Poet and writer · 1844-1910
Poet and writer
Cesarina Bento Montesino, known in part of the bibliography as Cesarina Vento, was a writer born in Agulo in 1844 and one of the earliest female poetic voices in the Canarian tradition.
Cesarina Bento Montesino was born in Agulo, La Gomera, on 29 January 1844. She died there on 10 June 1910. Government of the Canary Islands sources place her among the earliest women writers and poets of the Canarian literary tradition.
As a child she emigrated with her family to Cuba and was taught there by José Cipriano de la Luz Caballero. The family returned to Agulo in 1863. Her writing survives fragmentarily in a personal notebook, Libro de Escanari Toben y Nontisemo, a title formed as an anagram of her name.
Care is necessary when describing her output: the consulted sources state that she did not publish a book in her lifetime, although the notebook attests to texts written during her Cuban stay. Her importance derives both from those texts and from the later recovery of a nineteenth-century female voice connected to La Gomera.
