Children's gathering as war machines and new female figures: a poetry reading of Gabriela Mistral’s title “We were all to be Queens”

Abstract

This article proposes an unsual reading of the Gabriela Mistral’s poem “We were all to be Queens” (“Todas íbamos a ser reinas”) from the book Tala (1938) while trying to relate it to her preceding literary work Tenderness (1923) and to a collection of poems “Crazy Women” (“Locas mujeres”), published later in the anthology Lagar (1954). These connections between texts are helpful to depict a wide range of female figures that were advanced for the time that resist being read in a biographical way, as it has historically occurred with the work of this poet. In this way, the term of “war machine” (G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 1980) is revealing to glimpse the political power of children's gatherings, which constitute a considerable proportion of Gabriel Mistral’s poetic production, in promoting new possible series of women self-representations.