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"I must take you to meet friends of Don Pedro," Isolina Rondón, formerly secretary to Pedro Albizu Campos, announced one day. "He would have wanted you to know them." Winding in and out of narrow streets, we came to the home of the four maiden sisters, each with a special talent. Mirta Gutiérrez del Arroyo still teaches piano. Dolores is a retired high school teacher, and Isabel is an historian and former university professor. Carmen, very alert in cultural and political issues, takes on the job of keeping the home in order and meeting the needs of her sisters. She was the first to greet us. Gutiérrez del Arroyo Sisters
Though fluent in English, Carmen admitted that she expressed her thoughts much better in her native tongue. In reference to attempts to anglicize Puerto Ricans, she called it a crime to deprive people of their language.
"Isabel is very busy and has limited energy," Carmen warned us. But Isabel appeared briefly, bubbling over with stories of her beloved Don Pedro. Her nationalistic principles, which she openly proclaimed after the revolution of 1950, cost her her job teaching at the University of Puerto Rico, despite her high qualifications, including a doctorate in history from the University of Mexico.
Isabel was forewarned of the October revolution of 1950 when Don Pedro called her to meet him at the home of a Dominican priest, an admirer of Don Pedro. In their four-hour talk there was no mention of plans for a revolution. But the meeting signified to Isabel that something of importance was brewing. In the following month came the uprising, something that had to happen, Don Pedro proclaimed, "even if we have to fight with hands and pins." Catching wind that something was about to occur, police surrounded the home of Don Pedro, trapped and arrested him.
Isabel spoke of the great creative power of Don Pedro, his mystical nature, his joyfulness. During his last imprisonment, she recalled, he lay paralyzed by a stroke, unattended for several days and without medical care. When he was finally granted amnesty in November of 1964 and Isabel and Carmen went to see him, he was unable to speak. His face filled with sadness and anxiety as he fingered the black dress Isabel was wearing. Surely somebody in the family had died, he assumed. "No," Isabel assured him, "everybody is alive and well." And she went down the list of family members. His expression changed to one of peacefulness and resignation, unable as he was to express his feelings in words.
Such recollections racked her body with their intensity. She excused herself to return to her work of researching and writing a book on Puerto Rican history. "She must save her energy," Carmen explained. "She gets too wrought up reminiscing about Don Pedro."
As an historian, Isabel believes that "Albizu Campos' opportune historical emergence was providential, for God in His munificence grants nations in crisis the light of a resplendent star that illumines and saves them from not understanding their destiny." For her, Albizu was an apostle, a prophet, a teacher, as well as a revolutionary leader.
A recent honor paid to Isabel was the dedication of the Puerto Rican collection room of the Technical University of Bayamón in her name. She was praised as one of Puerto Rico's principal intellectuals and one of the first scientific investigators of the country. She was cited for her "conservation of our nationality, Spanish language and eventual integration of this Latin American country into the conglomerate of our sovereign nations, fulfilling the dream of Bolívar." Her file of hundreds of thousands of cards collected throughout thirty years of research is a bibliography of all historical areas bearing any relation to the national history of Puerto Rico, a unique guide to the basics of Puerto Rican cultural, political, economic, spiritual and ideological history.
The four sisters remain devout Catholics, as was Don Pedro, despite lack of support for independence among the five Catholic bishops of Puerto Rico. Writing, speaking, and participation in marches proclaim their undiminished zeal for independence.
As Carmen brought in cornmeal and coconut cake and acerola ice, she quoted Don Pedro, "En Lares, machete en mano, el jíbaro escribió con sangre, `¡Somos Puertorriqueños!'" ("In Lares, machete in hand, the jíbaro wrote in blood, `We are Puerto Ricans!'")