The officials built a plaster sculpture that represents Gabriela Mistral and that was discovered within the framework of the celebration of her birth. 

To commemorate the 135th anniversary of the birth of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the University of La Serena held an event at the Mistralian Center in which a plaster sculpture representing Gabriela Mistral reading a page from the newspaper La Voz del Elqui was unveiled.

The sculpture was made in just 4 months by the officials of the same center. Representing the Rector, the Academic Vice Rector, Dr. Alejandra Torrejón Vergara, welcomed the attendees and noted that she was “an extraordinarily visionary, intelligent woman, projected into the future, tremendously human, also very womanly.”

The Mistralian Center, located in the Las Compañías sector, was built on the land where the house where the poetess lived is located and in this sense the Vice Rector stated that “she walked here, she sat, she wrote her texts on her knees. (...) I have a very special thought, that the fact of being a woman, the fact of feeling everything that she gave us, both in her verse and in her poetic prose, is because she lived everything that she told us and that wanted to share with us. There is nothing more wonderful than that you (students) are in a place where she walked and where she was happy, and where she also had not so happy moments, as is life.”

For his part, Dr. Rolando Manzano, who was manager of the center's construction project and its coordinator for more than two decades, stated that "I hope that this center continues to grow and is what we always thought: a great center not only to remember April 7 every year, but let us take examples of his actions, his life, his way, his achievements. She is a woman, she is Chilean, she is Coquimbana. And that is what we have to know how to value and know how to deliver as a final product, which is what they have done abroad. That's why it is valued so much abroad. They don't break it down, they see it as a whole, in its entirety.” The researcher noted that he has contributed to spreading the poet's legacy.

The Director of Liaison with the Environment and Extension, Mg., attended the celebration. Carlos Varas Madrid, the Coordinator of the General Area of ​​Coordination of Rights and Duties for Comprehensive Training, Mg Cristian Blanco, among other university authorities and USerena students. All of them enjoyed the cultural programming prepared for the occasion consisting of the performance of the singer-songwriter Lucila Blues and the regional harpist Ociel Ortiz.

In this way the USerena remembered one of the most important figures in Latin American literature and culture, our Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral.