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El Espiritismo de las mujeres puertorriqueñas: FRANCISCA SUÁREZ GONZÁLEZ De las extraordinarias pioneras a sus herederas contemporáneas

2020

Biography of Francisca Suárez González

Clara Román-Odio, PhD Kenyon College, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: https://digital.kenyon.edu/espiritismo_franciscasuarez

Recommended Citation Román-Odio, PhD, Clara, "Biography of Francisca Suárez González" (2020). FRANCISCA SUÁREZ GONZÁLEZ. Paper 9. https://digital.kenyon.edu/espiritismo_franciscasuarez/9

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Francisca Suárez González 1861-1925

Clara Román-Odio, PhD Professor of Latin American Studies Kenyon College Translated by Henry Hirschfeld

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.1 Daughter of Antonio Suárez and Rafaela González, a native of San Thomas,2 Suárez was blind, but received her primary education from her mother, who practiced the profession of obstetrics, although they lived modestly.3 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 between 1899-1912.4 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.5 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

Fig. 1: Fotografía de Francisca Suárez González.6

1 Nancy Herzig Shannon, El Iris de Paz: El espiritismo y la mujer en Puerto Rico, 1900-1905, Río Piedras, P.R: Ediciones Huracán, 2001, p. 82. 2 Demographic Registry of Mayagüez, Record of Deaths 1923-1926, L. 29-35, partida 527, fol. 357, consulted online on FamilySearch, image 1512. 3 Such is confirmed in a letter by Francisca Suárez addressed to Federico Degetau, Resident Commissioner in Washington, in Collection of Dr. Ángel M. Mergal, Caja 3, Cartapacio VI, doc. #61, Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. I am incredibly grateful for the historian Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte for granting me access to his historical archives, thanks to which I found various letters by Francisca Suárez that I have cited here. 4 Herzig Shannon, Op. Cit., p. 82. 5 Collection of Dr. Ángel M. Mergal, Caja 4, Cartapacio I, doc. # 79. 6 Thanks to Dr. Gerardo Hernández Aponte, for granting us access and use of these photographs and other materials. 2 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.

Spiritist and Anticlerical Activism

Francisca Suárez’s spiritist activism knew no bounds. In 1903, she communicated by mail with Thomas Edison, A. Carnegie, the wife of President Roosevelt, and Federico Degetau, who at the time served as Resident Commissioner in Washington, to request economic assistance for the charitable hospital Caridad y Consuelo, which was founded by spiritists and located in the city of Mayagüez.7 She invited Federico Degetau to become a partner of the hospital for a monthly cost of ten cents, and to spread information about the hospital among his friends in order to increase its number of partners.8 Suárez also obtained from Degetau the constitution of the National Association of Spiritists of the United States, with the intention of establishing a Spiritist Federation in Puerto Rico.9

In addition, Francisca Suárez challenged the power structures established by the ecclesiastic hierarchy and the conservative elite, who fervently resisted the social transformation promised by Spiritism and freethinking near the turn of the century. Because of her anticlerical position, disseminated in national and international magazines and periodicals, she was publicly attacked by defenders of the Catholic Church, almost all of whom were men.10 Upon analyzing the Church-woman relationship at the time, her anticlerical discourse becomes especially important. As historiographer María F. de Barceló Miller explains in “De la polilla a la virtud: Visión sobre la mujer de la Iglesia jerárquica de Puerto Rico” (“From Moth to Virtue: Puerto Rico’s Hierarchical Church Vision of the Woman”), the Church’s loss of moral influence on the Island caused a meaningful change in how people thought of women. If in the eighteenth century the woman was considered a “generator of evil and wickedness,” and symbol of “sin and ruin;” in the second half of the nineteenth century the Church assigned the woman “the responsibility of saving society by means of the Christian family” and of restoring the worship of the Virgin Mary.11 The following excerpt from Barceló Miller’s study convincingly summarizes the opposing vision:

The moth comes from clothing as the inequity of man from women. The woman is the hunter’s trap, her heart the net, her hands the prison.

Fray José M. Hernández

7 Collection of Dr. Ángel M. Mergal, Caja 3, Cartapacio VII, doc. # 18-A. 8 Ibid. 9 Collection of Dr. Ángel M. Mergal, Caja 4, Cartapacio I, doc. # 79. Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte, El espiritismo en Puerto Rico 1860-1907, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2015. pp. 426-427. 10 Herzig Shannon, Op. Cit., pp. 90-91. 11 María F. de Barceló Miller in “De la polilla a la virtud: Visión sobre la mujer de la Iglesia jerárquica de Puerto Rico” in Yamila Azize Vargas, La mujer en Puerto Rico: ensayos de investigación. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, Inc., 1987, pp. 49-88. 3

“Disertación Canónico-Moral,” B.E. Year I, No. 15, July 15, 1864.

Do not doubt it, the Christian woman, with her fervent Catholic faith and virtuous examples is the call for a mystery of Providence to save modern society, fatally injured by doubt and corruption, her inseparable partner.

Juan Antonio Puig, Bishop of Puerto Rico “Carta Pastoral,” B.E. Year XXVI, No. 15, July 26, 1884.12

As a result, there were high expectations for wives and mothers in the last third of the nineteenth century. However, women were not yet free. “The change of vision did not rescue her from the plain of inferiority where she found herself in relation to the man.”13 According to an encyclical from Pope Leo XIII (1880), the husband would continue being head of the family and head of the wife, while she was completely suppressed under him:

The husband is the leader of the family and head of the family and head of the wife, who although being flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, subjects herself and obeys her husband…because the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the Church…and just as the Church is subjected under Christ, wives are subjected under their husbands.14

Five years after this encyclical was published, Francisca Suárez defies the narrow perspective of the Catholic Church in her provocative journalistic writing and her dictations from the afterlife, which are considered mediumistic communications.

Dictations from the Afterlife

The messages from the afterlife that Francisca Suárez dictated as a medium were very well known during her time.15 In 1885, at centro Grupo Familiar de Jesús (the Familiar Group of Jesus Center) in Mayagüez, Suárez received a dictation from the Spirit of María del Pilar, which she entitled Un monasterio por dentro. Dictado de ultratumba por el Espíritu de María del Pilar (A Monastery Within: Dictation from the Afterlife by the Spirit of María del Pilar).16 The work was published by the La Industria printing press of San Germán in 1893. The text is about a Spirit who recounts the sad memories that she kept to herself during her time on Earth. It narrates the story of María del Pilar, a woman from who was the daughter of a marquis during the reign of Philip II. In 1571, her father sent her to the Monastery of Carmelite Monks to separate

12 Ibid., p. 50. 13 Ibid., p. 83. 14 Ibid., p. 83. 15 Jovino de la Torre confirms this in a note to the reader in Un monasterio por dentro. 16 Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte, El espiritismo en Puerto Rico 1860-1907, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2015, p. 394. 4 her from her lover Luis, who was the son of his enemy. In the monastery, the fifteen year old girl discovers, along with Sister Pura, Sister Carmen, Sister Margarita, Sister Inés, and the Abbess, the atrocities and abuses that occur there. Behind closed doors, Father Joseph leads a luxurious life that violates and destroys the lives of the nuns. Women play a leading role in the story, acting as spokespeople who denounce their complete lack of rights as well as the decadence of monastic life.

The figure of Francisca Suárez emerges in the as a prolific semi-mechanical medium. In a letter to Federico Degetau, Suárez tells him that “she [Francisca] had various mediumistic communications that were unpublished due to lack of funds.”17 In 1892 she had published Historia de un monje en dos existencias físicas. Dictado de ultra – tumba por el espíritu de Fernando de Castro (A Story of a Monk in Two Physical Existences: Dictation from the Spirit of Fernando de Castro), another mediumistic dictation.18 That same year, the Spanish spiritist press reported that the second volume was in production and that “the complete work would consist of six or seven volumes the same length as the first, which was composed of 420 pages.”19 Witnesses from the time period were amazed at the quality and the novelty of her dictations. For example, in a note to the reader from Un monasterio por dentro, Jovino de la Torre notes:

Fig. 2: Un monasterio por dentro. Dictado de ultratumba por el Espíritu de María del Pilar, Francisca Súarez, 1893.20

There is no doubt that Francisca Suárez is a medium. The fact is true with all certainty. No one can doubt the mediumistic faculties of such a lady, because the public already knows, advantageously, a part of the Historia de un Monge, work by the cited medium who has not even finished yet, and soon you all will know others, which are currently unpublished.21

By means of her dictations from the afterlife, Suárez acquired discursive agency, which allowed her to establish meaningful relationships with spiritist organizations at the local, national, and international levels; relationships that promoted not only the spiritist philosophy, but also the advancement and the emancipation of Puerto Rican women. By studying Francisca

17 Hernández Aponte, El espiritismo…. Op. Cit. p. 395. 18 Gerardo Hernández Aponte, La cieguecita de la cantera: Obras completas de Josefa Martínez Torres, Primera mujer novelista de Puerto Rico, San Juan, P.R.: Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia and the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Investigación de Historias de Mujeres, 2014, p. 29. 19 Revista de Estudios Psicológicos. Órgano de Propaganda y Eco del Movimiento General Espiritista, julio de 1892, p. 127. (Cited in Hernández Aponte, El espiritismo…. Op. Cit. p. 395). 20 Thanks to Dr. Gerardo Hernández Aponte, for granting us access and use of these photographs and other materials. 21 Jovino de la Torre, “Al lector,” Un monasterio por dentro: Dictado de ultratumba por el espíritu de María del Pilar. San Germán, P.R.: Imprenta La Industria, 1893, p. 5. 5

Suárez’s work, we rescue an important moment in Puerto Rico’s past, when literature was produced by brave women who did not have institutional or social support. Suárez’s story demonstrates that Spiritism served her as an analytical instrument to understand and dismantle the structures of privilege and power that, since the founding of Western society, have subjugated women. Spiritism radicalized her, liberating her from the cultures that betrayed her and from the limitations that her blindness, sex, class, and race imposed upon her.

Journalistic Activity

Francisca Suárez’s journalistic activity was outstanding and very extensive. In addition to her regular contributions to spiritist publications like El Iris de Paz and La Luz del Porvenir (The Light of the Future), which was led by the Spanish spiritist Amalia Domingo Soler,22 she wrote in the Puerto Rican press addressing controversial topics and prominent figures of the ecclesastic and professional elite. Among her publications, Refutación al Vicario Capitular (Refutation to the Capitular Vicar) stands out in particular. Published on December 19, 1899, Refutación was addressed to the Capitular Vicar, Dr. Juan Perpiñá. During that time, Perpiñá governed the Catholic diocese of the Island,23 and had published an article in Boletín Eclesiástico (Ecclesiastic Bulletin) entitled “Cemeteries.” The newspaper La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico (The Correspondence of Puerto Rico), based in San Juan, reprinted the article on December 25, 1898.24 The Spanish-American War had come to an end on August 12 of the same year.25 Francisca Suárez’s article is

Fig. 3: Refutación al Vicario Capitular, Francisca Súarez, 1899.26

22 Ma. Dolores Ramos, “Heterodoxias religiosas, familias espiritistas y apóstolas laicas a finales del s. XIX: Amalia Domingo Soler y Belén Sárraga Hernández,” Historia Social, No. 53 (2005): pp. 64-83. Amelina Correa Ramón, Hacia la reescritura del canon finisecular. Nuevos estudios sobre las direcciones del Modernismo, Universidad de Granada, Granada, España, 2006, pp. 1-37. 23 The title of Capitular Vicar has all of the authority as the Bishop in governing the diocese when the Bishop is not present, in which case the Capitular Vicar holds the primary position of the Church. Thus, in her Refutación, Francisca Suárez confronts the highest authority of the Church in Puerto Rico during her time. Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte, La Iglesia Católica ante la invasión de Estados Unidos de América: Lucha, sobrevivencia y estabilización (1898-1921), San Juan, Puerto Rico, Decanato de Estudios Graduados e Investigación de la Universidad de Puerto, Recinto de Río Piedras, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2013, pp. 143-145. 24 Francisca Suárez, Refutación al Vicario Capitular Mayagüez, P.R.: Tipografía Comercial, 1899. 25 José Trías Monge, Historia Constitucional de Puerto Rico, Vol. 1, Editorial Universitaria, Río Piedras, P.R., 1980, p. 146. 26 Thanks to Dr. Gerardo Hernández Aponte, for granting us access and use of these photographs and other materials. 6 particularly important because it captures a vital moment of the separation of Church and State on the Island as well as the debates that emerged as a result of the change in government. During that time, the Puerto Rican people, fed up with the relentless Spanish colonial regime, received the United States’ liberal and democratic ideology with hope. In addition to describing the national mentality of this political moment, Refutación also demonstrates how the Puerto Rican woman benefited from the colonial transition. As Suárez explains, it allowed her to express her voice; a strong and well-grounded voice that made use of reason and freethinking Spiritism to make her opinion heard. Other important themes from this historical moment come to light in Suárez’s essay, including: the power and abuse of clergy during turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico, the identity of the Puerto Rican people, the all-at-once ecumenical,27 local, and international perspective of Francisca Suárez, various key principles of Kardecian Spiritism, and the liberal ideology of the new democracy that embraced citizens’ rights. Francisca Suárez’s essay demonstrates political optimism, as well as her own discursive agency, which challenges with humor and rationality the Capitular Vicar’s impertinence, an agent who quickly became obsolete in regards to the management of funds and public property.

Another important journalistic publication was Nuestra réplica al artículo del Dr. Manuel Guzmán Rodríguez titulado “La religión del porvenir” (Our Response to Dr. Manuel Guzmán Rodríguez’s Article Entitled “The Religion of the Future”) published in 1892.28 Graduate of the University of Barcelona in 1887 as a surgeon, Manuel Guzmán Rodríguez had published an article in the Mayagüez-based newspaper El Imparcial (The Impartial) entitled “La religión del porvenir” in which he suggested that superstition, mental disorders, the tropical temperament, and hysteria —commonly associated with women— formed the basis of Spiritism.29 Guzmán Rodríguez’s article was the response to an invitation, published in the newspaper El Estudio (The Study), that he received from a group of Mayagüez-based spiritists, including Suárez, to continue a previous discussion.30 Nuestra réplica includes three texts: “La religión del porvenir” (“The Religion of the Future”) by Guzmán Rodríguez, “Los Delirios del Sr. Guzmán” (“Mr. Guzmán’s Delusions”) by Francisca Suárez, and “Opiniones notables de los hombres más

Fig. 4: Nuestra réplica al artículo del Dr. Manuel Guzmán Rodríguez titulado ‘La religión del porvenir’, Francisca Súarez, 1892.31

27 I use the term ecumenical in its etymological sense of “universal” offered by Joan Corominas in his Breve diccionario de la lengua castellana, Third Edition, very well revised and improved, Madrid, Gredos, 1983, p. 223. 28 Francisca Suárez, Nuestra réplica al artículo del Dr. Manuel Guzmán Rodríguez titulado ‘La Religión del Porvenir’ y publicado en el periódico El Imparcial de esta ciudad, Mayagüez, P.R.: Tipografía Comercial, 1892. 29 Ibid., p. 9. Gerardo Alberto Hernández Aponte, El espiritismo en Puerto Rico 1860-1907, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2015. p. 287-289. 30 Ibid., p. 32. 31 Thanks to Dr. Gerardo Hernández Aponte, for granting us access and use of these photographs and other materials. 7 autorizados en todas las ciencias sobre los fenómenos del Espiritismo” (“Notable Opinions by the Most Qualified Men in The Sciences of Spiritist Phenomena”), a spiritist propaganda leaflet that presents opinions from fourteen physicists, astronomists, doctors, mathematicians, and writers from all over the world who considered the spiritist doctrine incontestable. As Francisca Suárez explains in “Advertencia” (“Warning”), which precedes the compilation, her intention of grouping the three texts was “so that our readers know about those who serve in the ranks of Christian rationalism, just as they know about those who after painstaking study have accepted Spiritism as a religion and as a science.”32 These texts spark much dialogue because they lay out Spiritism’s controversies, which are rooted in fervent class, race, and gender prejudices as well as in the optimism and sense of liberation generated by the freethinking discourses that circulated in Puerto Rico during the end of the nineteenth century. Guzmán Rodríguez’s text expresses classism, misogyny, racism, and anxiety regarding the inevitable collapse of the Spanish colonial system on the Island. It contrasts with the ironic but civil tone of Francisca Suárez, who uses her spiritist knowledge, solid and informed, to promote with clarity and confidence her spiritist agenda.

Francisca Suárez’s spiritist position was decidedly political because the poor were always on her discursive horizon. Therefore, Suárez’s understanding of class and social justice radically differs with Guzmán Rodríguez’s classism. If Guzmán Rodríguez makes fun of the spiritists of his country, calling them ignorant and unintelligent, Suárez stands up for them because her own circumstances, in reality, were precarious. As is reflected in the observations made by North Americans upon the Island’s change in sovereignty in 1898, poverty reigned over a considerable segment of Puerto Rico’s population.

So deep is their poverty that they are always in debt to landowners and business owners. They live in shacks of sticks covered with palm leaves. You can find a family of twelve piled up in a room that contains nothing but a dirt floor. They have little food, if you can call it that, and only very little clothing. They feed themselves with fruit, and if they work during the day, with a little rice and fish as well.33

Suárez knew that the poor did not inflict poverty on themselves; she recognized that it was the result of a colonial system that, for centuries, had exploited entire sectors of the Puerto Rican population. She understood that social injustice was immoral and that both the Church and the Spanish State on the Island had maintained social inequalities and poverty for their own benefit.

In Nuestra réplica, Francisca Suárez publicly named the patriarchy, misogyny, and the Island’s Roman Catholic Church as complicit in the oppression of women and of the entire turn-of-the-century Puerto Rican society. Armed with an anticlerical and freethinking ideology, she took a decolonial position that, nourished by Spiritism, challenged the violent concentration of the world’s resources under the control and for the benefit of a European minority.34 As a

32 Ibid., p. 3. 33 Geo. W Davis, Report of Brig. Geo. W. Davis on Civil Affairs of Puerto Rico. Cited in María Dolores Luque de Sánchez, La ocupación norteamericana y la Ley Foraker (La opinión pública puertorriqueña), 1898-1904, Editorial Universitaria, Río Piedras, 1980, p. 48. (Cited in Barceló Miller in “De la polilla a la virtud,” Op. Cit., p. 57) 34 Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad.” Perú Indígena, vol. 13, no. 29, 1992, pp. 11–20. 8 follower of Kardecian Spiritism, she helped to sustain and transform Puerto Rican society during its colonial transition from Spain to the United States; a transformation that empowered not only the Puerto Rican people, but all women spiritists in local and international circles.

Francisca Suárez passed away due to sepsis on November 21, 1925 when she was 64 years old.35 Her life exemplifies strength and freedom of female thought in the final years of the nineteenth century; a freedom that, in large part, Spiritism enabled.

35 Demographic Registry of Mayagüez, Record of Deaths 1923-1926, L. 29-35, partida 527, fol. 357, consulted online on FamilySearch, image 1512.