Eugenio María de Hostos

Eugenio María de Hostos y Bonilla was born on the eleventh of January 1839 in the barrio of Río Cañas, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to a well-to-do Spanish-Puerto Rican family. He received his early schooling in San Juan, and in 1852, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to Spain, where he completed his secondary studies at the Institute of Bilbao and afterward studied law at the University of Madrid.

In Spain he entered public life as a writer and advocate, pressing for reform and for the liberty of the Antilles. When his hopes for change under Spanish rule were disappointed, he devoted himself to the cause of independence for Puerto Rico and Cuba and to a lifelong vision of an Antillean confederation of free peoples. His pen ranged widely across law, sociology, logic, literature, and ethics, and he is remembered as one of the first systematic sociologists of Latin America.

Above all, Hostos was a teacher. He traveled through South America, Cuba, and the United States, and settled for long years in the Dominican Republic, where he founded the first Normal School and reshaped public instruction on rational, humane, and scientific principles. He championed the education of women and the training of citizens in reason and conscience, leaving a model of liberal education that spread across the hemisphere.

He died in Santo Domingo on the eleventh of August 1903, asking that his remains rest in Dominican soil until Puerto Rico should be free. Honored across the Americas as "the Citizen of the Americas," Eugenio María de Hostos endures as a teacher of liberty whose life joined thought to conscience.