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Journal of the History of Sexuality 12.1 (2003) 137-139



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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. She 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 Mexico and a rather disquieting examination of her racial [End Page 137] politics. During her time in Mexico, Mistral seems to have engineered her own racial reclassification, shedding her white image and adopting a new mestiza pose as the "mixed-race mother of the nation." Mistral worked closely during this time with Mexican Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos, a well-known champion of mestizaje who, in contrast, saw Africanness as a liability and a debilitating force within the American "race." Mistral maintained the same double standard: a sometimes patronizing champion of the indigenous peoples, she could exhibit virulent racism toward Afro-Latin Americans. Mistral's queerness, in other words, did not necessarily give her insight into racial oppression, leading Fiol-Matta to conclude that "there are no necessary, certain, or predictable alliances between sexually oppressed people and racially oppressed people" (36).

Subsequent chapters seek to explore the ways both Mistral and the state sought to use her queer image to their respective advantage. Chapter 2 begins with an analysis of the schoolteacher as a queer figure and provides an insightful analysis of the role of the queer woman in the promotion of state education policies. In this and later chapters Fiol-Matta argues that a "masculine" woman like Mistral was the ideal vessel for the deployment of state-building projects aimed at forging a disciplined and compliant citizenry. At the end of the book Fiol-Matta refers to Mistral as a "secular nun." I think a further exploration of this secular refashioning of religious imagery (and the nun as queer figure) might have helped historicize Mistral's image and advanced the author's analysis of the ways Mistral "queered the state."

Armed with this new analysis of Mistral's image and role, the author then moves on to offer new readings of some of Mistral's public and private writings. Chapter 3 offers a revision of the widely held view of Mistral as a proponent of a "separate spheres" ideology, arguing instead that private and public intermingled in complex ways in Mistral's discourse. Race...

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