Gabriela Mistral

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (7 April 1889 - 10 January 1957), also known as Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and humanist. Among the most important historical figures in Chile, she was the first Latin American author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry, inspired by powerful emotions, which has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world." Nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed by a blend of Native American and European influences are some of the central themes in her poems. Her image can also be found on the 5,000 Chilean peso banknote.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the military dictatorship of Pinochet appropriated Gabriela Mistral's image, portraying her as a symbol of "submission to authority" and "social order." Views of her as a saintly celibate and suffering heterosexual woman were challenged first by author Licia Fiol-Matta, who claims she was a lesbian. The discovery of her archive in 2007, following the death of her alleged last romantic partner, Doris Dana, in 2006, confirmed her eventual lesbianism. Dana had saved thousands of documents, including letters from Mistral to her various female lovers. The publication of letters she wrote to Dana in the volume Niña errante (2007), edited by Pedro Pablo Zegers, reaffirmed the notion that the two had a long-term romantic relationship that supported Mistral in her final years. Velma Garca translated the letters into English, which were published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018.

Regardless of these hypotheses about their alleged romance, Doris Dana, who was 31 years younger than Mistral, denied explicitly in her last interview that her relationship with Mistral was romantic or erotic, and described it as a stepmother-stepdaughter relationship. Dana denied being lesbian, and she believes Gabriela Mistral was not lesbian. Mistral suffered from diabetes and heart disease. She died of pancreatic cancer on January 10, 1957, in Hempstead Hospital in New York City, at the age of 67, with Doris Dana by her side.