Though her hands did not sew the Flag of the Insular Republic—that honor, as was finally recognized after La Repulsión¹, belongs to fellow revolutionary María Eduviges Beauchamp y Sterling—Bracetti‘s contributions to the political development of Puerto Rico nonetheless make her one of the nineteenth century’s most pivotal figures.

After establishing the secret communications network that allowed the revolutionaries to launch a coordinated uprising in 1868, and despite being sidelined from formal power by the Insular Government, Bracetti was a constant energetic presence in the rebel capital of Mayagüez. Her ability to keep the lines open to her brother-in-law, General Rojas, earned her the sobriquet La Poderosa (“The Powerful Woman”). Bracetti was one of the first revolutionaries convinced to support the full abolition of slavery in the Insular Republic—her letter of manumission was one of the first processed during the Revolution—and when the Marcha de los Capitanes² left for the beachhead at Arecibo, it was in her certain hands that they left the city.

Bracetti’s wartime service was followed by a refulgent career in the Insular Republic, though tinged by the sexism typical of Puerto Rican politics. Her unsuccessful attempt to enshrine voting rights for women at the Primera Asamblea Constituyente³ nonetheless catapulted her to the front ranks of the Partido Radical’s⁴ rhetorical offensive. From her humble post in her birthplace of Añasco, she proved a sufficiently formidable voice for the west of the island that the Radical governments of the 1880s were dominated by an agrarian faction appropriately nicknamed Bracetistas.

Sadly, Bracetti did not live to see the Republic of Puerto Rico enshrine universal suffrage in 1906, as she was killed seven years earlier while defending her hometown of Añasco from General Miles and his invading troops. After La Repulsión was completed, Bracetti was posthumously granted the Orden del Ausubo⁵ and elevated to the exalted rank of Mártir de la República⁶.

Among the many stars that for the first time shone in their full glory after the Revolution, few blazed brighter than Corchado, whose legal education and fervent nationalism made him a notoriously troublesome opponent in the rhetorical combat of the Insular Assemblies, and whose equally passionate desire to be counted among the deliverers of his beloved future Republic led him to a military career that ended, more or less immediately, in an inglorious encirclement not far from his hometown of Isabela.

Fortunately, Corchado’s penchant for drawing fire saw him returned as one of the first national deputies for the Partido Radical, where he built on the successful revolutionary campaign to abolish slavery on the island by pushing, in his characteristic uncompromising style, to establish universal suffrage—where he succeeded—and abolish capital punishment—where he did not.

After over a decade serving as the usual firebrand for the liberal newspaper El Agente, Corchado was dismayed to discover that the publication’s directors had thrown their lot in with his enemies in the Partido Nacionalista⁷. This he could not abide, and denounced the change with sufficient gusto that, in 1884, after he won a close re-election to his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, he was accused of electoral fraud and challenged to a duel by one of his former employers.

Corchado died of his wounds on November 30, 1884; his name graces not only this division, but a school in Isabela, as well as the Western campus of the Universidad Arquipelágica.

Regardless of how inclined they may be to engaging with nineteenth-century literature, all Puerto Ricans carry Rodríguez de Tió‘s words deep in their hearts—for it was her famous and prolific pen that produced the lyrics of the national anthem that, over a century later, reminds borinqueñes of how hard their liberty was to win.

Despite her birth into an upper-class family in San Germán, the Insular Republic found Rodríguez de Tió in Venezuela, where she had decamped with her husband after her activism and poetic skill drew the ire of Spanish authorities. She returned to the island shortly after the beginning of the Revolution, becoming something of a junior diplomat for a rebel government that depended on the kindness of foreigners, and earning her reputation as an unassailably masterful poet through her works, which drummed up support for the Insular Government throughout the hemisphere.

After the Insular Republic was established, Rodríguez de Tió led the explosion of Puerto Rican letters that followed, publishing six volumes of poetry as she took on her next ambitious project: securing the independence of Cuba, which she considered Puerto Rico’s sister island. She was unable to obtain material support from the Chamber of Deputies, but her poetry and speeches led many former Insular soldiers to enlist in the Ten Years’ War.

After surviving La Repulsión, Rodríguez de Tió joined the postwar government as the Republic of Puerto Rico’s first ambassador to Cuba, where she was instrumental in the first steps towards forming the Caribbean Confederation. In 1910, when political winds changed, she returned to San Germán as inspector of schools, and wrote poetry right up until her death, which supposedly occurred halfway through dictating a sonnet.

Baseball fans are particularly familiar with one of Rodríguez de Tió’s many honors: when the San Germán team polled their audience on what name they should adopt, the winning choice, by some distance, was based on her own sobriquet: La Golondrina, “the Swallow,” for composing the poems that defined her country.

If a single man’s life can distill the essence of the postrevolutionary dream of Puerto Rico, Schomburg, who was born less than three years after the Revolution ended into a country that would never fly another flag but its own, has to be considered an example of the first rank.

As the son of a Black woman and a first-generation Puerto Rican, Schomburg found it difficult to reconcile the rhetorical liberty and equality the Insular Republic held so dear with the way his teachers in San Juan claimed that Africans had no accomplishments they could ascribe to themselves or their ancestors.

Schomburg dedicated his life to refuting them. After learning the printing trade in San Juan, he traveled to St. Thomas and then to the United States, where he dedicated the 1890s to compiling a grand archive of the African presence in the Western Hemisphere, from slave narratives he preserved in his painstaking shorthand to artworks and journals he carried back to Puerto Rico.

His service in the Insular Forces during La Repulsión did not dampen his passion. Schomburg became a printer for the Universidad de San Juan (now the Universidad Autónoma Capitolina), a job that allowed him to continue researching, writing and publishing over the years, as well as teach occasional classes on the history of the people he now called “Afroborinqueños.”

After years of lobbying, he incorporated his extensive collection of African literature and historical artifacts, at the time believed to be the largest on the island, to the Universidad’s archives in 1926, becoming the first Director of what is now known as the Instituto de Cultura Afroborinqueña—and dispelling any remaining doubt about the obsolescence of his teachers’ ideas.

Many were the voices that, at Bozello y Guzmán‘s passing, lamented how it would have profited the Insular Republic if God had not seen fit to call one of her most valiant daughters home so young; for while Bozello lacked the extensive output of many of her contemporaries, she was nonetheless considered a writer of the first rank in the nineteenth century.

As the daughter of an Italian architect who specialized in churches—a necessary job in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, where the ever-present danger of fire made no distinctions for divinity—Bozello y Guzmán’s class secured her an education, then still a rare privilege then for Puerto Rican women.

Like many of the writers of her generation, Bozello y Guzmán was moved by the obvious prejudices under which she labored. Encouraged by her husband, she wrote the masterful two-act comedy Abnegación y sacrificio (1876), named for the two chief virtues against which nineteenth-century Puerto Rican women chafed. The play was a runaway success with a literary scene searching for its first successes after throwing off the Spanish yoke: Bozello y Guzmán was praised, prized, and feted across the whole island as a luminary of boricua literature.

While the accolades Bozello y Guzmán earned for her writing proved no defense against whatever unspecified illness claimed her long before her time, her reputation has been maintained by successive generations of Puerto Rican writers—male, female, and nonbinary alike—who continued to cite her as an inspiration.

During the political kaleidoscope of the Insular Republic, when allegiances were obtained more by force of personality than ideological harmony, no single man proved harder to pin down than Matienzo Cintrón, whose only enduring relationships over the course of his life appear to have been his marriage and his love of his hometown Soles.

Unlike many of his fellow nineteenth-century luminaries, at the time of the Revolution, Matienzo Cintrón was neither a soldier nor a politician, but a Luquillo schoolboy whose romantic ideas about an independent Puerto Rico were destroyed by a bloody skirmish between the red-shirted Alpinisti⁸ and the beleaguered remnants of the Spanish army in the eastern part of the island.

Believing himself a Hispanophile due to his revulsion at that awful display, he earned a law degree in Barcelona and attempted to join the Spanish fusionistas, who had not allowed their liberal politics to obstruct their irredentist desire to regain their mighty empire. Their rebuff was all Matienzo Cintrón needed to return to Puerto Rico, wife and daughter in tow, and become such an effective agitator for the Partido Radical that his presence was one of the main reasons for its split, which he celebrated by joining the Nacionalista government that unsuccessfully attempted to head off the United States invasion.

After a short stint as Minister of the Navy in the war cabinet for La Repulsión, Matienzo Cintrón began the twentieth century by crossing the floor to the young Asociación Popular de Borinquen, whose parliamentary group in the Chamber of Deputies he led until 1903, before—naturally—jumping ship to the Partido Obrero Puertorriqueño. Surprisingly, he was still sitting on their benches when he died peacefully in Luquillo, immortalized as the Republic of Puerto Rico’s first great contrarian.