The Puerto Rican Literature Project

José Gualberto Padilla was born in 1829 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and died in 1896 in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. He was a writer, journalist, politician, and physician. He published under the pen names El Caribe and Trabuco. He completed his primary studies in Añasco, Puerto Rico. He then moved to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where he finished his secondary education. There, he founded and directed the journal La Esperanza. In 1945, he transferred to the University of Barcelona, where he graduated with a medical degree. He returned to Vega Baja, Puerto Rico in 1857 to practice medicine. In 1859, he co-founded the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País. He published in various newspapers and journals, including El Palenque de la Juventud, El Porvenir, and Almanaque de Damas. In 1880, El Buscapié awarded “Contra el periodismo personal” a poetry prize. His daughter, Trina Padilla de Sanz, published his collected works posthumously in En el combate (Librería Paul Ollendorff, 1912) and Poetas completas: Rosas de pasión (Librería Paul Ollendorf, 1913).

Works Cited

Astol, Eugenio. El libro de Puerto Rico, El libro azul, 1923, pp. 980.

“Gualberto Padilla.” EnciclopediaPR, 16 septiembre 2014, https://enciclopediapr.org/content/gualberto-padilla/. 

“José Gualberto Padilla”. Biografías y vidas, 2004-2022, www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/p/padilla_jose_gualberto.htm.

Padilla, José G. Ad Alta: Por nuestros muertos. 1886. A poem in three parts.

“Padilla, José Gualberto”. BiografíasPR, Lexjuris, 1996-2002, www.lexjuris.com/biografias/buscar/biografias.asp?search=ayuda. Search “Padilla.”