Growing up in Santiago, Chile, Sonia Riquelme dreamed of one day becoming a doctor. But during her first medical internship, she quickly changed her mind after hurting a fellow student while giving a shot.

"I didn't like the idea of working with people in pain," she says. "I decided I would work with words, poetry and language rather than health problems and disease."

Teaching had always come naturally to her. Even as a child, she regularly taught her neighbors. Nearly thirty years later, she has no regrets. Since arriving at Southwestern in 1985, Riquelme has helped to transform the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. While there used to be only five sections of Spanish, there are now 22, with numerous opportunities to study and research abroad.

"I stress to students how important it is to be bilingual. I tell them there are 400 million Spanish speakers in the world, and they will need to know how to communicate with others."

This June, she will take two of her students to Moscow, Russia, to attend the Tenth Conference of Federacion International de Estudios de America Latina y el Caribe (FIEALC). There, she will coordinate a special session on Afro-Hispanic writers.

Riquelme has taught all courses in the Spanish program, including composition, Hispanic culture and civilization, poetry, Spanish film and literature, and contemporary peninsular and Latin American literature.

She is a regular contributor to literary publications and published the book "Gabriela Mistral: The Poetics of Power," a collection of essays about the winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of her former students, Robert Hall '93, who translated one of the articles from Spanish to English, and Michelle Mielly '89, who wrote one of the pieces, also worked on the book.

"My fondness for literature is part of my life experience. My mom taught me to read as a young child; my dad filled my childhood days with beautiful stories."

After receiving her Profesora de Estado de Castellano from the Universidad Técnica del Estado, Chile, in 1973, she left Chile and came to teach Latin American literature courses at the Universidad de Panamá, in Panama, Central America. In 1980, she was accepted to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her Ph.D.

Although she admits missing her homeland (especially the mountains), she says, "I appreciate the freedom and wide open spaces of Texas, and I have found my place in Georgetown." She still finds time to travel to Chile every year - often with students. In the next ten years, she would like to go back with some former students to help build schools there.

An active member of the Georgetown Literary Guild, Riquelme also lectures regularly at the Senior University in Georgetown. "Being involved in the community has been very important to me," she says. She also enjoys spending time with her mother and her "Texas-born" grandchildren, Paola and Nicolás.

A STORY OF HOUSES
Sonia Riquelme
(Translated from Spanish by Gloria Garza)

LAND OF FIRE

I go about founding houses, small houses.
The first was built of love,
discussions and laughter,
between the Andes and the sea.
Converted later in a dwelling for the sun,
moon and rain, unerring eternity.
Now two names identify that space of affection
which was conceived in duo.
One is the beloved name, the first resident
of that final land,
and there is another name,
that of a wise man, my father.
And, every year, in June, the Southern winter,
I grow flowers, immortelles,
which flood with their colors,
the family gravestone, and in solitude they blossom.

TROPICS

A house where the light turns green again.
I built it with bricks of sunlight
and curtains of light dawning
so I could admire the mango tree,
the bananero, the guandú,
the Espíritu Santo flower,
the Bird of Paradise
and the curious iguana, acrobat in the air.
That house of the Tropics was the joyous space
for the games of my son growing in freedom,
it was also the nest, an Andean home out of place,
for the sad passengers of exile,
both collective memory and nostalgia unredeemed.
What a house of light, my home in the Tropics!

TEXANA

Ancient conqueress, I took the space.
I invoked my household gods, founding another house.
Rejoicing, I settled in the stretch of endless earth,
between the color of the sky and the color of lakes,
the bluebonnets in April and other wild flowers.
This time I set up house beside the royal highway,
the long road to the South that reaches Tierra del Fuego.
In that house I planted an oak in honor of my mother,
and in this wide space of the America of ours
the child of the trópico became a free man and built his own home.
Installed once again in the essence of earth
at the edge of my midcentury, I discover myself:
a woman of houses, verses and affections.