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Barbosa and Muñoz Marín represent the two visions of status that dominate Puerto Rican voters today. Their lives were very different, but their impact on Puerto Ricans’ worldview was equally important.
José Celso Barbosa Alcalá was born into a humble family in Bayamón. His father, Hermógenes Barbosa, was a bricklayer and his mother, Carmen Alcalá, was a seamstress, but they worked hard to ensure their son received the best education so that he would have a better chance to improve himself. They themselves knew that José Celso would face two social prejudices: poverty and African ancestry. He overcame both problems with courage and pride. He completed his secondary school at the Ecumenical Seminary of San Ildefonso, which is today the home of the Center for Advanced and Caribbean Studies. Columbia University in New York rejected his application for admission due to racial discrimination, but his willpower pushed him to seek another career path and found it at the University of Michigan. There he graduated with honors and became one of the first African-American doctors at the institution. He recognized the value of civil rights from his experience and always kept it in mind in his political thinking. Upon his return to Puerto Rico, he devoted himself to medicine and education, but soon joined the Puerto Rican Autonomy Party, from which he began his political career. The invasion of the US military in 1898 prompted him to turn autonomy to annexationism.At the time, the federal government intervened less in the internal affairs of the states than it does today, so statehood was seen as a form of self-government and a way to gain greater civil liberties. Academic and political education was always a fundamental part of his ideology. That’s why he founded a bilingual newspaper. time He used this as a platform to promote his views on the benefits of statehood. Like many other prominent leaders of the time, he belonged to a Masonic lodge. He was the founder and top leader of the Republican Party of Puerto Rico until his death, which was the main opponent of the Autonomist movement led by Muñoz Marín’s father, Luis Muñoz Rivera.
José Luis Alberto Muñoz Marín was born into a prominent caste in San Juan. At the time, his father served as Minister of Grace, Justice and Interior. A kind of prime minister. His mother, Amalia Marín, came from a family of journalists and merchants in Ponce. He received a first-rate primary and secondary education in both Puerto Rico and the United States, where he lived for several years due to the profession of his father, who was the most popular Puerto Rican politician of his generation. Young Luis eventually followed in his footsteps. He attended Georgetown University but did not complete his studies, devoting himself to journalism, writing and bohemianism. At the age of 18, he returned to Puerto Rico and soon developed a strong interest in politics. Instead of joining his father’s party, he joined the Socialist Workers Party. He lived in the United States again, but by the 1930s he had settled permanently in Puerto Rico. He officially began his political career by joining the Liberal Party, led by Antonio R. Barceló, who supported independence at the time. In 1932 he was elected senator for the party, but five years later, differing with its sovereigntist goals, he founded the Popular Democratic Party. From this platform he gained the governorship, launched the most influential political movement of the twentieth century, and established a conception of relations with the United States that persists in Puerto Rican political culture to this day.
Both Barbosa and Muñoz rejected independence as a decolonization solution. They promoted different concepts of political autonomy; the first derived from statehood, the second from unincorporated territory. Barbosa’s focus was on civil rights, and he saw statehood as a way to achieve the full rights of American citizens. Muñoz Marín emphasized social justice and conceived of federal as the most practical way to achieve it. They all failed to see the contradiction between Puerto Rico’s political sovereignty being subordinated to the United States and its goal of complete freedom.
Barbosa’s political program did not have a political majority at the time and seemed to be dying under the autonomism of Muñoz Rivera and Muñoz Marín. However, time worked in his favor and he eventually achieved an electoral majority that he had never seen before. In itself, Muñoz Marín’s political program seemed invincible at the time, but its premises were eroded until it was discredited by the Sánchez Valle case and the enactment of the Promeza Law in 2016. Only time will tell the relevance of his vision to the political outcomes from Puerto Rico.
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