MUÑOZ RIVERA, Luis

The leading voice for Puerto Rican autonomy in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, Luis Muñoz Rivera struggled against the waning Spanish empire and incipient U.S. colonialism to carve out a measure of autonomy for his island nation. Though a devoted and eloquent nationalist, Muñoz Rivera had acquired a sense of political pragmatism, and his realistic appraisal of Puerto Rico’s slim chances for complete sovereignty in his lifetime led him to focus on securing a system of home rule within the framework of the American empire. To that end, he sought as the island’s Resident Commissioner to shape the provisions of the Second Jones Act, which established a system of territorial rule in Puerto Rico for much of the first half of the 20th century. Though displeased with its obvious deficiencies, he ultimately supported the act as a stepping stone to autonomy. “Give us now the field of experiment which we ask of you,” he told the House during floor debate on the Jones Act, “that we may show that it is easy for us to constitute a stable republican government with all possible guarantees for all possible interests.”¹

Luis Muñoz Rivera was born on July 17, 1859, in Barranquitas, a rural town in central Puerto Rico, roughly halfway between San Juan and Ponce. He was the eldest son of Luis Ramón Muñoz Barrios and Monserrate Rivera Vásquez. His mother died when he was 12, and he was responsible for helping to raise and tutor his nine brothers.² His father was a landowner and merchant and eventually became mayor of Barranquitas. Muñoz Rivera’s family was politically active during the 1860s and 1870s as the debate over Spanish colonial rule intensified and two primary political factions emerged in Puerto Rico. His father was a leading member of the Conservative Party, which supported rule by governors appointed by Spain, while an uncle was a Liberal Party loyalist and a proponent of home rule. Muñoz Rivera attended the local common (public) school between ages 6 and 10, and then his parents hired a private tutor to instruct him. According to several accounts, Muñoz Rivera was largely self-taught and read the classics in Spanish and French. As a young man, he wrote poetry about his nationalist ideals, eventually becoming a leading literary figure on the island and publishing two collections of verse: Retamas (1891) and Tropicales (1902). To make a living, Muñoz Rivera initially turned to cigar manufacturing and opened a general mercantile store with a boyhood friend. His father had taught him accounting, and he became, according to one biographer, a “moderately successful businessman.”³

Muñoz Rivera married Amalia Marín Castillo in 1893.⁴ A stage actress, Amalia was the daughter of Ramón Marín y Solá, a playwright and journalist, and an oft-persecuted advocate for Puerto Rican autonomy. She was “tough-minded, opinionated, demanding” and devoted to their child, Luis Muñoz Marín. With Muñoz Rivera immersed in island politics, the marriage was not a happy one, and the couple eventually separated.⁵ Muñoz Marín became a transitional political figure in his own right, serving as the island’s first popularly elected governor and helping to found the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Muñoz Rivera’s long career in public service began in the 1880s, merging familial political instinct with his penchant for writing and speaking. In 1883 he joined the Liberal Party in Barranquitas, and by at least one account he won his first political office, a seat on the town council, as a Liberal candidate.⁶ In 1885, again running as a Liberal, he lost a bid for a seat in the provincial assembly. He attracted the attention of Román Baldorioty de Castro, the “elder statesman” of the Liberal Party, who embraced him as a protégé.⁷ In March 1887, Muñoz Rivera cofounded the Partido Autonomista (Autonomist Party), which sought to create an autonomist Puerto Rican government under the Spanish colonial system. In 1887 the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, Romualdo Palacio y González, instituted a political crackdown against Autonomists, called los compontes. Many, including Muñoz Rivera’s future father-in-law, were jailed before Palacio was replaced by a more moderate governor. Several years later, Muñoz Rivera himself was jailed briefly.⁸ It was the first of many occasions on which he was harassed, formally charged, or detained for agitating against the government. After Baldorioty de Castro died in 1889, Muñoz Rivera assumed leadership of the Autonomist Party. He won a seat in the provincial assembly representing a district that encompassed Caguas, but his election was challenged, and his term expired before he could claim the seat.⁹

Throughout his career, Muñoz Rivera used his writing skills to advance his political agenda. In July 1890, he founded the daily newspaper La democracia in Ponce, using his father-in-law’s printing press.¹⁰ The newspaper pointed out the injustices of the colonial regime overseen by the governor while lobbying major political factions in Madrid to support Autonomist policy goals. La democracia was the first of several newspapers founded by Muñoz Rivera as political mouthpieces.

As the leader of the Autonomist Party, Muñoz Rivera steered a middle course. He spurned the entreaties of pro-Spanish factions and also rejected efforts by the separatista movement, which sought a complete break with Spanish and, later, American imperial rule. He believed that the best option for Puerto Rico was to ally itself with metropolitan political parties; without financial resources or activism among youth and the peasantry, the possibility of a revolution for complete independence appeared remote. This middle-of-the-road position permitted Muñoz Rivera a moderate stance for dealing with Spanish officials: He could criticize the violence of the Cuban insurrectionists while rejecting the Spanish misrule that incited it.¹¹ Throughout his decades of advocating for Puerto Rican autonomy, Muñoz Rivera continued to reject armed revolt, revealing his pragmatic way of thinking. Mob violence would provide ready ammunition for critics who argued that Puerto Ricans were “unprepared” for self-rule. Moreover, such resistance had no prospect of success. “A revolution in an island 100 miles long by 30 miles wide, crossed everywhere by roads and dominated by forces immensely superior would be nonsensical and useless,” Muñoz Rivera explained in a letter to the Washington Post.¹² His middle-of-the-road stance also derived from countervailing cultural currents, for while he championed Puerto Rican autonomy, he displayed a lifelong affinity for Spain, which he regarded as the Mother country. Late in his career, Muñoz Rivera said Puerto Ricans “had a hundred causes of affection toward Spain. She gave us her blood, her laws, her language, and the pride of her legendary traditions and of her remarkable progress.”¹³

In 1895, Muñoz Rivera and other Autonomist commissioners traveled to Madrid and persuaded Spanish Liberal Party leader Praxedes M. Sagasta to sign a pact promising that Puerto Rico would be granted home rule if he came to power. In return, the Autonomist Party was eventually dissolved, and the new Puerto Rican Liberal Party, which Muñoz Rivera helped found in 1897—and for which he established the newspaper El liberal in San Juan—endorsed that agreement. In November 1897, after coming to power, Sagasta hurriedly granted the Autonomist Charter, without approval by the Spanish parliament (the Cortes), to quell revolutionary ardor in the islands and to forestall U.S. intervention.

As the island’s foremost diplomat, Muñoz Rivera was appointed secretary of grace, justice and government when the home-rule cabinet was formed in February 1898.¹⁴ Later that spring he was elected head of a new executive council formed in July 1898. But Puerto Rico’s hard-won political status was short-lived. Days after the new government was formed, the USS Maine exploded at anchor and sank in Havana Harbor. By late April, Spain and the United States were at war. On July 25, just a week after Muñoz Rivera’s newly elected government had convened for business, U.S. Army troops landed at Guánica, on the southwestern side of the island. By mid-August, the island was under U.S. military rule. Muñoz Rivera’s governing cabinet sought to resign en masse, but the initial military governor refused to accept the resignation when the formal transfer of sovereignty was concluded in October 1898. When a new commanding general, Guy V. Henry, assumed command and tried to curtail the cabinet’s powers, Muñoz Rivera abruptly resigned.

For a long period Muñoz Rivera was engaged as a diplomat for Puerto Rican autonomy, playing much the same role he had under imperial Spain. In 1899 at the behest of sugar cane plantation owners, he lobbied officials in Washington to reduce trade barriers between the island and the mainland United States, particularly for agricultural products. He founded the newspaper El territorio, which voiced the concerns of Puerto Rican landowners. A year later, he organized the Federal Party, establishing the newspaper El diario de Puerto Rico as its voice. Muñoz Rivera and his followers, known as Muñocistas, were labeled anti-American, and Partido Republicano mobs, supporting statehood under the United States, ransacked his print shop and attacked his home. To protect his family, Muñoz Rivera moved to the town of Caguas, 15 miles south of San Juan.

Rebuffed by political opponents and colonial administrators, Muñoz Rivera relocated to New York City to assess America’s political attitudes toward its new colonial venture in the Caribbean. In April 1901, the family took up residence in an apartment along Fifth Avenue, blocks from the modern-day Flatiron District. There Muñoz Rivera founded the bilingual Puerto Rican Herald newspaper to initiate a dialogue on Puerto Rican autonomy and to launch a public relations effort to topple the Foraker Act (31 Stat. 77–86), which had imposed American rule in Puerto Rico. In the Herald’s first issue was an open letter to President William McKinley in which Muñoz Rivera lambasted the Foraker Act as a disgrace to the United States and Puerto Rico, writing that it possessed “not the slightest shade of democratic thinking.”¹⁵

In 1904 Muñoz Rivera returned from New York City to reconstitute a political movement after the dissolution of the Federal Party. With José de Diego, he cofounded the Unionist Party which, as he wrote in the Puerto Rican Herald, sought to secure “the right of Puerto Rico to assert its own personality, either through statehood or independence. If the United States continues to humiliate and shame us,” wrote Muñoz Rivera, “we can forget about statehood and support independence, with or without U.S. protection.”¹⁶ The Unionist platform was more elastic than that of the Republican Party, which sought statehood. Muñoz Rivera won a seat with the Partido de Unión in the Puerto Rican house of delegates in 1906 and was re-elected twice, serving until 1910. He chaired the ways and means committee and advocated tirelessly for self-rule.

In 1910 the Puerto Rican voters elected Muñoz Rivera to serve a two-year term as Resident Commissioner in the U.S. House of Representatives. On the strength of a Unionist surge (carrying 51 of 66 municipalities), he defeated his Partido Republicano opponent with 55 percent of the popular vote in the November 6, 1910, general election.¹⁷ Muñoz Rivera was re-elected in 1912 and 1914 by comfortable margins as the Partido de Unión ticket prevailed, with 61 percent and 53 percent of the vote, respectively.¹⁸

In the era when Muñoz Rivera served in the House, Resident Commissioners and Territorial Delegates could hold committee assignments and introduce legislation, but they could not vote on final measures on the House Floor. Furthermore, as a third-party candidate, Muñoz Rivera had neither the support that was conferred by a membership in the Democratic Caucus nor the Republican Conference. Like his predecessors Tulio Larrínaga and Federico Degetau, Muñoz Rivera received a seat on the Insular Affairs Committee. Since that committee had jurisdiction over laws affecting the United States’ overseas possessions and territories, it was a natural fit for the Resident Commissioner. This panel drafted the penultimate piece of legislation establishing Puerto Rico’s political status. It was Muñoz Rivera’s only committee assignment during his three terms in the House, and because he did not caucus with the Republicans or the Democrats, he never advanced in seniority.¹⁹

World War I spurred fears of German naval incursions into the Caribbean Basin. Anticipating such concerns, Resident Commissioner Muñoz Rivera supported a bill to strengthen a U.S. Army regiment on the island by increasing it from approximately 560 to 1,900 men, many of them native Puerto Ricans. It was, he argued, sounding like naval strategist Alfred Mahan, necessary for the protection of such a “strategic … advanced base.” Muñoz Rivera sought to allay fears that such a force might serve as a training ground for revolutionaries. He noted, “These Latin soldiers … will emulate the tranquil valor, the bold intrepidity of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers of this hemisphere. Rest assured that they will defend, with no care for the sacrifice of their own lives, the rights and the flag of this Nation, for they well know your splendid history, for they realize in maintaining the supremacy of your national character and influence they maintain the principles of modern freedom and civilization.” The Resident Commissioner believed such service was an opportunity to demonstrate Puerto Ricans’ character and their worthiness for self-rule. It would prove, Muñoz Rivera waxed, “that there is in the forests of Porto Rico good timber out of which to make heroes … they will be heroes following and defending the Star-Spangled Banner.”²⁰ Though the Caribbean did not play host to any significant naval battles during the First World War, the region “stood quietly as the keystone of American national security,” foreshadowing its strategic commercial importance in World War II.²¹ Puerto Rico’s readiness also demonstrated its loyalty to the United States, drawing the attention of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration and serving as an impetus for the passage of the Jones Act in 1917.²²

Geostrategic concerns created a window of opportunity for serious discussion of autonomy for Puerto Rico. Capitalizing on this opening, Muñoz Rivera introduced a bill in early 1914 to establish a civil government in Puerto Rico that increased the prospect for home rule and circumscribed the power of the presidentially appointed governor. It differed markedly from legislation authored by Insular Affairs Committee Chairman William A. Jones of Virginia. In February 1914 Muñoz Rivera testified about the Jones Bill before the Senate committee with jurisdiction over the United States’ insular possessions. The bill in its present form, Muñoz Rivera noted, “cannot fill the necessities of the Porto Rican people, nor represent what my country expects from a Democratic Congress” which “in its national platforms of 1900, 1904, and 1908, declared that no nation has the right to govern a people against its will. But with my country, a greater injustice is being perpetrated by denying its right to home rule, which, from the very first day of American sovereignty, it insistently claimed.”²³

In light of the dissension in Puerto Rico regarding the issue of home rule versus statehood or complete independence, Muñoz Rivera asked his congressional colleagues to strip from the legislation provisions that would extend American citizenship to Puerto Ricans. Testifying before Chairman Jones and the House Insular Affairs Committee in March 1914, Muñoz Rivera explained that the purpose of his bill was not to protest perceived deficiencies in the chairman’s bill, but to express Puerto Ricans’ desire for independence. He intimated that while the Unionist Party had stripped Puerto Rican statehood from its platform in November 1913, he still believed that outcome was desirable. However, he emphasized that the Puerto Rican people would overwhelmingly reject any bill that would “make us citizens of an inferior class,” adding, “If we can not be one of your States; if we can not constitute a country of our own, then we will have to be perpetually a colony, a dependency of the United States. Is that the kind of citizenship you offer us? Then that is the citizenship we refuse.”²⁴ Among other amendments Muñoz Rivera requested were the qualification of the presidentially appointed governor’s veto power (allowing the legislature to override a veto by a two-thirds majority). He also proposed that the territory be divided into political units by a board composed of the chief justice of the Puerto Rican supreme court and two additional members appointed by the island’s political parties instead of by the territorial cabinet. He insisted that public funds be deposited in Puerto Rican banks rather than in financial institutions in New York and other U.S. cities. He also proposed the creation of a public service commission composed of cabinet members, an auditor, the president of the territorial senate, and the speaker of the territorial house.²⁵ Some of his suggestions—such as a proposal to extend the Resident Commissioner’s term of service from two to four years—were incorporated into the act, but others were watered down as they moved through both chambers, and still others were simply ignored.²⁶ Perhaps most significantly, Chairman Jones, expressing the committee’s widely shared concerns about Puerto Rico’s political stability, opposed any bill that did not extend U.S. citizenship. “To postpone the settlement of this question means, in my judgment, that it will become a very live and most disturbing political issue in Porto Rico,” Jones remarked during the hearing.²⁷

Muñoz Rivera believed the Second Jones Act to be little more than a half measure, though he accepted it as a step toward eventual autonomy. On May 5, 1916, Chairman Jones yielded the floor to Muñoz Rivera during debate on the bill, marking the legislative and oratorical pinnacle of the Resident Commissioner’s congressional career. In the longest and most passionate speech he made in the House, Muñoz Rivera declared that while Puerto Ricans would have welcomed U.S. citizenship in 1898 had statehood then been offered, they no longer hoped for or desired such an outcome. He thanked Chairman Jones and the Ranking Republican, Representative Towner, for having “endeavored to make this bill … a democratic measure, acceptable to all of my countrymen.” Describing the creation of a full elective legislature as “a splendid concession” to American principles and Puerto Rican rights, he attacked the abeyance of local powers imposed by an appointed council. But in the end, he supported the Jones Act despite its imperfections: “This bill can not meet the earnest aspirations of my country. It is not a measure of self-government ample enough to solve definitely our political problem.… But, meager and conservative as the bill appears … we sincerely recognize its noble purposes and willingly accept it as a step in the right direction and as a reform paving the way for other more acceptable and satisfactory which shall come a little later, provided that my countrymen will be able to demonstrate their capacity, the capacity they possess, to govern themselves.”²⁸ The Jones Act passed the House several weeks later on a voice vote.²⁹

Afterward, Muñoz Rivera returned to Puerto Rico, his health weakened by the burden of his political responsibilities. With the extension of the Resident Commissioner’s term of service from two to four years, pending ultimate passage of the legislation, there were no elections in Puerto Rico in the fall of 1916. But even without the difficulties of campaigning, Muñoz Rivera declined rapidly. He died of an infection from a ruptured gall bladder on November 15, 1916, in Santurce, a suburb of San Juan. Puerto Ricans were plunged into mourning. The revered political leader’s body lay in state in San Juan. His funeral procession weaved 150 miles across the island from the capital to Ponce and then back to Barranquitas for burial. More than 1,000 automobiles followed the hearse bearing Muñoz Rivera’s body. “Never before has Porto Rico paid a like tribute to any man,” reported the Associated Press. “As the funeral procession passed through various cities and towns thousands of people bared their heads and placed wreaths and flowers either on the hearse or in the road over which it passed.… Everywhere the demonstrations of grief and affection were such that the burial was delayed for more than a day.”³⁰ Girls in white dresses with black sashes threw flowers at the head of the casket, while musicians followed playing the national anthem, “La Borinqueña,” as the casket was carried into the local church.³¹ Muñoz Rivera was interred in Barranquitas in a mausoleum in San Antonio de Padua Cemetery, appropriately named for a Catholic saint who was revered for his inspiring, eloquent oratory.

View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress

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