The many, many faces of Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela scowling

Gabriela frowning

Gabriela looking displeased

Gabriela looking displeased again

Gabriela ¨gazing blankly up at the sky
from a watery pit"

Born Lucilia de María Godoy Alcayaga in 1889 in Vicuña, Chile, Gabriela Mistral would become the first Latin American to accept the Nobel Prize for literature. She was an educator who worked to reform the Chilean and Mexican education systems in the early 20th Century, a journalist, a feminist, and (like other Latin American artists) held various diplomatic posts throughout the world.

Gabriela´s birthhouse

Water filtration station
from the 1880s

Gabriela´s primary school

Gabriela´s primary school

Gabriela´s gravesite in Montegrande,
a village in the Valle de Elqui

I did not get the chance to learn about her as much I would have liked to, and reading her poetry and about her life is on my ever-growing to-do list.  One quote of hers stuck out to me, though.She wrote, in Recados para America, that El aprendizaje de un idioma fue siempre una aventura fascinante el mejor de todos los viajes. (Learning a language was always a fascinating adventure, the best of all travel).

I think she might get me.