The melancholic and brave poet and romantic novelist, Juana Plácida Adela Rafaela Zamudio, was born on October 11, 1854 in the city of Cochabamba, considered the capital of the temperate Bolivian valleys, and it was there where her vocation to fight was awakened through her writings, against wars and in defense of the postponed feminine rights, and of the lower classes, in a retrograde and conservative society.
He received a Catholic Christian education at St. Albert’s School until the third grade, although as a self-taught person he enriched his culture with a rich reading, loving literature, which he made his own in poems, novels and plays, also feeling great fondness for painting.
In 1887, he published his first work “Ensayos poéticos”. Soledad”, the pseudonym under which she signed her first poems and other works, was her inseparable companion in her passage through this world that only recently came to understand her, at the dawn of the new century. “Born a man” is a poem that reveals her critical feelings towards the view that was held about the position of women in society at the time.
The end of the century allowed the Liberal Party to assume the government of Bolivia, which began with the presidency of Juan Manuel Pando (1900-1904). In 1903 he published the poem Quo vadis? taken the side of a Protestant Bible salesman, persecuted by the clergy. It was at this time that Adela was able to teach at the San Alberto school, also founding the Escuela Fiscal de Señoritas in her hometown and acting as director between 1905 and 1920. He founded two schools in 1911, one for painting for young ladies and the other for children from the suburbs. In 1914 he published in Paris, “Ráfagas”.
The Bolivian president, Hernando Siles, on May 28, 1925 crowned her as the great poetess of Bolivia and all America.
She published in 1943 “Peregrinando”, “Cuentos breves” and “Novelas cortas”.
When she died, on June 2, 1928, she only left “the earthly garb” and as her epitaph says, she is simply “absent but not lost”. The day of her birth, October 11, was instituted in Bolivia as Women’s Day by another great feminist fighter, Lidia Gueiler Tejada, who was interim president of Bolivia between 1979 and 1980.
In 2009, his realist and epistolary novel “Íntimas”, published in 1913, was one of the fifteen fundamental novels of Bolivia, selected by a team appointed by the Ministry of Culture.
