Talk:Pilar Barbosa

NYTimes Obit

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January 24, 1997 Pilar Barbosa, 99, Puerto Rican Political Mentor, Dies

By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR. Pilar Barbosa de Rosario, a revered Puerto Rican historian and political authority who served as teacher, mentor and mother confessor to generations of Puerto Rican politicians, scholars and intellectuals, died on Wednesday at a hospital near her home in San Juan. She was 99 and widely regarded as the conscience of the ruling New Progressive Party.

In a career in which, in 1921, she became the first woman to teach at the University of Puerto Rico and later established the departments of history and social studies there, Dr. Barbosa became such an authority on Puerto Rican political history, from the movement for autonomy from Spain in the late 19th century to the drive for statehood in the 20th, that she was named the commonwealth's official historian in 1993.

It was a further reflection of her standing that after her death Gov. Pedro Rossello decreed a three-day period of mourning and that half a dozen members of the Legislature formed an honor guard at her coffin during a wake on Wednesday night.

The only reason a state funeral was not planned was that Dr. Barbosa had asked for private ceremonies, and as virtually any political figure in Puerto Rico would attest, Dr. Barbosa's wishes had long been treated as commands.

Indeed, long after she retired in 1967, Dr. Barbosa remained an influential figure in Puerto Rican politics -- a gregarious and vivacious woman with such a magnetic personality and wide-ranging knowledge of political history and current events that students, politicians and government officials trooped to her door for her counsel and her company.

It was an intellectual watering hole, said Gonzalo Cordova, a friend who began teaching history at the university the year she retired. You didn't come to drink, but for the conversation.

To Kenneth McClintock, a 40-year-old member of the Puerto Rican Senate, her wealth of political and historical knowledge was understandable. As she was growing up, he said, history was made at her dining room table.

Her father, Jose Celso Barbosa, was the founder of the Puerto Rican statehood movement and the precursor of the New Progressive Party, which has continued to embrace his ideals -- as modified over the years, to be sure, by his daughter, who insisted that the party of statehood also commit itself to social justice.

This, too, was a tribute to the legacy of her father. He was a black man who was so outraged at being denied higher education by the Spanish that after graduating first in his class at the University of Michigan medical school in 1882 -- and even then allowed to practice in Puerto Rico only after the intervention of the American consul in San Juan -- that he became a leader of the autonomy movement.

Having found a measure of racial and civil justice in 19th-century America after the United States displaced the Spanish in 1898, he espoused statehood as the best way to guarantee similar rights in Puerto Rico.

As one of his 12 children, Dr. Barbosa, whose mother died when she was a toddler, inherited her father's intelligence and his ideals. When she began teaching at the University of Puerto Rico in 1921 she was still an undergraduate herself, and the university was little more than a teacher's college.

After graduating in 1924, she moved on to Clark University in Worcester, Mass., receiving a master's in 1925 and a doctorate the next year.

Over the next decades Dr. Barbosa researched and wrote numerous books, pamphlets and papers on Puerto Rican political history, some based on her father's papers.

Partly, perhaps, because she and her husband, Jose Ezequiel Rosario, an economics professor who died in 1963, had no children, Dr. Barbosa began receiving her students for informal consultations on Saturday afternoons.

The sessions, which began in the days she lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of San Juan, were continued after she retired and moved to a condominium in the city's Santurce section, but with a difference.

Because she no longer had a teaching load to keep her busy during the week, her proteges took to calling on her any day of the week.

By the time many of them had risen to high positions in the government, Dr. Barbosa, who also maintained friendly relationships with members of other parties, had acquired so much influence that she operated almost as a political boss -- a boss who seemed so blind to her own power that she may not have realized that an off-hand criticism delivered in a private conversation would soon be altering party policy.

Dr. Barbosa is survived by a brother, Rafael Barbosa, of Carolina, P.R. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top