One of the first female political leaders on the island, Felisa Rincón de Gautier "Doña Felá," as she was affectionately known became an important political figure in Puerto Rico, and the first woman to be elected mayor of San Juan, the largest city and the capital of Puerto Rico. Rincón de Gautier was one of the founders of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP).
Background
Felisa Rincón Marrero was born on January 9, 1897, in the town of Ceiba, the year before Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States after the Spanish-American War. In 1907, her father, Enrique Rincón Plumey, an attorney, and her mother, Rita Marrero Rivera de Rincón, a teacher, moved with their seven children to San Juan. A year later, her mother died in childbirth. With her father in a state of deep depression, the children were each sent to live with different relatives. Rincón was sent to the town of San Lorenzo with her aunt and activist uncle, where her political schooling began in their local drug store.
Education
Following the small-town tradition of the time, her uncle's pharmacy served as a central meeting place where townspeople, mostly men, debated local politics, particularly the new relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. It was through these discussions that she learned about machismo the superiority of men over women a prevailing double standard for women on the island. She attended public schools in Fajardo, Humacao, and Santurce, where she completed her junior year of high school. By 1909 her father had recovered from his depression and Rincón returned to San Juan to take care of her siblings. Don Enrique remarried, but his philandering drove his wife away after a few years and Rincón was forced to drop out of school and again take charge of the household.
Don Enrique settled his large family on a farm in the coastal town of Vega Baja, an experience that awoke Rincón to the extreme poverty and malnutrition of Puerto Rico's impoverished jíbaros, or country people. Welfare or social sendees were unknown on the island at the time. The level of need she witnessed among her neighbors in Vega Alta would stay with her.
Career
In 1917 Puerto Rican women were beginning to organize and demand suffrage like their U.S. counterparts. By this time, Rincón was living in San Juan with her father and making a living as a seamstress, enjoying and learning from the tertulias (political discussions) around the dinner table. In 1932 Puerto Rican women won the right to vote and Rincón was fifth in line to register.
Rincón realized that real success lay in the business side of sewing and emigrated to New York's garment district in 1935 to learn all the aspects of fashion design. A short time later, after working in an exclusive Fifth Avenue shop, she returned to Puerto Rico and set up Felisa's Style Shop in San Juan. Rincón became a successful businesswoman in Old San Juan, and was involved in local politics. At the same time, she was eagerly helping Luis Muñoz Marín form the Popular Democratic Party in preparation for the upcoming elections in 1940. In 1938, at the behest of Muñoz Marín and other political friends, she sold her business to work full-time on the Popular Party's campaign. It was during this time that she met her future husband, Jenaro Gautier, a source of support and one who believed that Felisa had more important things to do than cook. He advised her to "use your talents to help the party and the poor. Others can do the cooking". She used her talent as the newly appointed president of the San Juan Committee of the Popular Democratic Party, a position she would occupy for the next 30 years.
In 1940 the Popular Democratic Party lost the city of San Juan, but won the Senate, with Muñoz Marin presiding, and 18 of 39 seats in the House. Now married and known as Felisa Rincón de Gautier, she continued working tirelessly for the party and helped the citizenry improve their quality of life through housing, health, and education projects, a practice she continued throughout her political career.
During the party convention for the 1944 elections, the delegates declared Rincón de Gautier as their candidate for mayor of San Juan, but her husband ob-jected. Rincón de Gautier, in many ways a traditional woman, acquiesced and did not run for office. As she continued her work within the party, she began to encounter and become aware of the existent sexism in the system.
In 1946, the mayor of San Juan, Roberto Sánchez Vilella, resigned to accept another political appointment. When Rincón de Gautier was approached with the offer to take his place, she accepted, thus becoming the first woman mayor of San Juan and the first Puerto Rican woman to hold such a high political post. From that time on, and with her trademark upswept hairstyle, she became known as "Doña Felá." She made city hall the "house of the people." Every Wednesday she would open the doors of city hall to droves of people who came to tell her their problems and ask for help.
One of Doña Fela's major concerns was cleaning up the city of San Juan, and she had no qualms about personally calling up the sanitation department informing them that they had not cleaned a certain street. She was a tireless crusader for San Juan's quality of life improvements everywhere she went, particularly Washington, D.C., where she lobbied for initiatives such as Operation Bootstrap and commonwealth status.
A recipient of hundreds of awards, Doña Felá served five terms and retired from city hall in 1968 at the age of 71. By the time she retired, San Juan had grown from a city with a population of 180,000 to 600,000 residents. During her mayoralty, her administration provided the growing city with new and well-equipped medical dispensaries, new schools, and housing projects. She was an advocate for and increased the number of day-care centers and senior-citizen housing and provided legal aid for the poor.
She remained politically active throughout her retirement, participating in elections and serving as delegate to the U.S. Democratic Party throughout all of its conventions until 1992, where at the age of 95 she made her last political appearance as the oldest delegate to the National Democratic Party's Convention. She died in her beloved city of San Juan in 1994, after a short illness.
Achievements
Politics
Under her leadership, San Juan was transformed into a Latin-American urban center. Rincón de Gautier designed innovative public services and established the first preschool centers called "Las Escuelas Maternales", which would eventually become the model for the Head Start programs in the United States. She also renovated the public health system and was responsible for the establishment of the School of Medicine in San Juan.
Rincón worked with Ricardo Alegría to restore and conserve the historical structures of Old San Juan and provided housing and basic services to thousands of people. In 1951, during the Cold War era, she ordered the establishment of the island's first Civil Defense system which was under the directorship of Colonel Gilberto José Marxuach. She often opened City Hall to the public and listened to concerns of the residents of the city. In 1959, San Juan was awarded the All American City Award.
Rincón de Gautier started a Christmas tradition, which would be continued every year by the governors of Puerto Rico. On the Día de los Reyes (Three Kings Day), celebrated on January 6, she would bring gifts and treats to the poor and needy children. In 1952, 1953 and 1954, she had plane loads of snow delivered to San Juan so that the children who had never seen or played in snow would be able to do so.
Connections
In 1940, Rincón de Gautier married the San Juan lawyer Genaro A. Gautier, who served as the Assistant Attorney General of Puerto Rico and Secretary General of the Popular Democratic Party. They had no children.