The couple had to make an emergency stop in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where his mother, a native of Ecuador, gave birth to Viguié.

[4][5][6] Viguié's interest in the motion picture industry came about in 1901, after viewing the first silent film, an Eduardo Hervet presentation, exhibited in Teatro La Perla in Ponce.

During a trip to Paris, France, he witnessed Auguste and Louis Lumière's first public motion picture exhibition at the Caf-Les Capucinos.

[4][5] Viguié then went to work as a cameraman for "Porto Rico Photoplays," a film company established in Hato Rey.

Amongst the main staff of the company were Reginald Denny, Ralph Ince and Ruth Clifford, who were involved in constant quarrels.

As a result, he was offered numerous contracts to make documentaries for the Puerto Rico Department of Health, the government of the Dominican Republic and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1924, Viguié experimented with a new technique called Technicolor which yielded vivid, highly saturated levels of color to his film images.

In 1926, Viguié was hired by the producers of the movie Aloma of the South Seas to film the movie scenes in the location of Piñones[8] Viguié's international fame continued to grow, with his documentaries about Charles Lindbergh's 1928 visit to Puerto Rico, and the devastation caused that year by "Hurricane San Felipe Segundo" (known in the U.S. as "Okeechobee Hurricane").

[4] Synchronized film dialogue became possible in the late 1920s, with the perfection of the audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system.

Viguié's wife María was in charge of the wardrobe and the musical score was under the direction of composer Rafael Muñoz.

[4][5] Romance Tropical, which was distributed in theaters throughout Puerto Rico and New York by MGM, was an astounding success.

[7] Although for years many people sought to locate the missing film, it seemed as if it had met the fate of so many movies from that era, relegated to a few photos, a poster and newspaper articles from its initial release.

[9][10] The restored copy of the film had its big screen premiere for the first time in more than 80 years on November 4, 2017 at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles as part of UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing exhibition Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960.

Like his father, upon his retirement Viguié Jr. also left an indelible mark in history as being an instrumental element in the development of the film industry in the island.

[19] Today, Viguié's historical news documentaries are conserved in the Puerto Rico Archives and in the Carnegie Library.