María Bibiana Benítez and Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier

María Bibiana Benítez and Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier were two female poets who were extremely influential in the early 19^th century in helping to establish a distinctly Puerto Rican literary sphere. Regarded as the first female poet from Puerto Rico, Benítez (1783-1875) spent her childhood living in many different regions in Puerto Rico, allowing her to see the diversity of Puerto Rican life (Márquez). Benítez came from an elite Creole family and after moving to San Juan in her adulthood, she turned her house into a gathering place for artists, writers, and intellectuals (Márquez). After her father’s death in 1832, Benítez published her first, and most famous, poem “La ninfa de Puerto Rico,” (Márquez). Within this poem, Benítez expresses pride in her Puerto Rican identity while also expressing deep loyalty to the Spanish crown, writing lines such as, “Of that bold monarch whose will you convey, I am a most dear devotee,” (Márquez).

After moving to San Juan, Benítez took in her niece Alejandrina Benitez de Gautier, who would also become a famous Puerto Rican poet and mother to poet José Gautier Benítez. In 1843, she published her first poems in the collection Aguinaldo puertorriqueño, which, due to its inclusion of exclusively young, Puerto Rican authors, was a groundbreaking work in the establishment of Puerto Rican literature (Márquez). Within this work and her later poems, de Gautier expressed very similar views to her aunt, celebrating both a Creole identity and Spanish loyalty (Márquez). After a hiatus of twenty years, de Gautier began writing again, publishing her most famous work “The Submarine Cable in Puerto Rico,” which celebrated new ideas of progress on the island (Márquez).  

These feelings of continued loyalty to a colonial power as well as the development of a distinctive Puerto Rican identity reflect the way Puerto Rican elite likely saw the post-independence struggles of other Latin American countries. Newly independent countries were struggling economically and were mostly unable to follow through with the liberal promises that revolution leaders made (Chasteen). As political instability became the norm in these countries, loyalty to stable colonial rule would have been appealing to Puerto Rican elites like Benítez and de Gautier (Chasteen).

Works Cited

Alejandrina Benitez De Gautier. n.d. Prabook. https://prabook.com/web/alejandrina_benitez.gautier/2558385.

Chasteen, John Charles. Born in Blood and Fire. 4rd edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.

María Bibiana Benítez. Enciclopedia De Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rico Endowment for the Humanities, n.d. https://enciclopediapr.org/en/encyclopedia/benitez-maria-bibiana/.

Márquez, Roberto, ed. Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.