Gabriela Mistral: Reimagining Chile in Times of Feminism, Uprising, and the Creation of National Community

The UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese invites you to Gabriela Mistral: Reimagining Chile in Times of Feminism, Uprising, and the Creation of National Community presented by guest speaker Professor Soledad Falabella Luco, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile 

Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Time: 4:00 pm

Location: Lydeen Library, 4302 Rolfe Hall

Feminist movements have been at the center of recent mass uprisings against social injustice in Chile that have launched a national process for re-writing the Chilean Constitution and imagining more inclusive and egalitarian communities. The figure of Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) has become emblematic of this contemporary transformation. Mistral’s image and words have mediated the new voices, bodies, demands, and dreams articulated from the streets and in elected assemblies. Professor Soledad Falabella provides a genealogy of Gabriela Mistral’s legacy in Chilean cultural politics. She traces how a new generation of activists have taken Mistral’s image out of the conservative closet, where it was once appropriated by the military dictatorship, and rearticulated the poet’s symbolic power as challenges to patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.