Recasting the Role of the Intellectual: Chilean Poet Gabriela Mistral

Abstract

The life and work of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, is examined as an example of how difficult it was for women to win recognition as intellectuals in 20th-century Latin America. Despite an international reputation for erudition and political commitment, Mistral has traditionally been represented in stereotypically gendered terms as the ‘Mother’ and ‘Schoolteacher’ of the Americas, and it has been repeatedly claimed that she was both apolitical and anti-intellectual. This article contests such claims, arguing that she was not only committed to fulfilling the role of an intellectual, but that she also elaborated a critique of the dominant male Latin American view of intellectuality, probing the boundaries of both rationality and nationality as constructed by male Euro-Americans. In so doing, she addressed many of the crucial issues that still confront intellectuals today in Latin America and elsewhere.