Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was a Chilean author and educator whose poetry on loss, love, and passion gained worldwide renown. She was the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s storyteller was a Chilean author and educator whose poetry on loss, love, and passion gained worldwide renown. She was the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Please welcome Gabriela Mistral.
Gabriela was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga on April 7, 1889. She adopted the name she was better known by, Gabriela Mistral, as a pen name when she started publishing. She grew up in a small village called Monte Grande, tucked away in the Andes mountains.
Growing up, Gabriela’s family was essential to the formation of her identity as a writer. Her father was a school teacher who wrote poems and sang to her while playing guitar. Though he left the family when Gabriela was just 3 years old, he’d already inspired in her a love of literature. Gabriela’s mother instilled many of the young writer’s attachments to family, sentimentality, and home evident in her poems. Gabriela’s grandmother ignited a deep respect for poetic form -- she encouraged young Gabriela to memorize Bible verses and recite psalms.
In her poems and later years, Gabriela recalled her childhood in Monte Grande fondly. When she turned 11, she left the village to attend school in a nearby town called Vicuña. Gabriela would later call her departure from Monte Grande as her final moments of happiness.
A series of hardships awaited Gabriela in Vicuña. She had come from a poor family, and was subject to poor treatment by her peers and teachers. By the age of 15, she was working as a teacher’s aide to help support her family, and had published a few of her writings in local newspapers. One of them, called “The Education of Women,” criticized the limits placed on women’s access to schooling. When she was declined entry to a more prestigious school in 1906, Gabriela found out it was because headmasters there found her writing problematic. They also opposed her stance on liberalizing education and opening up schools to people of all social classes.
Despite these setbacks, Gabriela had found her calling in education reform. Teachers in rural Chile were scarce, and she was determined to make a difference. She studied for her teacher’s certification on her own while continuing to publish in local papers. In 1910, she received her teaching certificate.
Just a few years later, Gabriela published her first poems outside of Chile. She wrote to Nicaraguan writer Ruben Dario, who ran his own literary magazine in Paris called Elegancias. In 1913, a short story and a few poems by Gabriela appeared on the pages of Elegancias. One year later, Gabriela found local success after winning first prize in a poetry contest in Santiago. Her poem, called the “Sonnets of Death,” reflected on the 1909 suicide of her first love. The autobiographical nature of the poem romanticized Gabriela’s image as a tragic author, and the poem emphasized themes of love and loss that would continue to feature prominently in her works.
Gabriela’s writing caught the eye of then-Chilean secretary of education and future president Pedro Aguirre Cerda. He promptly appointed Gabriela as the principal of the Liceo de Niñas in Punta Arenas, a highschool in the southernmost part of the country.
The town was remote, far-removed from Chile’s capital, and as a port town was home to many immigrants. Gabriela was put in charge of reorganizing the school system to better serve the community, and implemented new initiatives like evening classes for workers who couldn’t attend during normal daytime hours.
Gabriela also continued to write. She penned 3 poems, called “Landscapes of Patagonia,” that were inspired by the simultaneous beauty of her surroundings, and the isolation from her family those remote surroundings brought.
Two years later, Gabriela continued her journey through Chile when she was appointed to work in Temuco. Her school was home to a high concentration of children from indigenous communities, and Gabriela saw firsthand the mistreatment of minorities in the education system’s status quo. She once again worked to implement community-based initiatives, and took inspiration from the area to advocate for indigenous populations in her poetry.
In 1921, Gabriela was appointed as the principal of a prestigious new school in Santiago. There, her fame grew -- she wrote poems and articles for local publications, and several of her works became part of primary school curriculums around Latin America. She also studied religious and spiritual writings from cultures around the world. She produced her first book, titled, “Desolacion,” a series of poems on life, teaching, and nature.
Following her book’s publication, Gabriela set to traveling the world as an author and educator. She lived for a time in Mexico, where she helped rebuild the public education system following the Mexican Revolution, and published journalistic articles about her time in the country.
After Gabriela released a second book called Ternura, she received a permanent stipend from the Chilean government for her service in education and culture. By this point, she was internationally famous. In 1925, she relocated to France to serve as the secretary of the Latin American Section of the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in the League of Nations.
In 1930, a new Chilean government helmed by General Carlos Ibáñez suspended Gabriela’s stipend, and she turned to journalism to make money. Her work was published in the most widely-circulated Spanish language newspapers around the world. She continued to teach, as well, securing residencies at Columbia University, Barnard College, and Middlebury College.
Gabriela also actively worked against the threat of facism in the 30s and 40s. When she published her third book of poetry, Tala, in 1938, she donated the proceeds to children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.
Gabriela was in Brazil listening to the radio when she heard she’d won the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1945, now a household name, Gabriela accepted the prize, becoming the first Latin American author to do so. In 1951, she also won the Chilean National Prize in literature, though due to failing health, she didn’t return to her home country from abroad until 1954. In 1957, Gabriela died after a battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 67 years old.
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