Mother Earth, Earth Mother: Gabriela Mistral as an Early Ecofeminist

Abstract

Historians have noted that male bureaucrats and natural resource experts tended to dominate early twentieth-century national and hemispheric conservationist movements in Latin America, but a constellation of female activists, notable among them Gabriela Mistral, strengthened conservationism in the cultural sphere. Capitalizing on her leadership in Pan-Americanism, transnational feminist networks, and cutting-edge teaching, Mistral functioned throughout her career as an advocate for conservationism, gendering the natural environment in strategically essentialist ways. Important tropes throughout her poetry, Nature and Mother Earth became specific themes in Mistral’s journalistic prose. Here, Mistral blended conservationism with anti-imperialism, arguing that Mother Earth was threatened both by man’s failure to care for her and by predatory imperialists. Environmental stewardship also played a central role in her Pan-American initiatives and complimented the “official” Pan-American Conservation Movement of the interwar period. Mistral’s de facto ecofeminism is echoed in Latin American women’s writing of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, suggesting that Nature represented an alternate sphere for women beyond the urban manifestations of modernization. The gathering of female voices around the gendered image of Mother Nature also represents a corpus of early environmental prophets in Latin American letters and culture.