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Born on January 11, 1839 in Rio Cañas, Mayagüez. One of Puerto Rico's greatest intellectuals, educator, philosopher, and advocate for education throughout Latin America.

Hostos received his elementary schooling in San Juan and then went to Spain for both secondary studies and law school. Hostos was educated in Spain and became active in republican politics as a university student there. He left Spain when that country's new constitution (1869) refused to grant independence to Puerto Rico. He went to the United States, where he became editor of the Cuban independence journal La Revolucién in 1870. In Santo Domingo (1879-88) he founded the first normal school and introduced advanced teaching methods, but nine years later he had to leave the country because of his liberal views. He subsequently traveled widely throughout South America and taught in Chile. As professor in the Univ. of Chile, he was instrumental in having women admitted.

He returned to the United States in 1898 and participated actively in the Cuban independence movement, but his hopes for Puerto Rican independence after the Spanish-American War (1898) were disappointed when the U.S. government rejected his proposal for autonomy and instead established its rule over the island as a territory. Hostos returned to the Dominican Republic. Hostos played a major role in reorganizing the educational system of the Dominican Republic. He is widely known throughout Latin America as a publicist of civic reforms, as a rationalist in ethics who believed that to be civilized and to be moral is the same thing, and as a writer of sober, graceful, and didactic prose. He wrote many essays and treatises on social-science topics and was one of the first systematic sociologists in Latin America. His most important was "La Peregrinacién de Bayoán" (1863), a seminal work promoting Cuban independence and revealing on a fiction tone restrictions of the Spanish Colonial regime. The book was suppressed by the Spanish Government. He was also known as a supporter of women's rights. He even wrote his own epitaph: "I wish that they will say: In that island [Puerto Rico] a man was born who loved truth, desired justice, and worked for the good of men." Other works: Moral social (1888); Lecciones de Derecho Constitucional (1887); and a superb essay, Hamlet (1873). He died on August 11, 1903 in Santo Domingo.