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A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral. By LICIA FiOL-MATTA. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pp. xxix + 269. $54.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
This study is an engaging and thought-provoking analysis of the myth and person of Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet who in 1945 became the first Latin American awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although she is best remembered for her verse, Licia Fiol-Matta reminds us that Mistral was also a key architect of public education throughout Latin America and an important player in midcentury diplomatic circles. Discomfort with Mistral's queerness, Fiol-Matta argues, in part explains this narrowed view of her historical importance.
As a biography, this is a skillful piece of scholarship, one that resists casting Mistral as heroine, villain, or victim. Instead, the author presents the complexities of a figure who lived in dichotomous public and private worlds: the "closeted lesbian" who became the "mother of the nation." Traditional accounts depict Mistral as a tragic asexual figure whose only true love (a man) committed suicide when she was young and as a poet who espoused fairly traditional views about gender and sex roles. Using previously underutilized collections of Mistral's writings, Fiol-Matta paints a more complex picture of a male-identified intellectual who maintained a series of long and important relationships with women and whose writings did not always conform to the heteronormative, "separate sphere" prescriptions often attributed to her. $he also examines the ways that Mistral participated in shaping and manipulating her public image and reveals her as a conscious actor in this process who both benefited and suffered because of the role she herself helped to fashion.
Both race and gender were key components in twentieth-century notions of Latin American citizenship and nationhood. Chapter 1 is a fascinating discussion of Mistral's role in shaping educational policy in revolutionary...