments for women's liberation in the Spanish-speaking world, and organized forty thousand sugar workers into Puerto Rico's largest strike. This episode is an attempt to give her the ten minutes most anarchist histories didn't.
In this episode: