Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler

Edited by Marjorie Agosín

Copyright 2003 by Center for International Studies, Ohio University, USA

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio

 

Kara Horowitz

 

            In this compilation of essays on Gabriela Mistral, the Noble poet from Chile, we learn everything about her, from her time as rural schoolteacher to her national fame even after her death.

 

            In "A World Full of X's and K's: Parables of Human Rights in the Prose of Gabriel Mistral," we learn from the author, Joseph R. Slaughter, the importance of libraries in Mistral's life.  Slaughter states: "For Mistral, the library is particularly praiseworthy for its capacity to house contrasting and contradictory ideas."(pg. 40). Mistral loved libraries because of the way they showcased cooperation. Books of different ideologies where housed in the same structure and the books "side by side sit 'the strong and the meek, the wise and the delirious, the serious and the playful, the conformists and the rebels (63)'" (pg. 40). In libraries, Mistral believed all sides of a conflict or issue could be, and had to be, presented. "A library, despite its silences, is like a small guerrilla camp: ideas fight here at their please: We…insinuate ourselves into the fray without blood (Mistral, 63) (pg. 41)."

¿Qué es una biblioteca? Repertorio americano (san Jose), 10 May 1950. Rpt. in Paginas en prose, 63-67.

 

            In Chapter 3, "Gabriela Mistral as Teacher: Revisiting Lucila Godoy Alcayaga's Pedagogical Assumptions," Veronica Darer shows the reader how Gabriela Mistral continues to be regarded as a symbol of public education in Chile. Educational projects in Chile are fashioned after her ideals, including El Proyecto Montegrande, a government education program for educational equity at the middle school level. Darer shows how Mistral fought continuously for equity in the school system. "Gabriela knew and loved the poor and defenseless and could never abandon them…She once said, 'I want to dedicate myself fully to the education of the masses (Gazarian-Gautier,49)'" Darer states that Mistral's most important and lasting gift is "the incorporation of democracy and equality as intrinsic components of the world of schools and the concept of schooling as the seed for the creation of a just and participatory society" (pg. 53).* Mistral also emphasized the role of the teacher. For Mistral, teaching was also being a surrogate mother: "Le me be more mother than the actual mothers, to be able to love and defend like them what is not flesh of my flesh" (Scarpa, Mistral, 35). Teachers, Darer says, in Latin America teach schoolwork, but also concepts of affection, tenderness and discipline.

*Mistral: "Place in my democratic school the splendor that hovers over your chorus of barefoot children" (Scarpa, Mistral, 55) (pg. 53)

 

            The mourning of Mistral's death left her as a national symbol of Chile, according to Elizabeth Horan in Chapter 13 "Mirror to the Nation, Posthumous Portraits of Gabriela Mistral." She has become a symbol for monuments, money, plaques, busts, postage stamps and city murals. "Appealing to her memory stamps a sense of historical legitimacy onto a variety of local projects," Horan states (pg. 229). Horan also points out other historical writer-educators who have been canonized, whose "biography of the saint matters less for the individual than for the community." (pg. 245). Mistral's image continues to dominate Chilean culture because of her international fame and the fact that she can be "a message variously emptied or filled with meaning depending on who receives the message from whom" (pg. 245).

 

 

Possible Perspectives

Libraries: Provincial and/or public libraries and how the public uses them. Are they regarded widely as Mistral described them? Or are they becoming obsolete in the Internet era?

 

Chilean Teachers: Are they still vehicles for life lessons, and not just the lessons of school. Particularly rural schoolteachers- how are they embodying Mistral, how has education evolved since Mistral's time?

 

Mistral as Art: A mural installed in downtown Santiago in 1971. Visual, public art and how much of it has been created.