A Queer Mother For The NationChilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889 1957), the first Latin American to win theNobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate, the national schoolteacher mother. How this distinctly masculine woman who never gave birth came to occupy this role, and what Mistrals image, poetry, and life have to say about the relations and realities of race, gender, and sexual politics in her time,