Eugenio María de Hostos

Eugenio María de Hostos (born January 11, 1839, near Mayagüez, Puerto Rico—died August 11, 1903, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) was an educator and writer who was an early advocate of self-government for the island of Puerto Rico.

Hostos was educated in Spain and became active in republican politics as a university student there. He left Spain when that country’s new constitution (1869) refused to grant autonomy to Puerto Rico. He went to the United States, where he became editor of the Cuban independence journal La Revolución in 1870. He subsequently traveled widely throughout South America and taught in Chile. He returned to the United States in 1898 and participated actively in the Cuban independence movement, but his hopes for Puerto Rican self-government after the Spanish-American War (1898) were disappointed when the U.S. government rejected his proposal for autonomy and instead established its rule over the island as a territory. Hostos returned to the Dominican Republic, where he remained until his death.

Hostos played a major role in reorganizing the educational system of the Dominican Republic. He wrote many essays and treatises on social science topics and was one of the first systematic sociologists in Latin America.