Fernando Alegría

Fernando Alegría (26 September, 1918 - October 29, 2005) was a Chilean poet, writer, literary critic and scholar.

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Biography

Alegría was born in Santiago, Chile and grew up in the Independencia barrio of the city. Poets from this barrio include Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra and Volodia Teitelboim.

He received an M.A. from Bowling Green State University in 1941 and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1947.

From 1964-1967, Alegría was a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. From 1967 to 1998 he was a professor at Stanford University and for many years he was Chair of the Spanish and Portuguese Language Departments there. He sat on the Board of Trustees at the Western Institute for Social Research (WISR) for about twenty years beginning with its inception in 1975.

Alegría served as cultural attaché from the government of Salvador Allende to the United States from 1970 to 1973. He has been the representative of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in the United States for many years. Among the many awards he has received is the Latin American Prize of Literature.

As an academic and visionary writer and revolutionary, Alegría brought prestige and legitimacy to the Spanish language in the United States of America at a time when children were punished in schools for speaking their native tongues.

A documentary film about the life of Chile’s revolutionary poet Alegría, ¡Viva Chile Mierda!, was produced in 2004. The documentary is a humanistic portrayal of one of the most influential figures from Chile and a key figure in the advancement of Latino culture in the United States of America.

Alegría’s "Viva Chile Mierda", the most recited poem of the Allende era, was written in the 1960s.

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