Move Over, Pablo Neruda. Young Chileans Have a New Favorite Poet.

In October 2019, more than a million Chileans took to the streets in what became the country’s biggest ever protest. Few things united them: Some demanded better education, others greater Indigenous rights. They had no leaders or symbols.

But as the dust settled, one image slowly emerged as a prominent emblem. A mural in downtown Santiago depicted an elderly woman dressed in black combat boots, faded jeans and a T-shirt with lyrics from a punk rock band. Her neck was wrapped in a green handkerchief, the signature of Latin American abortion-rights activists. In her left hand she held a blacked-out national flag; in her right, an open book.

The woman is Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet, educator and diplomat, who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. Long depicted in fusty garb and known for writing poems about children, Mistral is being reclaimed by a new generation of feminist and L.G.B.T. activists as an anti-establishment icon — and igniting a debate about how we appropriate literary figures from the past.

“My instinct told me that Gabriela was a good figure to accompany this whole cause,” said Fab Ciraolo, the artist who painted the mural. “For women, gay rights, rights for the poor — she touches all those issues.”

The past few years have seen a surge of interest in Mistral, who died on Long Island in 1957. In 2020 the Chilean Ministry of Culture released an eight-volume digital anthology of her poetry, letters and essays, one of the most significant compilations of her work to date. In 2021, a selection of Mistral’s letters to Doris Dana, her longtime companion and executor, was published to acclaim.

This spring the Spanish version of “A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral,” by Licia Fiol-Matta, a professor of Latin American literature at New York University, is scheduled to be released by a Chilean publishing house, two decades after its controversial publication in English.