Gabriela Mistral

A transgressor in her own time, this universal creator vindicated the writing of women, Hispanic America’s hybrid race and human rights.

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, who would later adopt the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was born on April 6, 1889 in Vicuña in the Elqui Valley, amid the Andes mountains in that part of northern Chile called “Norte Chico” or “Little North.”

She began her work in education as a rural teacher and as a poet by publishing in local newspapers and taking part in poetry competitions. She was the principal of a high school for girls in Santiago and wrote articles for the international press on her favorite topics: early childhood, education, women and the unification of the American intelligentsia.

She was a peripatetic writer and, upon being invited by the Mexican government, took part in the country’s Educational Reform. She published her first book in Mexico, entitled Desolación (“Despair”). Later came Ternura (“Tenderness”) and Tala (“Felling”).

In Mexico, the Escuela Hogar Gabriela Mistral (Gabriela Mistral Home School) was founded and published 20,000 copies of her book, Lecturas para mujeres (“Readings for Women”). In the 1930s, the Chilean Government appointed her consul in Genoa, a position she did not occupy on that occasion upon declaring herself to be anti-Fascist. She was transferred to Madrid and would later be consul in Portugal, France, Guatemala, Brazil and the United States.

Her poems of tenderness and grief achieved international recognition. In 1945, at the age of 56, she received the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1951 Chile’s National Prize for Literature. She died in New York in 1957, leaving her poem, Poema de Chile, to be published posthumously. Her grave as well as her school-museum are in Montegrande, nestled in the mountains of her native Elqui Valley, near the children and nature that inspired her work.