In 1919, Puerto Rican feminist, writer, and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo would rent rooms of her apartment on Twenty-Second and Eighth in New York to fellow workers, for whom she would also serve delicious vegetarian meals, even if they didn’t have any money.
In addition to operating a boarding house and a restaurant, Capetillo wrote fiction depicting feminist and workers’ utopias, and she shared them through her work as a loudreader in cigar factories. Before they were banned by authorities, loudreaders (lectores) read aloud for workers who were often denied any other means of formal education. Capetillo read her own stories alongside the words of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Together with the tobacco workers she turned the intellectual void opened up by repetitive work into an advantage, filling the shared communal space of capitalist exploitation with the subversive ideas of an underground anti-capitalist culture. Loudreading motivated networks of solidarity across the continent and fueled general strikes demanding acce…