The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Fracisco Trelles was born in 1855 in La Coruña, Spain. He was a poet, essayist, and journalist. Trelles pursued graduate studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he obtained his PhD in Medicine and Physico-mathematical Sciences. He migrated to Cuba, where he worked as science faculty at the University of La Habana, and arrived in Puerto Rico around the second half of 1887. His first poems published in Puerto Rico—“Quiero vivir soñando,” “Este mundo es un fandango,” “De La Habana a Puerto Rico,” and “De Puerto Rico a Gibara”—appeared in Puerto Rico Ilustrado, and he eventually also contributed to El Demócrata. Thanks to the wealthy Galician landowner, D. Manuel Núñez Roméu, Trelles was able to settle in the town of Cayey, where he worked as a doctor, a man of letters, and a journalist opposed to the “political absolutism of peninsulares and Puerto Ricans who stood for unconditional Spanish rule on the Island” (Rivera de Alvarez, 1568). In 1889, he founded and directed the newspaper, El Porvenir, and in 1890, El Cañón (which might have been a continuation of the former). Trelles was the author of the poetry book Flores varias (1894) and the editor of La razón y la fe: Breves consideraciones sobre el catolicismo (1891). Right before Puerto Rico was handed off to the United States empire, he moved to Coamo, where he worked as the “municipal doctor” (Rivera de Alvarez, 1568). Trelles died in 1899 in Cayey.

Works Cited

Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. “Trelles, Francisco.” Diccionario de literatura puertorriqueña, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, Edition 2, Issue 2, Volume 2, 1974, pp. 1568-1569.