Gabriela's circles of life.

• Author: Agosin, Marjorie
• Position: 1945 Nobel Prize for winner Literature Gabriela Mistral

Give me your hand and we shall dance Give me your hand and you will love me Together we will form a flower We'll be a flower and nothing more.

We will sing the same song We will dance the same step We will wave like a grain stalk A stalk and nothing more.

Your name is Rose and mine is Hope But you will soon forget your name Because we'll simply be a dance Upon the hill and nothing mere.

- Gabriela Mistral

It may have been no coincidence that the first Nobel Prize for Literature in Latin America was awarded to a woman - and a rural schoolteacher at that - in 1945, the year in which the European concentration camps were liberated and the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gabriela Mistral's Nobel Prize is a tribute to the voices of silence and to the appearance of such marginalized beings as women and children, schoolteachers, native Indians, and war refugees upon the stage of history. For through her writing, Mistral transformed them into accomplices of her personal vision.

In this year of 1995, in which the Allied victory is being commemorated and the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are singing hymns of peace, the Americas observe the fiftieth anniversary of that Nobel award in honor of Mistral and her concern for social justice. Through the images and bold language of her poetry, she celebrated her mujerio, a favorite term of the writer, weaving together beauty and nostalgia with the madness of...