Josefa Martínez Torres was born in Ponce between 1862 and 1863, approximately. Her mother’s name was Carmen Torres, and her father’s Román Martínez. Since birth, she suffered from problems with her eyesight. At two years old she lost vision in one eye, at eight she became completely blind, and at ten or eleven her mother died, leaving her in the care of her sister. In September of 1879, she started visiting a spiritist center. According to the spiritist press, she was asleep for most of her time there, even during spiritist sessions. She frequently sleepwalked, which many understand today as being in a state of hypnotic trance. Martínez Torres often sang, laughed, and danced while sleepwalking. This behavior called the attention fo Manuel de Jesús Morel y Pastor, who was from Ponce, and in 1869, became the clerk of the town of Coamo. In 1875, he lived in the Primero neighborhood of Ponce as an unmarried 38 year old man, who owned many properties. In 1883, he was the owner of the Typographic Establishment of M. J. Morel which, most likely, he used as his own printing press. According to the Spanish spiritist press, Morel y Pastor noticed that Martínez Torres was the victim of an obsessive Spirit. According to the spiritist doctrine, obsessive Spirits may take control over a medium. Morel y Pastor helped Martínez Torres to understand her situation so that she could develop auditory mediumship. It was in this way, apparently, that she dictated what the Spirits told her…

— Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte, PhD

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Writer, spiritist, and anticlerical activist, Francisca Suárez González belonged to the first generation of Puerto Rican spiritists; a group of educated women who were active in spiritist study and experimentation. Daughter of Antonio Suárez and Rafaela González, a native of San Thomas, Suárez was blind, but received her primary education from her mother, who practiced the profession of obstetrics, although they lived modestly. Like Agustina Guffain, Simplicia Armstrong de Ramú, and Dolores (Lola) Baldoni, Suárez was on the editorial board of El Iris de Paz (The Iris of Peace), a spiritist magazine led by Guffain that was published in Puerto Rico between 1899-1912. Francisca Suárez was known for her dictations from the afterlife. She was a semi-mechanical medium and her works, published in Puerto Rico, were spread freely throughout the Island in support of spiritist propaganda. Suárez studied and practiced Kardecian Spiritism. Completely convinced of the morals modeled by Jesus, she defended the value and dignity of women and the poor, and dedicated herself with passion to the experimental aspects of Spiritism. She helped to uphold and transform Puerto Rican society during its colonial transition from Spain to the United States, offering a hopeful vision based on a spiritist, rational, and equitable moral code. With her literature and journalistic writing, Suárez produced a counter-discourse where women played a central role that promised to transform the spaces where Puerto Rican society created its laws and norms: in the home, the Church, and the State…

— Clara Román-Odio, PhD

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Cultivated writer, activist, and Puerto Rican spiritist, Simplicia Armstrong de Ramú was born in the city of Ponce in 1863. Simplicia was the daughter of Tomás Armstrong, a Protestant Englishman, and Ramona Márquez, a Catholic. Her father passed away when she was barely five years old, and when her mother died eight years later, she became an orphan in charge of her nine year old brother. Armstrong de Ramú dedicated her life to fighting for the emancipation of the Puerto Rican woman. A person of original and complex thought, she analyzed a society that was structurally oppressed by sexism, misogyny, and religious intolerance. She concluded that only women, who were expected to shape the consciousness of new generations, could carry out the necessary changes to make public space more inclusive; that only the woman, in solidarity with her emancipated peers, could truly liberate herself. Spiritism inspired Armstrong de Ramú to take ownership of her own knowledge in order to achieve a moral and intellectual emancipation based on free thought and logic rather on rules, traditions, or customs. She reimagined gender roles as well as domesticity and adopted a spiritist spirituality that allowed her to address the experience of the oppressed with a profound sense of charity and justice…

— Clara Román-Odio, PhD

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The spiritist María Agustina Guffain Lanzó de Doittau was a tireless trailblazer with a vision and passion for social change, and, more importantly, a woman with a deep devotion to family. In the early twentieth century, Agustina Guffain was known as a pioneer and one of the most influential leaders of her time.

A profile of Agustina’s life through historical records of family, literature, and news, although gaps exist in dates and events, provides a glimpse of her personal experiences. They also showcase some of the influences on her belief system and deep devotion to the Spiritism Movement in Puerto Rico at that time.

Agustina Guffain was born on April 24, 1863 in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, the third child of Pedro Bruno Guffain Rebollé and Juana María Celestina Lanzón de Vernoes from France. Her parents arrived in Puerto Rico during the mid-1840s at a time of major economic growth; at some point, they settled in Mayagüez…

— Michele R. Hewlett-Gómez, PhD

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Juana Baldoni Pérez was a medicinal or consultative medium or, as Allan Kardec explains, she acted as an interpreter for the Spirits for medicinal prescriptions. Scholars of Kardecian Spiritism agree that Juana was one of the best mediums in Puerto Rico during her time. She was also a speaking medium, and in fact, much of her communications with the Spiritist were published in local periodical publications. Juana communicated with the Spirits while her sister, Lola, took notes.

Juana was the first daughter of Eduardo Baldoni and Dolores Pérez. Her family advocated for free-thinking and promoted the spiritist doctrine throughout the Island. They lived in Arecibo, but when a fire destroyed their home in 1890, they moved to a house on Betances Street in the center of Utuado, a small town in the mountains…

— Sandra Enríquez Seiders, PhD

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Educator, spiritist, and member of the municipal council of Vega Baja, Brígida Álvarez Rodríguez was born on October 8, 1868 in the city of Ponce. Daughter of Salomón Álvarez Domenech and Carmen Rodríguez López, she grew up during a turbulent time of her country. As the nineteenth century came to a close, revolutionary movements for Spanish independence were unleashed throughout he Island. Kardecian spiritist ideas, which conflicted with the Catholic Church, started to gain followers among the country’s intellectual and liberal elite. Brígida’s father, Salomón Álvarez, was one of those intellectuals who defied the government because of his anti-Catholic and anticlerical political views.

— Sandra Enríquez Seiders, PhD

Read the complete biography here.

Listen to her story here. 

Dolores (Lola) Baldoni was a Puerto Rican writer, activist, and spiritist from the end of the nineteenth century. She was the granddaughter of Luis Baldoni, a French official who, fleeing from a terrible massacre in the Dominican Republic, moved to Puerto Rico at the end of the eighteenth century. Lola was the second daughter of Eduardo Baldoni and Dolores Pérez, a freethinking and anti-Spanish family that professed Spiritism. They resided in Arecibo until a fire destroyed their home in 1890 and Lola, along with her four sisters—Juana, Genoveva, Isabel, and Ángela—had to move to Utuado to live with their brother Luis, who owned a local grocery store. By then, at the age of twenty, she wrote in her book Impresiones (Impressions) (1894), recalling the destruction of her childhood home…

— Sandra Enríquez Seiders, PhD

Read the complete biography here.

It is a challenging task to approach a woman who contributed to the development of Puerto Rican Spiritism. Even more so when it is a woman known as a labor rights leader and theoretical feminist from the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when few Puerto Rican women considered the need for social and political changes.

Luisa Capetillo Perón from Arecibo not only took the opposite position to the social structures of her time period, she also proposed a spiritist belief system and analyzed society and its events from a philosophical perspective. The researcher Norma Valle Ferrer is the prominent Puerto Rican biographer of Luisa Capetillo, and she has searched extensively for data on her life and work. Julio Ramos has also contributed to the understanding of the ideas of Luisa Capetillo with his research and reprinting of some texts…

— Carmen A. Romeu Toro, PhD

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Guillermina Massanet Rivera was born in the town of Arroyo in 1892. Her father was Mr. Pedro Massanet, a businessman from Spain, and her mother, Felipa Rivera, a housekeeper from the town of Patillas, Puerto Rico. Guillermina was educated under the protection of a family of good virtues and high moral principles. When she was young, she moved to San Juan and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she earned a degree in Education.

Her teaching career brought her to many different cities including Guayama, Patillas, Cataño, Arroyo, and San Juan. It was in Guayama where, on July 2, 1914, she married Mr. Benigno Fermaintt Oquendo, bookkeeper and mechanic from Carolina, Puerto Rico. Four children, three girls and one boy, were born from that love. Tragically, one boy and one girl died as infants. Her husband Benigno passed away on June 12, 1966…

— Nydia E. Lozada

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Clara Cardona Cardona, a spiritist, businesswoman, and municipal councilwoman from San Sebastián, was born on June 1, 1906. The third child of Juan Antonio Cardona y Lugo and Vitalia Cardona Genister, she was raised in a large catholic family that lived from agriculture. She married Juan Gregorio Román Santiago II, a farmer and businessman. They had eight children and adopted six. A multitalented and entrepreneurial woman, she successfully founded a sewing and embroidery business at a time when the industry was flourishing on the Island, and she established one of her town’s first supermarkets, the Superete Hostos, although it was destroyed in a fire in 1970. When she was widowed in 1964, she became in charge of the property that her husband, Juan Gregorio, had managed before, fields of sugar cane and various fruits. Clara Cardona practiced Spiritism for more than forty years, integrating an emancipating and egalitarian vision of the human being, nourished by mediumship and spiritist morals…

— Clara Román-Odio, PhD

Read the complete biography here.