Juanita Fernández Solar was born in Santiago to a wealthy and devout Chilean family. From childhood she was drawn deeply to Christ — her diary, kept from age fifteen and one of the great spiritual documents of 20th-century Latin America, records a remarkable interior life of mystical prayer and growing certainty of her Carmelite vocation.
At nineteen she entered the small new Discalced Carmel at Los Andes (Chile), taking the name Teresa of Jesus of the Andes. She lived there for eleven months. On March 14, 1920, she contracted virulent typhus from contaminated water in the convent. Her superior allowed her to make her religious profession on her deathbed (April 7); she died on April 12, 1920, age nineteen.
Her diary and her letters, published after her death, made her one of the great spiritual figures of 20th-century Latin America. Devotion exploded across the Spanish-speaking Catholic world; pilgrimages to Los Andes became immediate and massive. Beatified by John Paul II in 1987; canonised by him in 1993 in a ceremony at the Roman Basilica of St. John Lateran — the first Chilean saint, and one of the youngest canonised saints of the modern Church.