Luisa Capetillo was born in Acerido Puerto Rico on October 28, 1879 to French and Spanish unmarried expat parents who revered literacy and intellectualism. Luisa's exposure to subversive models of thought and being began in her childhood home. Her parents assured she had access to a social and political education through engagement with transnational ideation.1 She devotedly cultivated these ideas in personal political development for the duration of her life, shaping and transforming them responsive to experiential and testimonial injustice she both witnessed and faced.
When she was in her late teens she took a lover by the name of Manuel Gregorio Ledesma Figueroa. They had two children together but, because his upper class status contrasted with her working class status as well as the normative expectations of sexed and gendered social behavior, Luisa lamented her financial dependence on him and her solitary responsibility for child-care as barriers to her independence and liberty. As Capetillo began a public vocation in labor organizing and activism, Ledesma stripped Capetillo of parental care for their children, insinuating that she could only be a mother if a mother and a wife was all she was. This experience, in part, spurred and fortified her commitment to the movement for women’s liberation in Puerto Rico and the development of her feminist philosophy.
Capetillo was initiated to labor organizing through her work in garment factories in 1905 where she connected with the Federación Libres de Trabajadores de Puerto Rico. With this collective, she took part in organizing the farmers strike of 1905 and joined the American Federation of Labor. After this, she became a reader in a cigar factory in Arecibo. In this work, she came face to face with the severity of illiteracy, gaps in political consciousness, and labor exploitation in the Puerto Rican working class. In her role as reader for the laborers in the cigar factory she “served as an important locale from which to cultivate worker’s consciousness of trade unions, socialism, anarchism, and women’s rights.”2
In 1907, she published her first book, entitled Ensayos Libertarios or Liberation Essays, where she married her experiences as a working class anarchist and a woman to develop “ideas about a just an egalitarian Puerto Rico in which workers of both sexes would enjoy the rights denied to them by the exploitative labor system.”3 During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Capetillo became a transnational labor organizer, traveling from Puerto Rico to New York City to Tampa and to Cuba to assist in strike organizing. It was in her involvement with labor unions that she began to cross-dress to “defy gender norms, but also to infiltrate male-dominated groups.”4
She published La humanidad en el futuro or Humanity in the Future in 1910 in which she paints a picture of possibility for a liberatory anarchist future in “an egalitarian society with the dissolution of legal contract and religious doctrines.”5 The next year she published Mi Opinión (My Opinion), constituted primarily by her positions on gender equality and women’s independence, particularly advocating for women’s right to education as a mechanism for disrupting reliance on patriarchal social structures. In this piece she also developed pragmatic ideological space for women to build personal power in practicing autonomous sexuality, insisting on the importance of women building capacity to “distinguish between marriage, love, and desire.”6 In this book she also makes a compelling case for free love as “the union of two people without any legal contract...marked by respect and mutual support.”7
When she made it to Cuba in July of 1915, she was arrested for cross-dressing under the pretense of “immorality and causing a scene.”8 She defended her choice of dress pragmatically (more hygienic and comfortable for the work she was doing) and legally, that she was “justified on the grounds of her civil right to do so.”9 The case was dismissed and she kept on doing what she was doing.
The next year, she published Influencias de las ideas modernas, a collection of “plays, short stories, letters, and memoirs” where she used these creative avenues to apply her experience of ostracized and criminalized womanhood as well as transnational labor organizing to further refine her visions and ideations of women’s liberation.10 In this book she hones in on the personal aspect of her political thought through creative expression and testimony as well as a quasi-self-help approach equipping readers with tactics to care for self as a mechanism of women’s liberation.
Capetillo’s markedness as transgender (in transgressing normative gendered expectation and/of expression), transnational, and transgressive politic of pragmatism situates her in prime territory for a gender/queer reading of her life and activism. From the get go she engaged in non-normative gendered behavior. Her early literacy in childhood, her entrance into male-dominated organizing spaces, her relationship with mothering and the men who mothered her children (neither of which she married), her perpetual cross-dressing, the criminalization of her politicized embodiment, and her position in developing and disseminating radical and revolutionary theory all are indicative of the way Capetillo crossed just about every line of gendered regulation. These are only a handful of the instances in her life which transgressed hegemonically determined norms of what a woman was or could be. Her womanhood, in its non-normativity and defiant rejection of the expectations of normative womanhood, gender/queers her sexed story. She said of herself ““soy una equivocada,” or “I’m a woman out of place, a woman misunderstood”...This out of place space that she found herself in, misunderstood and subversive for not adhering to gendered social spaces, was also a creative place and a vantage point.”11
It is from this vantage point that we witness Capetillo’s entrance into and impact on the lineage of radical gender and sexuality politic, in part marked by her introduction of “sexuality at the centerfold of politics.”12 Her understanding of the centrality that gender and sexuality played in the revolutionary agenda of the early twentieth century offered novel and potent fortification to movements for workers rights and women’s liberation in her time and continues today as vital in the enlivened lineage of liberatory and revolutionary movements. Included in her advocacy and activism for women’s economic independence (from men and from the state) was an insistence on women’s right to sexual desire and sexual pleasure, “understanding [the ] sexual life of women as natural as hunger, sleep, and all other physiological embodied phenomena.”13 She rejected the reductive and repressive “bourgeoisie definitions of womanhood that centered on virginity, marriage, and monogamy” and through this opened up avenues for solidarity among all women so long as they, too, Rejected these definitions.14 In her ideological and pragmatic disruption and destabilization of gendered and sexed normativity, she offered an alternative to nation-state determination and enforcement of regulative sexuality, thus disrupting and destabilizing this cornerstone aspect of repressive nation-state hegemony over its people.
Her impact on spiritual thought takes root particularly in the realm of Christo-anarchism. Luisa was baptized a Catholic and rejected religion in its institutionalized rigidity of dogma and ritual, especially those which contribute to exploitation of people whether through spiritual apologetics or charging fees for sacred rites.15 Despite her rejection of religion and the Church, she remained a devout and practicing Christian her whole life. In Mi opinión she makes a case that Christianity is in ideological accordance with anarchism, writing “Christianity in its essence is a communist anarchy, that tolerates no privilege, nor impositions, nor masters nor servants, nor class distinctions of any kind.”16 She understood anarchism as typifying true Christianity. Her devotion to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ is exemplified in her writing, in her organizing, and in her direct actions. As a foundational figure in the Christo-anarchist lineage, she embodied the Christian ministry of solidarity and action all while challenging the efficaciousness and ethics of churches. Her faith-led activism, radically oriented from her politicized gender/queer embodiment, reminds Christo-anarchists today that it is not the church that determines our faith in Christ, rather it is how we put his teachings into action towards liberation.
1 Araceli Cruz, “Puerto Rican Feminist Luisa Capetillo Fought to Redefine Labor, Gender Equality,” Teen Vogue, May 8, 2020. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-luisa-capetillo-puerto-rican-feminist
2 Stephanie Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard: Recovering the Philosophy of Luisa Capetillo,” Essays in Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2018): 5, https://commons.pacificu.edu/work/sc/9e128651-a5f5-4209-bde9-4c5564443f91
3 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 6.
4 Cruz, “Luisa Capetillo.”
5 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 6.
6 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 6,
7 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 8.
8 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 9.
9 Cruz, “Luisa Capetillo.”
10 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 7.
11 Luisa Capetillo, Absolute Equality: An Early Feminist Perspective, Influencias de las ideas modernas, trans. Lara Walker (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2009), xxiv.
12 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 11.
13 Rivera Berruz, “Writing to be Heard,” 12.
14 Ibid.
15 Juan Conatz, “Capetillo, Luisa - a biography,” LibCom, August 17, 2010. https://libcom.org/article/capetillo-luisa-biography
(This biographical statement written by Sloan Touchet for the Fall 2024 Queer & Trans Theology class at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.)
Biography Date: May 2025