Luisa Capetillo (October 28, 1879 – April 10, 1922) was one of Puerto Rico's most famous labor leaders. She was an anarchist writer, activist, labor organizer who fought for workers' rights, women's rights, free love, and human emancipation. Early years Capetillo was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to a Spanish father Luis Capetillo Echevarría from the Basque country and Luisa Margarito Perone, a Corsican immigrant. Luis Capetillo arrived in Puerto Rico at around the same time as Margarita, traveling with his family. In Arecibo, she was raised and home schooled by her parents, who were both very liberal in regard to their philosophical and political ideologies. In 1898, Capetillo had the first of her two children out of wedlock. She found a job as a reader in a cigar-making factory in Arecibo. After the Spanish–American War, the American Tobacco Company, which had gained control of most of the island's tobacco fields, would hire people to read novels and current events to the workers. It was in the tobacco factory that Capetillo had her first contact with labor unions. In 1904, Capetillo began to write essays, titled Mi Opinión (My Opinion), about her ideas, which were published in radical and union newspapers. In her book Mi Opinion, she urges women to fight for social equality: The work is an important early example of a treatise written specifically about the experience of Latinas. Influences Luisa Capetillo was greatly influenced by her parents, her environment, her personal experiences and the literature she surrounded herself with. Both of her parents shared many ideals, including those related to Romanticism. Her mother being of French descent, believed women should defend their ideals and act according to themselves. She strongly sided with George Sands' beliefs that the old liberated woman could be "revolutionary, both politically and in her personal life, opposed to marriage and to all social contracts that would regulate human relations, but willing to sacrifice everything in the name of love". Margarita reflected these ideals since she lived and procreated with the man she loved at the same time providing for herself. Later on, Luisa would dedicate the following words to her mom: "To you, dear mother of mine, who tried to control me, or make me think traditionally. You allowed me to inquire freely, only reproaching what you thought were exaggerations, without forcing me in any way". As for her father, Luis, he taught