Eugenio María de Hostos

Eugenio María de Hostos y Bonilla was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, on the eleventh of January 1839, the son of a Spanish-Puerto Rican family of mixed European and African ancestry. He took his secondary education in Bilbao and his legal studies at the Central University of Madrid. He completed the studies but refused to receive his Spanish degree in protest of Spain's continued sovereignty over Puerto Rico.

He spent thirty-five years in exile across Latin America — never returning to a Spanish Puerto Rico — and produced, across those exile decades, the most consequential body of liberal political philosophy by any Caribbean writer of his generation. He published more than fifty books on law, education, sociology, ethics, and the political theory of Antillean independence.

He drafted educational and judicial reforms for the Dominican Republic (where he founded the Normal School at Santo Domingo in 1880 and trained two generations of Dominican teachers), for Chile (where he held a chair in international law at the University of Chile from 1889 to 1898), and for Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela.

His novel La peregrinación de Bayoán (1863) is the founding work of Puerto Rican literary fiction. His Antillean Confederation project — for a federation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic — anticipated by a century the regional integration arguments of CARICOM.

Puerto Rico passed under United States sovereignty in 1898. Hostos returned in 1898 to argue for Puerto Rican independence under the new American administration; his arguments were rejected. He returned to the Dominican Republic in 1900 and died there on the eleventh of August 1903, age sixty-four.

He is honored here as the philosopher who refused his Spanish degree and built liberal education across half the Americas.