Winétt de Rokha

The De Rokha marriage produced nine children, seven of whom survived infancy. The De Rokha family, though touched several times by tragedy, became a famously accomplished Chilean clan. From the late 1920s through the late 1940s, Winétt de Rokha published four collections of poetry upon which her literary reputation today largely rests: Formas del Sueño (1927), Cantoral (1936), Oniromancia (1943), and El Valle Pierde Su Atmósfera (1949).

• Name — Winétt de Rokha • Pen Name — Winétt de Rokha, Juana Inés de la Cruz • Birth Name — Luisa Anabalón Sanderson • Born — 7 July 1892 • Birthplace — Santiago, Chile • Died — 7 August 1951 • Place of death — Santiago, Chile • Occupation — Poet • Language — Spanish (Chilean) • Period — early 20th Century • Movement — vanguardista / surrealist / feminist • Spouse — Pablo de Rokha • Children — include Carlos de Rokha (poet), José de Rokha (painter), Lukó de Rokha (painter)

Winétt de Rokha, born Luisa Victoria Anabalón Sanderson, was the daughter of Indalecio Anabólon Urzúa, a general in the Chilean army, and Luisa Sanderson Mardones, a Santiago society lady. Biographical entries have usually listed Winétt's date of birth as 1892 but, according to a 2004 interview with Lukó de Rokha, her parents Pablo and Winétt were both born in the year 1894. Winétt's only brother, Carlos Anabalón Sanderson, was a judge who later became chief justice of Chile's Supreme Court. She credited her maternal grandfather, the classicist and scholar Domingo Sanderson, with introducing her as a young girl to literature and with first opening a door for her upon intellectual vistas beyond those of the Catholic faith. In 1939, Winétt and Pablo together founded the communist and anti-fascist literary journal and publishing house Multitud (whose slogan was "For bread, peace, and the liberty of the world"). Chilean academic María Inés Zaldívar describes the tension between Winétt's origins and her life as poet, communist, and wife of Pablo de Rokha: "[She], in the personal as much in the public sphere, was a woman whose life and work, strongly interlaced, resists simple classifications. Her family background was very traditional, as she was born to an observant Catholic family in the upper ranks of Santiago society—a family that even had pretensions to nobility—but for the length of her life she committed herself instead to the pains and joys of a marriage of equals, to art as a form of life, and to ideologies that resolutely sought social justice and so clashed with the social milieu from which she came." Winétt de Rokha died in 1951 of cancer.