The academic Elizabeth Horan was born 67 years ago in the United States, but when you face her you get the feeling that you are in the presence of a spirit that is too young, with the overwhelming energy typical of the twenties, that time in which the world is a sea of infinite possibilities ready before our eyes to throw us into its depths. She did so then, when she traveled at her own expense to Spain. The move, or when he decided to immerse himself in the bowels of Latin America after learning Spanish and Latin and reading everything he found in his path about Latin American literature. About 20 years ago she began to investigate the character that seemed the most fascinating of all: the Chilean Gabriela Mistral. Now, with that sparkle in her eyes when she talks about her greatest passions, she presents the first of three books about the life of the poet, writer, professor and the only Nobel Prize-winning woman in literature. [1945] that this region has had and the first of the greats to publicly identify as mestizo: Mistral. A life. Only those who love me find me (Penguin Random House, 2024).
“Gabriela wrote letters, many letters, too many letters,” says Horan on one of the pages of the book. Thanks to that—and to her enormous work that has not yet been fully explored or published—Horan was able to trace the lines of Mistral’s profile; the journey from the birth of the Chilean, in 1889, in a small town next to the Andes mountain range called El Valle del Elqui, until the moment in which she left for Mexico, at 33 years of age, to be part of the educational and cultural plan of the former Secretary of Public Education José Vasconcelos, for which he had to pass several tests that Mexican diplomats gave him.
This was the first part of her life, a complex uphill path to find a place in the Chilean teaching profession and later, in her career as a diplomat. She didn’t have it easy. She came from a lower middle class family that, when she was old, she supported with her teacher’s salary. She grew up in a female-supported household—all the women in her family knew how to read and write, at a time when one in ten Chileans could do so. Her sister and her mother did what they could to keep the house standing and for Mistral to join the world that would give her new and better tools to survive. In a letter to her good—and extremely rich—friend Victoria Ocampo she wrote: “Hardnesses, fanaticisms, ugliness, there are in me that you will not be able to take care of, ignoring as you ignore what thirty years of chewing raw stone with a woman’s gums are like, within a tough race.”
Hardness and ugliness took every imaginable form in his childhood. The shadow of an alleged sexual abuse when she was 7 years old – by a close friend of her family -, her extreme shyness and her lack of desire to fulfill the roles imposed on her by being a woman in a country and at a time in which that represented a disadvantage; her sexual preferences, with a clear identification of what queera term that describes a gender and sexual identity other than heterosexual and cisgender), and her desire to explore the world beyond the Valley where she was born and later became the first Latin American writer to win a Nobel Prize.
Horan, in his endless enthusiasm, remembers wondering, “How did it turn out?” [Lucila Godoy Alcagaya —el verdadero nombre de Mistral—] of this valley without any surname privilege, which in Chile is, or was, everything? Without having any formal education after the age of 10, and reaching the top of four professions, internationally,” she says. Because, in addition to being a poet and writer, teacher and diplomat, Mistral was a bold and prolific journalist. She “started in Coquimbo and she published more than any other author of her time, when she was just a teenager. She wrote about 800 articles,” she recalls.
And how—as the author tells it in her book—Mistral managed to carve out a space for herself in the world history of literature despite her “envious” detractors who called her a third-rate scribbler, such as the Spanish writer Pío Baroja, who In 1946, months after the Chilean received the Nobel Prize, he criticized her by saying: “cockatoo poet,” or like Jorge Luis Borges, who judged her poorly both for her poetry and her articles.
Being mestizo, your pride
Gabriela Mistral, Horan reflects, is not only the first, but she is also the only great Latin American writer of the 20th century to declare her peasant origin and to describe herself as mestizo: “A sign of the racism that surrounded her, she did not openly assume that identity, but until shortly after her mother’s death, the only authority to contradict her,” he says. “It must be said that the Chilean environment represented in the regional and national publications of the time was very racist. Just read the best-selling work by Nicolás Palacios [Raza chilena, en 1904] or see the mortality figures among indigenous peoples to understand why Mistral, in his Chilean time, barely refers directly to racial identity. However, if you look closely, he does do it, but in coded and metaphorical language, in the same way that he refers to queerness, to his feminine masculinity,” says Horan.
After more than 20 years studying, reviewing and rediscovering new writings and contributions by Mistral, Horan assures that the Chilean’s place is still far from what she deserves. “Gabriela Mistral is an endless source for Latin America. That she has forged a language that is totally her own and that her prose is very accessible. She is one of the first writers to think of Latin America as an entity. She has not received the attention that she should have received, she is as important as Bolívar, like Martí, like Mariátegui.”
Secretaries and confidants
Horan’s work takes a journey through the life of the Chilean woman through work and the secrets guarded by her secretaries: the Chilean Laura Rodig, the Mexican Palma Guillén and the American Doris Dana. According to the academic, the work of these women and whoever was their partner wove a meticulous and valuable network of collaborative work that sought to provide the couple they formed with Mistral with privileged positions in circles that were prominently male. “Each book will be about her secretary at the time, or her primary secretary. This is about Laura Rodig, and we know from letters that Rodig was a lesbian, and we do not know with certainty that they were lovers, but it is possible, they had little privacy. But it is possible. Mistral’s secretary-friend relationship has many connotations. The roles are not stable and have to be negotiated. This shows how sexual dissidence is a primary point.”
In his attempt to reach Mexico with Vasconcelos, Mistral had to go through several tests that a group of diplomats gave him to demonstrate his ability to promote Mexico “not as a disordered State in permanent revolution, but as a country that It has diplomats, poets, and very good poets; a country that was among the leaders of Latin America.” From there his path was long, fruitful and transcendental. She was the architect of Vasconcelos’ educational reforms in Mexico, and she was a diplomat and pedagogue for a long list of places where she was intermittently until the end of her life. Horan, convinced of the infinite legacy that she still discovers in the Chilean, assures: “Mistral was (as she herself observed) the last of her lineage.”
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