...Licia Fiol-Matta Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in the remote Elqui Valley of Chile. She ascended from prototypical small-town schoolteacher to the most famous Latin American woman of her time in her multiple guises as educator, diplomat, and poet. For decades this 1945...

... in the past few years from the interdisciplinary field of queer theory.1 In a study of the Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, Fiol-Matta demonstrates how Mistral’s queerness — including a series of affairs with women, a non-normative gender presentation, and a spectacularly...

...: Gabriela Mistral in the Twenty-First Century,” Fiol-Matta revisits the career of Gabriela Mistral’s sexuality in Chilean politics and scholarship, demonstrating how archival knowledge pertaining to Mistral is used, by the state and in her own scholarship, to evince both heterosexist and...

...-Matta is professor of Latin American, Latino, and Puerto Rican studies at Lehman College, CUNY, and the PhD program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian languages and litera- tures at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (2002). Her...

... velvet seats, the salon has been the site for various solemn events throughout history. In 1957 a three-­day vigil was held there for the body of poet Gabriela Mistral; more than 170,000 Chileans came to pay their respects for the Nobel laureate.21 The hall is an emblematic place, and during the...

..., reproduction has never been owned or mandated by heterosexuals, just as reactionary and even authoritarian political practices have never been owned or mandated by heterosexuals, as Licia Fiol-Matta’s study of the queer Chilean poet and educational reformer Gabriela Mistral makes clear.7 Yet the...

... prominent place in the public realm in Chile, due in part to the omnipresence of two major literary figures, Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize, 1945) and Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize, 1971), whose work certainly forms part of a rich development of poetry during the twentieth century in the...