Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (Gabriela Mistral)

She remembered how the wind whistled through the Elqui Valley, curling around olive trees, vineyards, and adobe homes. That wind carried with it dust and stories, sometimes sadness, sometimes joy. For Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the wind would become a companion. A metaphor. A reminder that life, like the valleys of her home in northern Chile, was shaped by absence as much as presence. It would settle into her poetry as Lucila became known as Gabriela Mistral and the "Spiritual Mother of Latin America."

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Lucila was born in 1889 in Vicuña, Chile, in the Elqui Valley. "Esto, tan pequeño, puede llegar a amarse como lo perfecto" (This little place can be loved as perfection), she wrote about it. Most of her upbringing, however, would be spent in the nearby village of Montegrande after her father, a schoolteacher and poet, left the family when she was three. Her memories of him were largely in the poetry he left her.