Gabriela Mistral in Brazil: ideological and physical proximity in the formation of transnational literary alliances

• In Event: Cultural Fronts in the Americas: a Hemispheric Approach to Public Intellectuals I

Abstract

This study considers the anti-fascist alliances to which Gabriela Mistral contributed during her six years in Brazil, over two residences as a Chilean consul. The first, from August to December of 1937, coincides with six months of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Estado Novo. The second encompasses the duration of World War II. In this multiarchival study, I establish the chronology of Mistral’s presence in Brazil and situate her alliances with regard to specific people and meeting places. I call attention to sites - the Palace of Itamaraty, the Embassy of Chile to Brazil in Argentina, the Hotel Terminus in São Paulo – where her activities helped form transnational anti-fascist alliances. The houses where Mistral lived became important way stations for travelers - Waldo Frank, Erna Fergusson, María Rosa Oliver, Benjamín Subercaseaux, Roger Caillois – who came by way of Washington DC, Buenos Aires, and Santiago Chile. The people and physical sites are linked with the venues where Mistral published: the Brazilian translation supplement “Pensamento da America”; SUR and La Nación, in Buenos Aires; El Mercurio in Santiago de Chile, and the Bulletin of the PanAmerican Union, in Washington D.C. By way of a visual map of Mistral’s network ties as registered in her publications, speeches, and letters during these years, I propose the centrality of specific subjects in Mistral’s forming antifascist alliances: Ribeiro Couto, Alfonso Reyes, Vinicius de Moraes, and Waldo Frank. Yet Mistral's relationships with women in Brazil propose other ways of understanding these networks.

Author

• Elizabeth R Horan, Arizona State University