A Story of Survival in Puerto Rico

In the mountains of Humacao, Puerto Rico, a baby girl was born on November 28, 1890. Her parents, Guadalupe Mijon and Juana Rivera, named her Rafaela. They lived in the rural barrio of Mabu, where life was measured by the rhythms of the land and the church calendar. Rafaela’s baptism would not come until more than a year later, a delay that hints at circumstances we can only imagine—perhaps illness, poverty, or family turmoil already beginning to brew.

What we know of Rafaela’s early childhood comes in fragments, preserved in the careful script of parish priests and civil registrars. She was confirmed at Dulce Nombre de Jesus church in January 1891, when she would have been barely two months old—an unusual event that suggests her family feared for her life. Josefa Pena and Carmen Olmedo stood as her godmothers, their names recorded in the confirmation register. Then, in February 1892, came her baptism, with Catalino Villafane and Leonarda Delgado serving as godparents. The delay, the seeming repetition of sacraments—these details whisper of a family in distress, though the records offer no explanation.

The Year Everything Changed

Rafaela was only two years old when her world collapsed. On March 30, 1893, her mother Juana Rivera died in Tejas, Humacao. The death certificate, signed the following day, recorded the cause as hemorrhage. The declarant was not Guadalupe, Juana’s husband, but Pablo Rivera—Juana’s own father, Rafaela’s grandfather. The document noted that Juana left behind two daughters: Rafaela and her younger sister Juana.

But the death certificate told only part of the story. Five days later, on April 4, 1893, the newspaper La Democracia published an account that revealed a darker truth. Guadalupe Mijon had been arrested for the murder of his wife. According to the report, on the morning of the crime, Guadalupe and Juana had quarreled about jealousy. He threatened to kill her. Neighbors heard the argument and intervened, and the confrontation ended. But that evening, Guadalupe sent his eldest son out on an errand—a son from a previous relationship, revealing that Rafaela had half-siblings she may never have known. Guadalupe stayed home with Juana and three young children. When the boy returned, he found his stepmother dead, stabbed five times, and his father pacing frantically through the house.

The newspaper called the boy Guadalupe’s ‘eldest son,’ suggesting there were other children from his first marriage. Who were they? What became of them? The records are silent. But in that terrible moment, when the boy came home to find his stepmother’s body, all of their lives changed forever.

Rafaela was too young to remember any of this directly. She was not yet three years old. But the absence of her mother would shape every day that followed.

An Orphan at Three

Guadalupe Mijon was convicted and transported to the Spanish penal colony at Ceuta, on the northern coast of Africa. There, in the hospital of Jesus y Maria, he died on July 16, 1894, at eight o’clock in the evening. The cause was recorded as ‘toxic fever.’ He received the last rites. He was 45 years old.

By the summer of 1894, Rafaela was orphaned. Not yet four years old, she had lost both parents to violence—one to murder, one to the consequences of that murder. She and her sister Juana were alone in the world, save for their maternal grandparents, Pablo and Ramona Rivera, who lived in Naguabo.

What happened to the two little girls in the years that followed? The documentary record falls silent. Between 1894 and 1907, Rafaela disappears from the archives. We can imagine that her grandfather Pablo took the girls in—the same man who had come to identify his daughter’s body, who had stood as declarant at the death registry. Perhaps Rafaela and little Juana grew up in their grandparents’ home in Naguabo, learning to read and write, attending Mass, trying to build a childhood from the ruins of tragedy.

Another Loss

On New Year’s Day, 1907, Rafaela lost her sister. Juana Mijon y Rivera died in Rio Blanco, near Naguabo, at the age of fifteen. She was single, the record notes—a detail that seems unbearably poignant for a girl who would never have the chance to marry, to have a family of her own. Once again, it was Pablo Rivera who stood as declarant, the grandfather who had now buried a daughter and a granddaughter.

Rafaela was sixteen years old, or perhaps nineteen—the records disagree about her age, one of many mysteries that surround her life. Either way, she was now truly alone. The only sister she had known, her companion through orphanhood, was gone.

A Young Woman on Her Own

When the census taker came through Rio Canas in January 1910, he found Rafaela Mijon y Rivera boarding in someone’s home. She was listed as white, female, single. She had never been pregnant and had no children. She spoke Spanish. She could read and write—an achievement in rural Puerto Rico at the time. She had attended school as recently as 1909. She was keeping house, likely for the family she boarded with, earning her keep through domestic work.

The census taker recorded her age as fifteen, though she should have been nineteen if the 1890 birth record was correct. Was this an error? Did Rafaela herself not know her exact age? Or had the trauma of her early years caused such confusion in the records that even she was uncertain when she was born?

She was no longer living with her grandparents Pablo and Ramona. Rafaela needed to strike out on her own, to find work, to make her way in the world as a young woman without family support. The records don’t tell us why she was boarding, or how she came to be in Rio Canas, some distance from where she had grown up.

What the Records Don’t Say

The documents tell us the bare facts of Rafaela’s early life: baptisms and confirmations, deaths and arrests, census entries. But they cannot tell us what it was like to be that child. They cannot record the nightmares she might have had, or whether her grandparents told her the truth about how her mother died. They cannot tell us if she remembered her father’s voice, or if she was comforted by her sister’s presence during the long, difficult years of their childhood.

We don’t know if Rafaela blamed her father, or pitied him. We don’t know if she understood why he had killed her mother, or if understanding would have made it worse. We don’t know what she thought about on January 1, 1907, when she buried her sister on New Year’s Day—whether she felt relief that she had survived when Juana had not, or whether she felt utterly alone.

What we do know is that Rafaela survived. Born in the hills of Humacao in 1890, orphaned by violence before she could remember her parents’ faces, deprived of her only sibling as a teenager, she learned to read and write. She found work. She made her way. By 1910, she was a young woman living independently, literate and capable, still moving forward despite everything that had tried to break her.

The records end there, in January 1910, with a nineteen-year-old woman—or perhaps a fifteen-year-old woman, if the census was right (it wasn’t) —keeping house for a family in Rio Canas. Did she ever speak of her parents, or did she bury that story as deeply as her sister was buried in the ground?

These are questions for further research, mysteries waiting to be solved. But even in the fragments we have, Rafaela’s story speaks across more than a century. She was a survivor. Against all odds, she endured.

Historical Notes and Sources

This narrative is based on historical documents and attempts to tell Rafaela’s story truthfully while acknowledging the gaps in the record. The following sources document the known facts of her life:

Birth and Baptism:

Rafaela’s birth on November 28, 1890, is recorded in the parish register of Dulce Nombre de Jesus, Humacao (FamilySearch, Libro 19, Image 2081). Her confirmation on January 17, 1891, appears in the Humacao confirmation records (Libro 3, Image 234). Her baptism on February 7, 1892, is also recorded in the parish register (Libro 19).

Mother’s Death:

Juana Rivera y Hernandez’s death on March 30, 1893, is recorded in Humacao civil death records (Libro 10, Image 1654, dated March 31, 1893). The newspaper account of Guadalupe Mijon’s arrest appears in La Democracia, April 4, 1893, page 3.

Father’s Death:

Guadalupe Mijon y Cintron’s death on July 16, 1894, in Ceuta, Spain, is recorded in the Archivo Parroquial de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Libro 3º de defunciones penitenciarias 1890-1904, folio 67.

Sister’s Death:

Juana Mijon y Rivera’s death on January 1, 1907, is recorded in Naguabo civil death records (Libro 17, Image 105, dated January 2, 1907).

1910 Census:

Rafaela’s appearance in the 1910 Puerto Rico census is documented in the records for Municipal Caguas, Rio Canas (Volume 12, Image 1250, enumerated January 18, 1910).

Interpretive Elements:

While the documented facts are accurately presented, this narrative includes reasonable inferences about Rafaela’s emotional experiences and living circumstances. The following elements are interpretive:

• Rafaela’s inability to remember her parents directly (based on her young age at the time of the tragedies)

• The suggestion that she may have lived with her grandparents Pablo Rivera and Ramona Hernandez (inferred from Pablo serving as declarant for both her mother and sister’s deaths, and the family connection to Naguabo)

• Descriptions of her emotional state and inner life (imagined based on the documented circumstances)

• Details about the reasons for delayed baptism or her boarding situation (unknown from the records)

Unresolved Questions:

Several significant questions remain unanswered and would benefit from additional research:

• The identity and fate of Guadalupe’s children from his first marriage

• Rafaela’s exact whereabouts between 1894 and 1907

• The identity of the family she was boarding with in 1910

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Until Next Time,

Lilly Resto Gunderman

January 2026