Chile’s 5,000-peso note carries the face of a woman the Pinochet dictatorship spent years selling as a quiet, celibate saint of the classroom, a symbol of order and traditional values. The actual person was a self-taught rural schoolteacher who got blacklisted from teachers college for arguing that education should be available to everyone, then took the isolated posts nobody else wanted until the system had no choice but to employ her. Born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in 1889 in an Andean village, she lost her father at three, watched her mother sew to keep them fed, and saw her formal schooling end for good in 1900, when she was eleven. By fifteen she was a teacher’s aide supporting the household. She sent essays and poems to regional newspapers and built a public reputation entirely from outside the institutions that had shut her out.

Her early twenties brought two devastating losses, a man she loved who took his own life and another who married someone else, and she poured all of it onto the page. Latin American poetry at the time was dominated by modernismo, all swans and marble and distant elegance. Hers was dirt and blood and rural grief. In 1914 she won Chile’s major national literary contest with a collection called Sonnets on Death, submitted under a pen name that was less an artistic flourish than professional armor: an uncredentialed teacher publishing raw poems about suicide under her own name would have been fired. Seven years later, the woman with no degree was appointed to run the most prestigious girls’ school in the capital.

• Mexico’s post-revolutionary education minister recruited her in 1922 to help build a national system of rural schools and mobile libraries, and she designed it around what farming communities actually needed rather than imported European curricula.
• She turned literary fame into a diplomatic passport, serving as Chilean consul in Madrid, Naples, Los Angeles and New York, representing Latin America at the League of Nations, advising presidents, and working alongside Eleanor Roosevelt.
• She was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945, and she directed the proceeds of her 1938 collection Tala to orphans of the Spanish Civil War.
• An archive opened in 2007, after the death of her longtime companion Doris Dana, held hundreds of intimate letters that demolished the state-approved version of her, revealing a complex, likely queer woman who never fit the box a dictatorship built for her.