Hispanic Heritage Month: Literary

Luis de Góngora was a Spanish poet. Born on July 11, 1561 to a wealthy family, his father was a judge who had a large library collection. In 1575, he enrolled at the University of Salamanca although it does not seem that he obtained a degree. After this time, Góngora moved around, associating with powerful political figures. He published ballads, lyric poems, and sonnets. In 1605, at the age of 55, he became an ordained priest and became the honorary chaplain to King Philip III of Spain in 1617.

Góngora had a longstanding feud with Francisco Quevedo where both poets would attack one another in their pieces. Quevedo would go as far as purchase the house that Góngora was staying in just to evict him in 1625. Góngora would pass on May 23rd, 1627.

Góngora has been known to have developed the style called Gongorismo. This was taken from Culteranismo that is a term for poets and an audience that feel lost within Spain.

Born in 1648 or 1651, de la Cruz was born in where is now Mexico. She was the illegitimate child of her father who was a Spanish navy captain. Her mother was Creole whose family owned property near Mexico City. She had two siblings and learned to read at a young age. By the age of eight, she was composing poetry. By thirteen, she was teaching children Latin as well as had learned the Aztec language, Nahuatl, spoken in central Mexico.

When she was eight, she was sent to live with her aunt in Mexico City. While there, de la Cruz tried to persuade her family to allow her to dress as a male in order for her to get higher education. They forbade her, so she continued her education in private. At sixteen, de la Cruz was sent to the court of the Viceroy and admitted into service of the viceroy's wife. A year later, the Viceroy challenged her knowledge on various scientific and literary subjects. Her knowledge became public admiration around the court and around Mexico. 

De la Cruz declined marriage and eventually entered into the convent. Even in the convent, she continued to write and continued with her studies. She was often criticized for her studies and craft for not being religious enough. In 1690, a letter of hers was publicized without her permission. It was a letter of her criticizing a well-known Jesuit sermon. De la Cruz publicized Respuesta a Sor Fiotea as a response. 

After many political pressures, in 1693, she stopped writing. De la Cruz passed during a plague on April 17, 1695. Many of her unpublished works had not survived.

Gabriela Mistral is the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, diplomat, and educator. Mistral was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945.

Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile on April 7, 1889. her mother was a seamstress and her father became estranged by the time Mistral was three. Troubled by poverty by a young age, she supported her mother and herself by becoming a teacher's aid. In 1904, she published some poems using different pseudonyms. In 1914, she had her first published work (also under a pseudonym).

Since 1908, Mistral began using her pen name Gabriela Mistral for her writing. In 1922, she published her first book. It was a success. Two years later, she published her second book. A lot of her work has permeated Latin American poetry, often described as being highly emotional and in an original style.

Mistral taught in many education spaces and worked in many schools despite her not having formal education. In 1924, Mistral addressed the Pan American Union. In 1925, she retired from the school system.

For further reading on Gabriela Mistral and about her writings, read the Poetry Foundation's webpage.

Pablo Neruda is the pseudonym of Richardo Eliéver Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. Neruda was born July 12, 1904 in Chile. His mother passed two months after he was born. When Neruda was two, his father remarried. From a young age, he shown great interest in nature and the natural world which would later become source of his poetry.

Before he reached college, Neruda had already published in local papers, magazines, and won several literary competitions. In 1921, he moved to study French at the University of Chile. Not soon after, in 1923, he publishes his first book which was highly praised. In 1927, he took diplomatic service and married his first wife in 1930. They had a child together, but she was an ill child.

When the Spanish civil war broke out, Neruda was still in service. In 1937, he was dismissed for his political leanings and returned home. In 1940, he was appointed consul in Mexico. In 1943, he divorced his wife, found out his child had passed, married his girlfriend, and returned to Chile. 

In 1945, Neruda joined the Communist Part of Chile and receives the National Literature Award. Neruda found himself in hiding and under the threat of arrest after reading out names of Communist miners who were imprisoned and placed into concentration camps. He would spend three years in exile. He was able to return to Chile in 1952 and in 1953 he received the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize, which cause some tension given his past affair with Joseph Stalin's policies.

In 1973, Neruda was hospitalized with prostate cancer and passed.

For more about Pablo Neruda and about his poetry, check out the poetry foundation's webpage about him.

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 near Mexico City. His family had political ties during the Mexican Revolution and had financial difficulties after the Revolution was over. Paz's father fought and died during this time. His grandfather introduced him to literature at a young age.

By the time Paz was 19, he already published several poems in local publications and had published a collection of poems. Paz studied law at the National University of Mexico, but had left in 1936. While in Spain at the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers, he became entrenched in the Spanish Civil War and the political tones in his own country. He returned to Mexico, became one of the founders of a literary journal, and worked as a poet, journalist, and translator.

Paz's best-known work, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) was made in 1950. It is an essay broken up into nine parts where Paz has an overarching theme of Mexican identity and solitude. The identity spoken about in this essay talks about colonialism culture vs. indigenous culture and where does identity lie if the colonist country goes away. Paz also was influenced by things like surrealism and Marxism in his earlier work and love and time in later work.

In 1962, Paz was appointed as ambassador to India. He resigned his diplomatic duties after four years of service because of student demonstrations during the Olympic games in Mexico. Throughout his life, he founded several literary magazines. He was named an honorary doctor at Harvard in 1980 and had won many prestigious prizes. In 1990, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Paz died on April 19, 1998.

For a list of all of Paz's work, check out his biographical page on the Nobel Prize website. For an in depth view of his work, read the Poetry Foundation's webpage for more detail.

Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca