El siete de abril/April 7th

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga)! (1889-1957)

Image from Biblioteca Yacucho. Click HERE. 

A Chilean poet, educator, and diplomat, she was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1945), and she remains the only Latin American woman to have won the prize to date. As this 2003 New York Times article asserts, there is probably "no town in [Chile] that does not have a street, square or school named for her." Her image also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note. Born in Vicuña, Chile to a seamstress mother and a guitar-playing, poetry-writing father who abandoned the family when she was three, Mistral grew up surrounded by the Andes Mountains. Though she only attended school until she was 11, she nonetheless began writing poetry at the age of 13. A year later, she became a teacher's aide and discovered a passion for the classroom that would never wane. She taught elementary and secondary school for years until her poetry made her famous, and she continued to be involved with education, greatly influencing the educational systems in Mexico and Chile, for the rest of her life. Pablo Neruda, another of Chile's great poets, was one of her students. Mistral was an advocate for women's and indigenous people's rights, and she left her inheritance from the sales of her books in South America to the impoverished children of Monte Grande, in the Elqui Valley of Chile, where she had spent her childhood. During the Pinochet dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, the regime used Mistral as an image for social order and submission to authority (they were the ones who put her photo on the 5,000 peso), though since the regime ended and democracy returned in 1990, Mistral was studied for all her complexity. See this short "Draw My Life" video (in Spanish) for Chilean children or watch this video (in English) from the Gabriela Mistral Foundation to learn more about Mistral and her life. You can also check out her Nobel Prize official biography HERE and the Google Doodle done to honor her life in 2015 HERE.

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.