Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga in the high Andean village of Vicuña. Both her parents came from familes of mixed Basque and Indian heritage. Her father was a teacher, he left the family when Gabriela was three years old. Sowing her his love in a garden he made for her before he left.

Between 1898-1901 Mistral attended rural primary school and Vicuna state secondary school.

By the age of sixteen she was working as a teacher's aide to support herself and her mother. Mistral though advanced very fast and most of this was due to her various publications, which first appeared in the newspapers La Voz de Elqui and Diario Radical de Coquimbo in 1905. Her writings gained a diverse readership of schoolteachers, administrators, children and fellow poets. The pen name Gabriela Mistral - taken from the French poet Frédéric Mistral and the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio - was used only for her poetry.

Her Career: In 1921 Mistral became the principal of Santiago High School, Chile's most prestigious secondary school for girls.

Soon after Mistral had assumed her post in Santiago, she was invited to work in Mexico on a plan for the reform of schools and libraries. The following years she returned to Chile for only two brief visits.

From Mexico she went to the Unites States and Europe. Between the years 1925 and 1934, Mistral lived primarily in France and Italy, and worked for the League for Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. During this period she write fifty or more newspaper and magazine articles a year.

In 1930 Mistral was a visiting professor at Barnard College, New York City, and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York.

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 U.S.

Before and after the war Mistral was associated with a number of American universities. She also served as the Chilean consul in Los Angeles and in Italy.


Her poetry: Mistral's reputation as a poet was established when she won the Chilean prize for \Sonetos de la Muerte\(Sonnets of Death), love poems in memory of the dead in 1914. Much of her poetry is simple and direct in language, but full of warmth and emotion. The main themes in her poems are love, maternal love, sterility, nature, sorrow and recovery. Her lover, Romelio Ureta's suicide in 1909, left deep marks on her writings. Several of Mistral's early poems were written for him.

In 1922 she published her second collection of poems under the title \Desolacion\, which gained an immediate international acclaim. Its main themes were Christian faith and death - she promises that, after death "sunny land" will emerge from decay. In the final sonnet she expresses faith in a forgiving God. Many of the poems in \Ternura\ (1924) deal with childhood.

Gabriela yearned for a child. She never married but adopted a child who sadly passed away. Her maternal yearnings are present in her cradle songs and poems of mothers. She joined the lay order of the Franciscans and published such poems as \Motivos de San Francisco\ and \Elogios de las cosas de la tierra\, which combined spiritual and material values.In the 1930s Francisco Donoso, a Chilean author and priest, wrote that "almost all of Gabriela Mistral's poems have the accent of a prayer".

Throughout the last ten years of her life Mistral worked with \Poema de Chile\(1967), in which she returned to the agrarian Chile of her childhood.

She died of cancer on January 10, 1957, at the age of sixty-seven. "What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people," she once stated, and these words are also inscribed on her tomb.