Román Baldorioty de Castro and the Autonomist Party (1887)

Román Baldorioty de Castro was a leading Puerto Rican abolitionist and an indefatigable advocate of the island's right to self-determination, active in political life on both sides of the Atlantic during the second half of the nineteenth century, moving between Madrid and the island as circumstances demanded.

In 1870 he was elected a deputy to the Cortes Generales, the Spanish parliament, in Madrid, where he actively promoted the abolition of slavery: work that laid the direct groundwork for the partial Moret Law of that same year, covered in detail in the previous lesson of this series.

Baldorioty de Castro's political project did not stop at abolition, though that particular fight defined much of his early career. In March 1887 he founded the Puerto Rican Autonomist Party, in Ponce, also sometimes referred to under the variant names "Pure Autonomist Party" and "Historic Party."

The party's strategy marked a deliberate departure from earlier tactics used on the island. It pursued political and administrative autonomy for Puerto Rico within the existing Spanish system, rather than the outright independence that Betances and the Lares rebels had fought for two decades earlier, in 1868.

After Baldorioty de Castro, the movement's leadership passed to figures including Martín Corchado, a prominent Ponce physician, and later included prominent members such as José Celso Barbosa and Luis Muñoz Rivera, each carrying the autonomist project forward in his own way. This decades-long organizing effort produced directly the Autonomic Charter of 1897, the movement's eventual, though brief, success, covered in full detail in the next lesson.

Sources: Román Baldorioty de Castro; Partido Autonomista Puertorriqueño. Freeze 2026-08-22.