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 earl ...