EdSight

Celestina Cordero y Molina was an Afroboricua educator who opened the first school for girls in Puerto Rico and is remembered as a pioneer of racial equity, labor rights, and gender justice in Spanish colonial education. Born in San Juan in 1787, she lived her entire life as a liberta — a free Black woman — at a time when Spanish rule in Puerto Rico rested on an economy of chattel slavery that would not be formally abolished until 1873. Her parents, Lucas Cordero and Rita Molina, had been libertos since at least 1690, and both were literate and economically independent at a moment when fewer than one in ten Puerto Ricans could read. They taught Celestina and her younger siblings, Gregoria and Rafael, to read and write at home, and Celestina in turn became instrumental in the education of her brother Rafael Cordero y Molina, who would later be honored across Latin America as the “Father of Public Education” in Puerto Rico. Celestina began teaching in 1802 at the age of fifteen, and in 1820 she founded her girls' school in San Juan — recorded as serving at least 116 female students across all racial and socioeconomic groups. That same year, after a sustained fight documented in Las Actas del Cabildo de San Juan, the town council recognized her as a permanent teacher entitled to wages and accreditation. She never married, lived as an independent entrepreneur and paid teacher, and pursued her work decades before the Economical Society of Friends of Puerto Rico and the Association of Ladies for the Instruction of Women opened their schools. Her precise date of death is not firmly established in the colonial record, and for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries her contribution was eclipsed by her brother's; only in recent decades have scholars such as Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Aurora Levins Morales, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol recovered her as an educational thinker in her own right.

Cordero y Molina's signal contribution is the opening, in 1820, of what is widely recognized as the first school for girls in Puerto Rico. The school enrolled at least 116 female students and accepted them regardless of race, class, or legal status, at a time when white girls from wealthy families were taught by private tutors, white boys were sent abroad, and low-income, liberta, enslaved, and indigenous children had no formal access to schooling at all. The school predated by more than a generation the girls' schools established by the Committee of Ladies of Honor of the Economical Society of Puerto Rico and the Association of Ladies for the Instruction of Women, and it placed Cordero y Molina years ahead of her brother Rafael's better-known school for boys. The founding of the school is itself an act of educational philosophy: an insistence that girls of every background were fit for literacy, numeracy, and intellectual life, and that a Black woman teacher was the right person to prove it.

• Afroféminas. (2019). Celestina Cordero Molina, la maestra negra que fundó la primera escuela de niñas en Puerto Rico. https://afrofeminas.com/2019/03/07/celestina-cordero-molina-la-maestra-negra-que-fundo-la-primera-escuela-de-ninas-en-puerto-rico
• Cabrera Salcedo, L. (2022). Rafael Cordero Molina. Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico.
• Levins Morales, A. (1998). Remedios: Stories of earth and iron from the history of Puertorriqueñas. Beacon Press.

The pedagogical distinctiveness of Cordero y Molina's school lay in its composition. At a moment when colonial society was organized to keep white, liberta, enslaved, and indigenous girls apart, she housed students from every one of these groups in a single small building in San Juan and taught them together. She designed materials and practices to meet a range of ages, learning styles, and mastery levels, teaching literacy, arithmetic, religion, geography, and history. Contemporary scholars read her classroom as a nineteenth-century instance of what would today be called critical and culturally sustaining pedagogy — a “pedagogy of critical care” that rejected the deficit framing of Black and poor girls as servants-in-training, gave them high academic expectations, and modeled an alternative to the domestic-service pipeline that beneficence institutions were building for low-income women. The same interracial, cross-class model would later become the hallmark of her brother Rafael's school, whose graduates — Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, Román Baldorioty de Castro, José Julián Acosta, and Manuel Elzaburu y Vizcarrondo — led Puerto Rico's abolitionist and cultural movements.

• Matos-Rodríguez, F. V., & Delgado, L. (Eds.). (1998). Puerto Rican women's history: New perspectives. M. E. Sharpe.
• Matos Rodríguez, F. V. (2004). Libertas in the service of the colonial project: Domestic workers in nineteenth-century San Juan. In Women and slavery in the Americas.
• Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
• Moll, L. C. (2019). Elaborating funds of knowledge: Community-oriented practices in international contexts. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 68(1), 130–138.

Unlike her brother Rafael, who supported his own school through his earnings as a tobacconist, Cordero y Molina insisted that teaching was waged work and that the Spanish colonial government owed her payment, accreditation, and financial support for her school. Her petitions are preserved in Las Actas del Cabildo de San Juan and are among the earliest documented struggles by a Black woman teacher in the Americas for formal employment status. In 1820 the cabildo formally recognized her as a permanent teacher, an act that bound the colonial state to her claim to wages and established a precedent for subsequent Puerto Rican educators. Read alongside the simultaneous activism of San Juan's liberta laundresses — who fought for fair pay and safe working conditions — Cordero y Molina's campaign situates teaching within the broader nineteenth-century Black women's labor movement and anticipates twentieth-century struggles over the feminization of teaching, gendered pay scales, and protections for married and pregnant educators.

1. Recognition as a public teacher: Cordero y Molina fought to have the cabildo accredit her as a teacher of record rather than an informal tutor.

2. Remuneration: She demanded wages commensurate with her work, rejecting the assumption that Black women's labor was free or charitable.

3. Institutional support: She pressed for public funding of her school so that instruction could be extended beyond those who could pay fees.

• Matos Rodríguez, F. V. (2004). Women's history and the Spanish colonial archive: The Actas del Cabildo de San Juan. In Puerto Rican women's history.
• Matos-Rodríguez, F. V., & Delgado, L. (1998). Puerto Rican women's history: New perspectives. M. E. Sharpe.
• Meléndez Badillo, J. (2011). Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico. Editorial Akelarre.
• Martínez Vergne, T. (1999). Shaping the discourse on space: Charity and its wards in nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. University of Texas Press.

Long before the vocabulary of critical pedagogy entered educational theory, Cordero y Molina practiced what Paulo Freire would later call conscientização: the awareness and contestation of the social, political, and economic forces that produce oppression. Her classroom brought white, liberta, enslaved-adjacent, and indigenous girls into shared study and challenged the colonial claim that race and gender determined intellectual capacity. Contemporary scholars have read her as a forerunner of decolonizing education movements among Latinx, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities, and as a precursor of the “funds of knowledge” and “community cultural wealth” traditions that recenter the experiences of marginalized learners. The school functioned, in the words of one historian, as an Underground Railroad of the mind: a route out of domestic servitude into literacy, numeracy, and civic participation.

• Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury.
• Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
• Moll, L. C. (2019). Elaborating funds of knowledge: Community-oriented practices in international contexts. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 68(1), 130–138.
• Pérez-Vega, I. (2017). Archival sources for the study of free Blacks in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Journal of Caribbean History, 51(2), 1830–1850.

Cordero y Molina's life embodied the educational alternative she built for other Puerto Rican women: she never married, earned her own living as a paid teacher, and maintained an independent household in defiance of the legal and social codes that tied Black women to domestic service. Her insistence that Afroboricua girls and women were fit subjects of rigorous instruction anticipated later struggles over access to higher education, STEM pathways, and equal pay for women of color. Among the modern educators who have explicitly carried her legacy is Professor Emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol, who joined the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Department at Brooklyn College in 1978 and chaired it from 1989 to 2004. Sánchez Korrol's scholarship on the Puerto Rican diaspora, beginning with From Colonia to Community, and her leadership in building one of the first ethnic studies departments in the City University of New York, extend Cordero y Molina's project of bringing Black and Latina women into the center of the historical and pedagogical record.

• Sánchez Korrol, V. (1983). From colonia to community: The history of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948. Greenwood Press.
• Chisholm-Burns, M. A., Spivey, C. A., Hagemann, T., & Josephson, M. A. (2017). Women in leadership and the bewildering glass ceiling. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 74(5), 312–324.
• Kinsbruner, J. (1996). Not of pure blood: The free people of color and racial prejudice in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Duke University Press.
• Stark, D. M. (2009). A new look at the African slave trade in Puerto Rico through the use of parish registers: 1660–1815. Slavery & Abolition, 30(4), 491–520.

• Afroféminas. (2019). Celestina Cordero Molina, la maestra negra que fundó la primera escuela de niñas en Puerto Rico. https://afrofeminas.com/2019/03/07/celestina-cordero-molina-la-maestra-negra-que-fundo-la-primera-escuela-de-ninas-en-puerto-rico
• Cabrera Salcedo, L. (2022). Rafael Cordero Molina. Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico.
• Chisholm-Burns, M. A., Spivey, C. A., Hagemann, T., & Josephson, M. A. (2017). Women in leadership and the bewildering glass ceiling. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 74(5), 312–324.
• Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury.
• Kinsbruner, J. (1996). Not of pure blood: The free people of color and racial prejudice in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Duke University Press.
• Levins Morales, A. (1998). Remedios: Stories of earth and iron from the history of Puertorriqueñas. Beacon Press.
• Martínez Vergne, T. (1999). Shaping the discourse on space: Charity and its wards in nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. University of Texas Press.
• Matos Rodríguez, F. V. (2004). Libertas in the service of the colonial project: Domestic workers in nineteenth-century San Juan. In Women and slavery in the Americas.
• Matos-Rodríguez, F. V., & Delgado, L. (Eds.). (1998). Puerto Rican women's history: New perspectives. M. E. Sharpe.
• Meléndez Badillo, J. (2011). Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico. Editorial Akelarre.
• Moll, L. C. (2019). Elaborating funds of knowledge: Community-oriented practices in international contexts. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 68(1), 130–138.
• Pérez-Vega, I. (2017). Archival sources for the study of free Blacks in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Journal of Caribbean History, 51(2), 1830–1850.
• Sánchez Korrol, V. (1983). From colonia to community: The history of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948. Greenwood Press.
• Stark, D. M. (2009). A new look at the African slave trade in Puerto Rico through the use of parish registers: 1660–1815. Slavery & Abolition, 30(4), 491–520.
• Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.