The Puerto Rican Literature Project

José Pérez Losada was born in Cadiz, Spain in 1879 and died in 1937. He was a writer, journalist, and educator. As a child, his family moved from Cadiz to Valencia, Spain where he studied at the Instituto de Cadiz. Financially insecure after the death of his parents, he worked as a waiter on the steamboat Catalina at the age of 14, traveling to the ports of Cuba; San Juan, Puerto Rico; New Orleans, Louisiana; Galveston, Texas; Genoa, Italy; and Barcelona, Spain. In 1895 he moved to Puerto Rico, where he secured financial stability by working as a servant in a convent in San Juan. In his youth, he founded and directed the newspaper Los Dependientes in 1901. However, due to its political critiques, the publication was short-lived. Later that year, he became the editor of Boletín Mercantil and served as its director from 1902 to 1916. During this time, he contributed literary criticism to the paper under the pseudonyms Capillos de Arena and Domingo Orozco. Between 1912 to 1913, Pérez Losada traveled to New York, New York and Washington, DC, where he taught Spanish. During this period, he was named the foreign editor of Revista de las Antillas. He later returned to Puerto Rico, where he directed the newspaper El Imparcial from 1918 to 1932 and the literary magazine Puerto Rico Ilustrado from 1933 until his death. In 1927, he founded the literary magazine Gráfica. In 1923 and again in 1929, he traveled to Spain to represent Puerto Rico in the Congreso de Comercio Español de Ultramar. His works include Alma negra (1903), La patulea (M. Burrillo & Co., 1906), and El manglar (Imp. Boletín Mercantil, 1909), the latter of which won first place in the 1909 Cuarto Centenario de la Civilización Cristiana en Puerto Rico literary contest. In 1934, he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic Queen for his contributions to Hispanic literature and culture.

Works Cited

Gómez Rivera, Manuel. José Pérez Losada: Vida y obra. 1969. University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. MA thesis. http://hdl.handle.net/11721/1711. 

Manrique Cabrera, Francisco. Historia de la literatura puertorriqueña. Publicaciones Gaviota, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 2010.

Rivera de Álvarez, Josefina. Diccionario de literatura puertorriqueña. Tome 1, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1979.