Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Indian and European influences.

Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended the primary taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. She respected her sister greatly. Her father, Juan Gerónimo Godoy Villanueva, was also a schoolteacher. He abandoned the family when she was three years old, and died, long since estranged from the family, in 1911. Throughout her early years she was never far from poverty. At age, she began to support herself and her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, a seamstress, by working as a teacher's aide in the seaside town of Compania Baja, near La Serena, Chile.