Justicia Espada Acuña Mena

Justicia's story begins with a colourful episode. Her father, José Acuña, was the victim of a fraud committed by a man who carried exactly his own name. Seeing the damage the coincidence had caused his reputation and finances, he made a firm decision: he would never give his children names that could be repeated in society.

That is how a lineage of unique, evocative names came about for the eight Acuña siblings, among whom Justicia held third place:

Yet beyond the singularity of their names, the Acuña household held an even more unusual philosophy for the period. The father actively encouraged the education and full autonomy of his daughters at a time when such ideas were subversive. In that space of collaboration and mutual respect, gender did not limit ambition. That was the first structure Justicia learned to calculate: one for shaping minds without pre-set moulds.

Justicia completed her secondary studies at the prestigious Liceo de Aplicación in Santiago. After graduating, she initially enrolled in Teaching, the academic path traditionally tolerated and considered suitable by Chilean society at the time for a woman of her standing. However, she did not stay in it for long.

The pull of rigorous logic, materials physics and structural drawing steered her off that course. Driven by genuine vocation, and relying on the historic Decreto Amunátegui of 1877 ("Amunátegui Decree" — the ruling that had legally opened university doors to women decades earlier, though almost none had chosen the exact sciences), she resolved to take a bold step and transfer into Civil Engineering.

In 1912, Justicia Espada Acuña made history by becoming the first woman enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering at the Universidad de Chile. An account preserved in the Archivo Central Andrés Bello (the university's central archive) records with precision the astonishment and great admiration of the academic community:

Among her classmates was a young man of brilliant mathematical ability: Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez, a future President of the Republic of Chile. Those who shared a classroom with her did not remember her for the novelty of her presence in a male setting, but for the fineness of her drawings and the rigorous precision of her calculations.

Seven years later, in 1919, she defended her thesis without a single failure and graduated as a Civil Engineer from the Universidad de Chile without having failed a single subject, becoming the first woman in Chile and South America to achieve such a distinction.

In 1920, with her professional qualification in hand, Justicia joined the Empresa de los Ferrocarriles del Estado (EFE) (the State Railway Company). She started out in the most technical tasks as a structural draughtswoman. Over time, she rose through her technical skill to the post of bridge calculator in the company's prestigious Roads and Works Department.

Her 34 years with the railway company were a model of methodical steadiness. In a workplace made up entirely of men, Justicia proved her technical ability through structurally complex projects that still stand and operate across the country today:

Today, the Archivo Central Andrés Bello at the Universidad de Chile preserves her original blueprints, calculation notebooks, and reinforcement and moment-of-inertia drawings for the Malleco Bridge, signed in her own hand. They are concrete, mathematical records of the calibre of her daily work.

While cataloguing her personal archive at the Archivo Central Andrés Bello, the team of archivists uncovered a fascinating dimension. Behind the rigid blueprints and dense moment-of-inertia calculation notebooks lay a rich and complex daily life. Personal letters, intimate poems, photographs of outings and school notebooks revealed a woman who defied the social demand to choose between professional development and personal life.

Justicia was the mother of seven children. After the birth of her first two, she paused her work temporarily to raise them, returning fifteen years later to the Empresa de Ferrocarriles del Estado to resume her role as calculator with the same solidity with which she had stepped away.

An ordered timeline of discoveries, everyday efforts and posthumous honours that reconstructs the historical legacy of one of the continent's most distinguished scientists.

Justicia Espada Acuña's mark is measured not only in the tonnage of the trains that crossed the bridges she calculated, but in the profound transformation of enrolment and representation of women in applied science faculties:

Today, her posthumous honours include induction into the Gallery of Illustrious Engineers of the Colegio de Ingenieros (1981), the creation of the prestigious Premio Justicia Acuña, awarded every two years by the Instituto de Ingenieros to the country's most outstanding woman engineer, and the renaming of the Central Tower of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile in 2018.