Luisa Capetillo and the Counter-Republic of Letters

At the turn of the twentieth century, workers, anarchists, and intellectuals created a global resistance culture through print media, migration, and their radical imaginaries. The networks that animated this resistance culture gave way to the Counter-Republic of Letters. It was (and still operates as) a transnational intellectual community and means of communications between those that were cast outside Western modernity—that is, most of the world’s population. This essay explores how Luisa Capetillo became one of the many individuals who actively participated in the creation and expansion of the Counter-Republic of Letters in the Caribbean. In the process, she articulated multiple identities as a writer and a labor organizer. One hundred years after her death, Capetillo’s work carries radical potential and urgency in the present day.