Chilean writer and educator Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is widely knownacross Latin America for being a poet laureate who wrote children's rhymes andpoems to lost lovers. The present doctoral dissertation, will permita broadreadership to think about Gabriela Mistral as a major intellectual, who not only reflected on Latín America and its relations with the world but who hadan active role in political and transnational debates of the first half of the twentieth century.By tracing Mistral's trajectory from being a woman born in a poor and rural area to achieving unique creative and professional goals, I have questioned the notion that her poetry is the decisive factor of her becoming an influential public figure in order to assert the central role of her essays in the press, her visual representations and her public performance in her construction as a Latin American woman intellectual.My theoretical approach draws on gender and visual theory as well as ontheory and history ofthe intellectual. Working from ideas on the modern intellectual in Latin America, its relationship with the state, the cultural industries and discourses on modernity, nationalism and Latinoamericanism, I critically address gender performance and representation in the public sphere, paying particular attention to the intersections between the lettered, the popular and the mass media.This project is ultimately about how Gabriela Mistral beca me a modern andtransnational intellectual by activating a set of identifiable and previouslyunrecognized strategies and negotiations with regard to the cultural and políticalestablishment. Those negotiations led, in turn, to the contradictory facets of herpublic image, enabl ing a very wide range of political, intellectual and social sectors to read and re-write her work and figure. Doctor en Filosofía TERMINADA PFCHA-Becas 279p. PFCHA-Becas