She helped organize women schoolteachers to burn down the building of the official newspaper and to overthrow the dictatorship of Costa Rica's Federico Tinoco Granados in 1919. She is credited with translating the Communist Manifesto into Spanish in 1920. She went on to take a leading role in the banana workers' strike of 1934. During this time, she wrote "Bananos y Hombres" (Bananas and Men). 