He was born on April 16, 1897 in the municipality of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the son of Emilio Piñero Estrella and Josefa Jiménez Sicardó. His father was a middle-class farmer who raised sugarcane and cattle. After the death of his mother in 1905, his father moved to the university town of Rio Piedras.
Piñero studied at the model elementary school connected with the university and received his high school education at the Xavier College in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied from 1914 to 1916 at the University of Puerto Rico and subsequently attended the University of Pennsylvania for two more years, studying engineering.
In 1918, shortly before the armistice, he enlisted in the army.
With the help of his two brothers, Piñero turned to farming in Puerto Rico. In his spare time he experimented with shortwave radio and photography. He also helped found one of the first rural high schools on the island. In 1928 he was elected chairman of the Municipal Assembly of Carolina, a post he held for four years.
In 1933 Piñero was elected president of the Puerto Rico Sugar Cane Farmers' Association. He lobbied for that group in Washington, where he came to know another Puerto Rican, Luís Muñoz Marín, who became his close friend. In the Popular Democratic party's upset victory of 1940, Piñero was elected to the Puerto Rican house of representatives. He served one term and was elected in 1944 to the post of resident commissioner of Puerto Rico in the United States Congress. He served on the agriculture, labor, and insular affairs committees, and, with Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, cosponsored a bill to allow a plebiscite in which Puerto Rico would decide its political future.
In 1946 President Harry Truman nominated him to succeed Rexford G. Tugwell as governor of Puerto Rico. In 1948 Puerto Rico was granted the power to elect its own governor, and Piñero was succeeded by Muñoz Marín. When he was not offered a nomination to the Puerto Rican senate, Piñero declined a post in the island's legislature and became vice-president of a large construction company, the first to build one-family houses in Puerto Rico on a mass scale.
He died in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico.
Jesús Toribio Piñero Jiménez was the first native-born governor of Puerto Rico, guided Puerto Rico through the postwar transitional period, when a program of industrial development brought previously undreamed-of prosperity to the island. During his administration, legislation was passed that later served as the basis for the economic development plan known as Operation Bootstrap. Plans for the construction of a new international airport for the Island were also drawn up during his governorship. A high school, public housing complex, and a principal avenue in San Juan and in Cayey have been named for him.
By 1936 Piñero had left the Republican-Union party, which had sponsored his election to the Municipal Assembly, and became an unsuccessful Liberal party candidate for the island's senate. In 1937, after Muñoz Marín's expulsion from the Liberal party, Piñero joined him in forming the Popular Democratic party, to which he lent much-needed financial support.
His quiet yet friendly personality won Piñero many friends. Piñero displayed a high level of integrity and administrative ability as governor.
He married Aurelia Bou Ledesma in June 1931; they had two children.
