“Race Woman”: Reproducing the Nation in Gabriela Mistral

Abstract

This article unmasks Gabriela Mistral’s fiercely claimed public position, as the champion of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, by arguing that in her intimacy her position was absolutely opposed to any public nonnormative sexual stance. The author proposes three critical operations for the reading of Mistral’s work, regarding the subject of the Latin American “race”: the disavowal of blackness (Mistral responds to it with anxiety, sexualization, and pathologization, i.e., stereotypical white responses), the complicity of the language of diversity in the practices of white supremacist thinking (which is made clear in her correspondence), and the role played by Mistral’s queerness in her racialized nationalism (her queerness helped improve heteronormativity and the Latin Americanist racial project).