In October 2019, more than a million Chileans participated in what became the largest demonstration in the country’s history. Few things united them: some demanded better education, others greater indigenous rights.
But as the dust settled, one image slowly emerged as a prominent emblem. A mural in Santiago showed an older woman dressed in black combat boots, faded blue jeans and a punk rock band lyric T-shirt. Around her neck she wore a green scarf, the signature of Latin American abortion rights activists. She held a darkened national flag in her left hand.
The woman is Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet, educator and diplomat, who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1945.
Long portrayed in muted clothing and known for writing poems about children, Mistral is being claimed by a new generation of feminists and LGBT activists as an anti-establishment icon — and igniting a debate about how we appropriate literary figures from the past.
“Gabriela was a good figure to accompany this whole cause,” said Fab Ciraolo, who painted the mural. “For women, gay rights, the rights of the poor — it touches on all of those issues.”
Recent years have seen a surge in interest in Mistral, who died in the United States in 1957. In 2020, the Chilean Ministry of Culture released a digital anthology of his writings. In 2021, a selection of Mistral’s letters to Doris Dana, his partner and lifelong executor, was published to great acclaim.
Born in 1889, Mistral worked as a rural schoolteacher’s aide, submitting poems and essays to local newspapers in her spare time.
Mistral’s poor origins and lack of a title impeded the progress of his career. In 1922 he accepted an invitation from the Mexican government to reform the public education system and never returned to Chile.
She worked as a consul and visiting professor in Spain, Portugal, France, Brazil, Italy and the US, where she taught at Columbia University, in NY.
When the military seized power in 1973, Chile’s most famous poet was Pablo Neruda, a Nobel Prize winner and atheist communist. Mistral, by contrast, seemed like an appetizing cultural icon. The regime “manipulated his work to such an extent that his poems came to be considered naive and tender, when in reality they are powerful social critics,” said Alejandra Araya, director of an archive with Mistral’s work.
In 2007, the collections of letters between Mistral and Dana were made public. In them, Mistral oscillates between a doting mother—she often called Dana, who was 31 years her junior, “my little girl”—and a jealous lover, scolding her for meeting men and women.
Mistral categorically denied being a lesbian. However, some scholars argue that the letters and Mistral’s unusual lifestyle suggest that she at least was queer. She lived for long periods with secretaries who served as confidantes.
Now, Activists in Chile celebrate her as a feminist and LGBT icon — though she never identified as either.
“There is a debate here,” said June Garcia, an author. “Can we say that Gabriela Mistral was a lesbian if she never said so? I prefer to say that she disagreed with the heteronorm ”.
By: ANNE LANKES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6591061, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-28 21:30:08
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