Born Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, this Chilean educator, cultural minister, diplomat, and poet was the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded in 1945 "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world." - The Nobel Prize in Literature 1945
Lucila was born on April 6, 1889 in Vicuña, Chile (see map). Her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, was of Basque descent, and her father, Jeronimo Godoy Alcayaga Villanueva, was an itinerant poet and school teacher of Indian and Jewish descent. He abandoned the family when Lucila was three years old, and thereafter, Lucila and her step-sister Emelina, who was fifteen years older, were raised alone by their mother. Lucila was a shy, plain and solitary child.
When she was sixteen, Lucila moved to La Cantera to work and there fell in love with Romelio Ureta, a railroad worker who was found guilty of embezzlement and committed suicide in 1909, when Lucila was eighteen. Devastated by the abandonment by the two most important men in her life, Lucila expressed her feelings in Sonetos de la Muerte, Sonnets of Death.
She never married but adopted a child who died in 1943.
Achieving certification, she taught in various Chilean cities, including Temuco, where she encouraged Pablo Neruda. Her time in Punta Arenas gave rise to Patagonian Landscapes.
Her advancement in education is credited to her teaching abilities and to publications for educators, administrators and children. In 1922 Mistral accepted an invitation to start educational programs for the poor in Mexico. In 1923, Mistral was awarded the title Teacher of the Nation by her own government.
As Mistral became famous for both education and poetry, she attended conferences and made speeches. In 1933 she entered the Chilean Foreign Service and was appointed by the Chilean government as a kind of ambassador-at-large for Latin American Culture. Later Mistral represented Chile as honorary consul in Brazil, Spain, Portugal and the US. Between 1922 and 1938 she worked in the League of Nations.
With publication, she became formally known as Gabriela Mistral. She published three poems from Sonnets of Death in 1914 for which she won a national prize in poetry. She edited a book of poetry and prose entitled Readings for Women In 1922, she published her first volume of poems entitled Desolación, in which she expressed her feelings toward pain and death. Ternura published in 1925, was a collection of poetry for children which celebrated the joys of birth and motherhood.
The dominant themes in her poetry were love, death, childhood, maternity, religion, justice and the beauty of nature and of Chile, her native land. She also wrote fables and continued publishing in periodicals.
When Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, she accepted it on behalf of Latin America in her Acceptance Speech.
Gabriela Mistral died of cancer on January 10, 1957, at the age of sixty-seven. Her body was flown to Chile and buried in Montegrande.
What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people, she once wrote, and these words are inscribed on her tomb.
In her honor, the Gabriela Mistral Inter-American Prize for Culture was created in 1979. In the late 1990s CEPCIDI, an OAS organization, assumed responsibility for the establishing the rules of procedure for awarding the Prize. The Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros received the prize in 2000 as did the British rock singer Sting in 2001.
Browse through some of her poetry in Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957). Gabriela Mistral's poetry has now been translated into many languages, and much of it published or reprinted following her death. With her death, long suppressed rumors of her sexual preferences and her supposed motherhood have arisen and been discussed and/or denied in the press. The importance of her feminism, her educational achievements, her alleged lesbian relationships and the movie, La Pasajera are discussed in La película sobre la Mistral que genera polémica.
In the end, the mysteries and secrets of Gabriela Mistral's personal life are, to this writer, inconsequential against the vast richness of her body of work in which she spoke for women and children everywhere.
