violeta invencion

To Paris and Back: Violeta Parra’s Transnational Performanceof Authenticity

Ericka Kim Verba

The Americas, Volume 70, Number 2, October 2013, pp. 269-302 (Article)

Published by The Academy of American Franciscan HistoryDOI: 10.1353/tam.2013.0091

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TO PARIS AND BACK:Violeta Parra’s Transnational Performanceof Authenticity

In 1964, at what was surely the acme of her career, Violeta Parra becamethe first Latin American to have a solo show at the Louvre. During thefive-odd weeks that her artwork was on display, Parra was at the museum

every day. She chatted with visitors, put finishing touches on her tapestries,sang songs, played her guitar, served empanadas, and turned the expositionhall into a veritable Chilean ramada.1 The exhibit received favorable reviews inthe press, and was visited by important dignitaries and a who’s who of theParisian and expatriate Latin American artistic community. Parra sold several ofher tapestries, including one to the Baroness Rothschild. By all accounts, theshow was a great success.

How Parra reached this pinnacle is the subject of opposing narratives. Oneanecdote claims that Parra was given a business card with an address on it bysomeone she met, and when she got to that address, found herself in front of“an enormous building”—the Palais du Louvre.2 The Louvre archives, how-

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I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of The Americas along with editor Eric Zolov for their insight-ful comments and suggestions. This article is part of a larger research project on the life and times of VioletaParra. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at The Aesthetic of Revolt: Latin America in the1960s, a conference held at the Latin American Studies Center, University of Maryland, College Park, in April2011. My thanks to conference organizers Mary Kay Vaughan and Karin Rosemblatt for the opportunity andsupport. I also thank Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Angi Neff, and Cynthia Verba for close readings and valu-able suggestions on later drafts, and Heidi Tinsman, Fernando Rios, Angela Vergara, Kimberly Davis, JedrekMularski, and Claudia Vizcarra for help along the way. My thanks to archivists Guillemette Delaporte at theBibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Aaron M. Bittel at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive for theirgenerous assistance with my research, and to the California State University Dominguez Hills Research, Schol-arship and Creative Activities Program Committee and the Emeriti Faculty Association for their support.Finally, and as promised, I dedicate this article to my son, David César, in gratitude for his patience and much-appreciated sense of humor.

1. A temporary shelter made from branches and leaves where people gather to eat, drink, and dance.Ramadas are usually set up in parks or other public spaces in conjunction with the commemoration of Chile’sIndependence Day, September 18th.

2. Patricia M. Stambuk and Patricia Bravo, Violeta Parra: el canto de todos (Santiago: Pehuén Editores,2011), pp. 125–126. Note: This is a revised and augmented version of the book that has appeared in variousprevious editions under the title, Gracias a la Vida. Violeta Parra, Testimonio.

ever, reveal a different version of events. Parra arrived at the museum byappointment, one obtained via a letter of introduction from the Chileanambassador at the time, Carlos Morla Lynch, to Jean Cassou, director of theMusée National d’Art Moderne. In it, Ambassador Lynch identifies MadameVioleta Parra as “a Chilean artist who resides in Paris,” and requests thatCassou grant her a visit “in order for her to explain to you in person her desires. . . for the development and diffusion of her artistic activities in France.”3 Thefirst story positions Parra as authentic—naïve, unworldly, standing outside ofthe modern, which is symbolized in this case by what is arguably the most pres-tigious cultural institution of the West. The official letter of introduction, incontrast, offers a cosmopolitan Parra with considerable savoir faire.

This article strives to uncover the common roots of these divergent accounts. Itexplores how Parra reinvented herself as non-cosmopolitan “other” and insistedthat she be “discovered” by the cosmopolitan world. My contention that Parra“performed” her authenticity is not meant to imply that she was somehow afake—my work is premised on the idea that authenticity (hence inauthenticity)“is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is asocially agreed-upon construct.”4 Neither object nor event, Parra embodiedauthenticity. It was her defining feature but itself had no fixed definition. Itcould thus take on different meanings depending on the time and place of herperformance. Although multivalent, authenticity is always claimed in referenceto and thus constitutive of modernity. It represents “a peculiar longing, at oncemodern and antimodern. It is oriented toward the recovery of an essence whoseloss has been realized only through modernity, and whose recovery is feasibleonly through methods and sentiments created in modernity.”5

Parra, in addition to visual artist, was a folklorist, composer, and musician. Hermultimedia performance of authenticity spanned two decades and two conti-nents. She was a leader of the 1950s folkloric “boom” in Chile, a pioneer and,

270 TO PARIS AND BACK

3. Carlos Morla Lynch to Jean Cassou, n.d., dossier of the Exposition “Violetta [sic] Parra: tapisseries,peintures, sculptures,” Archives of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This and all other translations are by theauthor.

4. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1997), p. 5.

5. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1997), p. 8. The bibliography on authenticity is extensive, and includes Michelle Bigenho,Sounding Indigenous. Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance (New York: Palgrave, 2002); James Clifford,The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988); Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Moder-nity, Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);David Grazian, Blue Chicago. The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs (Chicago: University ofChicago, 2003); and Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1995).

upon her death, a source of inspiration for the genre of 1960s-1970s protestmusic that came to be known as nueva canción chilena. This study, through itsinvestigation of Parra, thus sheds light on two key cultural movements of thesecond half of the twentieth century: folk music revivals of the 1950s, and protestmusic of the 1960s and beyond. Rapid modernization and urbanization in thepost-World War II era provided the context for these sequential, if overlapping,cosmopolitan trends. The protest song movement was additionally contempora-neous with and expressive of the youth-driven revolutionary and counterculturemovements of the 1960s. Both movements depended on technological advancesas well as innovations in the increasingly global entertainment industry. Bothplayed out against the backdrop of the Cold War.

Parra staged her performance primarily in Santiago and Paris, with brief stintsin Buenos Aires, London, Geneva, and Concepción. In all of these settings,Parra appealed to her cosmopolitan public’s shared discomfort with modernityand nostalgia for an idealized past and place. On both sides of the Atlantic, thevalue of her performance was assessed based on its ability to offer an alternativeto mass consumer culture. Parra’s Chilean and European acts thus held muchin common. That said, they differed in certain fundamental aspects. First andforemost, Parra was Chilean, and her performance in her native land was thusintertwined with issues of nationalism and political debate over the constitutionand rights of el pueblo chileno. In Paris and other capitals of Western Europe, onthe other hand, Parra’s performance was viewed through a colonial gaze thathad a long, deep history, and enacted during a period of acute anti-colonialstruggle that directly challenged that gaze. The disproportionate wealth of thecultural power centers of modernist capitalism, and their correlated one-waycultural impact on more peripheral sites, created additional differentiating char-acteristics in Parra’s performance. In concrete terms, they meant, among otherthings, that she was paid better in Europe than in Chile, and that her Europeanreception affected her reception in Chile, but not vice versa.

The analysis offered in this article is informed by works in the interdisciplinaryfield of transnational studies that reframe cultural phenomena, hitherto con-ceptualized as nationally produced, as transnational processes.6 In particular, itadopts Thomas Turino’s conceptualization of a cosmopolitan cultural forma-

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6. See for example: Katherine J. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); Deborah Pacini Hernandez, “Dancing with theEnemy: Cuban Popular Music, Race, Authenticity, and the World-Music Landscape,” Latin American Per-spectives 25:3 (May 1998), pp. 110–125; Mark Pedelty, “The Bolero: The Birth, Life, and Decline of Mexi-can Modernity,” Latin American Music Review 20:1 (Spring-Summer 1999), pp. 30–58; Peter Wade, Music,Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Eric Zolov,Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

tion through which “ideas, practices, and technologies . . . travel throughcommunication loops independently binding people culturally who are not,otherwise, related by location or heritage.”7 To use Parra’s Louvre exhibit asillustration, its French and expatriate Latin American visitors and Parra herselfwere all members of the same modernist-capitalist cosmopolitan cultural for-mation. As such, they shared a set of aesthetic sensibilities and social values,including their understanding of authenticity. As Turino and others have estab-lished, the advantage of this transnational framework is that it allows theresearcher to move beyond the obfuscating dyads of traditional/modern,underdeveloped/developed, or more recently, local/global that would situateParra as somehow outside of the cosmopolitan milieu that embraced her. Forbrevity’s sake, this article refers to the specific cosmopolitan cultural formationof mid-twentieth-century modernist capitalism as cosmopolitanism, and itsmembers as cosmopolitans.8

Parra may have been bound through communication loops to a diversity ofother cosmopolitans, but how and where she entered those loops mattered. AsAnthony Giddens succinctly reminds us, “Modernity . . . produces difference,exclusion, and marginalization.”9 Fundamental dichotomies and real inequali-ties of class and gender, alongside and interacting with those of race, ethnicity,and nationality, formed the foundations of modernist capitalism. These samefundamentals, in combination and, arguably, in equal measure to her own cos-mopolitan sensibilities, influenced and may very well have determined theartistic pathways Parra travelled. This article is therefore necessarily a study ofgender, class, and race relations.10

Parra was well known in Chile during her lifetime, and achieved a degree ofrecognition in certain European artistic circles as well. Her full embrace as aninternational figure would occur only after her tragic death in 1967, her lifeand work taking on renewed significance in each succeeding chapter of recent


7. Thomas Turino, “Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study ofZimbabwean Popular Music,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12:2 (2003), pp. 51–79; p. 62. My thanksto Fernando Rios, who first introduced me to Turino’s conceptualization of cosmopolitanism, and whoseresearch on the Andean music scene in Paris during the 1960s, and particularly the Parra family’s involvementin it, is crucial to my own analysis. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-PopularMusic in France and its Impact on Nueva Canción,” Latin American Music Review 29:2 (Fall-Winter 2008),pp. 145–189.

8. Turino identifies two other prominent cosmopolitan cultural formations of the second half of thetwentieth century: modernist-socialist and fundamentalist-Islamic. “Are We Global Yet?” p. 62.

9. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 1991), p. 6. Emphasis is in the original.

10. That scholars in the field of transcultural studies reject essentializing dichotomies in our analyses ofcultural processes is sometimes misconstrued to imply that we consider them of no consequence. This is notthe case.

history.11 Today, Violeta Parra is celebrated as the “mother” of the Chilean newsong movement, and as an important twentieth-century Latin American womanartist.12 Accordingly, the body of literature on her life and work is substantial.Much of it is testimonial in nature.13 Parra has also been the subject of severalbiographies, a historical novel, a recent biopic, and a growing number of scholarlytreatises. 14 Though varied in format, the vast majority of nonacademic work, andmuch of the academic output as well, reifies Parra as authentic and proceeds tocelebrate her authenticity (in testimonials and biographies), or to parse the waysit gave form to her creativity (scholarly monographs). Parra’s afterlife as “authen-tic other” offers trace evidence of how well she performed that role during herlifetime, as it marks the extent to which the essentializing notions of gender andclass that shaped her life’s trajectory have endured into present times.15

This article turns Parra’s too-often assumed authenticity into an investigation.It first addresses the question of Parra’s invention of an authentic self, and fol-lows with a discussion of her varied performance practices. It then considershow her performance was received by cosmopolitan audiences in Chile andWestern Europe. A brief final section examines Parra’s relationship with theemerging Chilean nueva canción movement. As processes of creation, per-formance, and reception are intrinsically linked, their division in this case ismerely a heuristic device, and not a seamless one at that.


11. Interest in Parra has grown exponentially in the decades since her death, to the point that the term“Violetamania” has been coined to name the phenomenon. See Alberto Moreno, “Violeta Parra and LaNueva Canción Chilena,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 5 (1986), pp. 108–125; CristianGonzález Farfán and Gabriela Bravo Chiappe, Ecos del tiempo subterráneo: las peñas en Santiago durante el rég-imen militar (1973–1983) (Santiago: LOM, 2009); and Sophia A. McClennen, “Chilex: The Economy ofTransnational Media Culture,” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Thought and Practice 3:1(2000), http://eserver.org/clogic/3-1&2/mcclennen.html (accessed July 18, 2013).

12. A Google search for her name netted 2,590,000 results, while a YouTube recording of Parra singingher best-known song, “Gracias a la vida,” registered 1,958,551 hits. Both searches were conducted April 7,2012.

13. Ángel Parra, Violeta se fue a los cielos (Santiago: Catalonia, 2006); Isabel Parra, El libro mayor de Vio-leta Parra (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2009); and Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra.

14. The online catalog of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile provides a comprehensive, up-to-date bibli-ography of works on Parra, scholarly and otherwise. Biographies include: Karen Kerschen, Violeta Parra: Bythe Whim of the Wind (Albuquerque, N.M.: ABQ Press, 2010); Diana Malizia, Violeta Parra: mujer de cuerpoentero (Buenos Aires, Capital Intelectual, 2008); Patricio Manns, Violeta Parra: la guitarra indócil (Concep-ción: LAR, 1986); Carmen Oviedo, Mentira todo lo cierto: trás la huella de Violeta Parra (Santiago: EditorialUniversitaria, 1990); and Fernando Sáez, Violeta Parra: la vida intranquila, biografía esencial (Santiago: Edi-torial Sudamericana, 1999). Mónica Echeverría wrote the novel, Yo Violeta (Santiago: Plaza Janés, 2010). Thebiopic is Violeta se fue a los cielos, directed by Andrés Wood, and based on the book of the same title by ÁngelParra. The film won the 2012 Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize.

15. The gender bias in Parra’s persistent reification may be seen in the contrast in how she and NicanorParra, her brother and a renowned poet, are portrayed in biographical and literary studies. The siblings sharedthe same background, and both drew inspiration from Chilean folklore. Nicanor, however, has been allowedto “grow up” into a modern artist, while Parra remains “pure,” “natural,” “campesina,” “one of thepeople”—in short, authentic. See for example Jaime Quezada, Nicanor Parra de cuerpo entero (Santiago: Edi-torial Andrés Bello, 2007); Efraín Szmulewicz, Nicanor Parra: biografía emotiva (Santiago: EdicionesRumbos, 1988); and Pamela Zúñiga, El mundo de Nicanor Parra: antibiografía (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1995).

Parra’s performance of authenticity was never guaranteed success. Case inpoint: her Louvre exhibit almost did not take place.16 In a moment of self-doubt, Parra would write: “How could I have an exhibit at the Louvre, I, theugliest woman on the planet, who comes from a tiny country, from Chillán,the end of the world?”17 Her query underscores that her positioning as otherwas by no means entirely a matter of volition. As a woman, a chillaneja in San-tiago, and a Chilean in Paris, Parra was widely perceived as “other” in the cos-mopolitan circles she moved in, and her rhetorical question reveals how deeplyshe felt herself to be just that. I use the word “performance” in this article’stitle, but could just as well have used “ascription” or “experience.” If I choosethe former over the latter two, it is in tribute to Parra. James Clifford has con-vincingly argued that authenticity is produced by removing an object orcustom from its site of historical origin, and relocating it to another.18 Extend-ing his claim to encompass a person, my research shows Parra to have been aprime mover in this process.

THE FOLK “BOOM”

The year 1953 marked a turning point in Parra’s life. Then 35, she had built arespectable career for herself performing a commercial música popular with hersister Hilda, as the duo Las Hermanas Parra.19 That year, encouraged by herbrother, the poet Nicanor Parra, she abruptly and definitively left it behind andbegan her work collecting and disseminating the folk songs and traditions ofChile that would earn her renown, during her lifetime and beyond, as one ofthe country’s premier folklorists. In short, she turned to the “authentic.”

Parra was not alone in her interest in folklore in the 1950s. She was one of averitable “boom” of folkloric performers that included Margot Loyola, GabrielaPizarro, and the conjunto Cuncumén, among others.20 Their project, like most


16. The museum’s selection committee initially rejected Parra’s proposal, and the show went forwardonly after a sympathetic museum official convinced them to reconsider.

17. Violeta Parra to Amparo Claro, cited in Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 126. 18. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, p. 228.19. The duo performed a pan-Latin American repertoire of boleros, corridos, rancheras, tangos,

tonadas, and cuecas at a variety of clubs in Santiago from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. They also recordedseveral singles with RCA Víctor. See Alfonso Alcalde, Toda Violeta Parra (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor,1974), pp. 25–26, 36–37; Juan Pablo González and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la música popular enChile, 1890–1950 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2004), p. 435; Sáez, Violeta Parra, pp.47–53; and Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, pp. 51–61. For a list of the duo’s RCA Víctor recordings, see IsabelParra, Libro mayor, p. 231.

20. Juan Pablo González, Oscar Ohlsen, and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la música popular enChile, 1950–1970 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2009), pp. 311–367. Together, the twotomes by self-professed “académicos-fanáticos” González and Rolle, and (for the second volume) Ohlsen, offercopious information on virtually every aspect of Chilean música popular for the period from 1890 to 1970.

folkloric projects, was national in scope: they viewed Chile as the sum of itsvaried regions, and the folklore of these regions as the nation’s patrimony. Thefolklorists’ charge was to discover, rescue, and restore the “true” folklore of elpueblo chileno through its authentic interpretation via radio shows, recordings,and recitals. They considered their project an urgent one, as it was widely per-ceived that Chilean folklore was on the verge of extinction in the face of rapidprocesses of modernization and urbanization. To give but one example of thestriking rate of change, the population of Santiago grew from roughly 500,000in 1920, to 2,000,000 by the end of the 1950s.21 The fast pace of economicand social transformations provided thus both the context and impetus for thefolklorists’ activities. In terms of its political moment, the Chilean folklorerevival took place during a decade marked by government harassment and cen-sorship of the left, in particular of the Communist Party.22 Though nationalistin intent, the reinvigorated Chilean folk scene was cosmopolitan; parallel folkrenewals with similar characteristics were taking place in the 1950s throughoutthe modernist-capitalist cultural formation.23 On a global scale, folk music rep-resented an active but ill defined arena in the cultural Cold War.24


21. Simon Collier and William Sater, A History of Chile, 1808–2004 (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004), p. 291.

22. The Chilean Communist Party was banned from 1948 to 1958 under the so-called “Law for thePermanent Defense of Democracy.” For a history of this period, see Carlos Huneeus, La Guerra Fría Chilena:Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago: Debate, 2009); and Olga Ulianova, “Algunas reflexionessobre la Guerra Fría desde el fin del mundo,” in Ampliando miradas: Chile y su historia en un tiempo global,Fernando Purcell and Alfredo Riquelme, eds., (Santiago: RIL Editores, 2009), pp. 235–260. Anti-Commu-nist government repression in Chile does not appear to have had as direct an adverse effect on the individualcareers of leftist Chilean folk musicians active in the 1950s as McCarthyism had on their U.S. counterpartsduring that period.

23. See David Atkinson, “The English Revival Canon: Child Ballads and the Invention of Tradition,”Journal of American Folklore 114:453 (Summer 2001), pp. 370–380; Paul Austerlitz, “Birch-Bark Horns andJazz in the National Imagination: The Finnish Folk Music Vogue in Historical Perspective,” Ethnomusicology44:2 (Spring-Summer 2000), pp. 183–212; Michael Brocken, The British Folk Revival: 1944–2002 (Aldershot,U.K.: Ashgate, 2003); Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Oscar Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement: SugarElites, Criollo Workers, and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, 1900–1955 (Tucson: University of ArizonaPress, 2010), and Breve historia del movimiento folclórico argentino: cultura, identidad y nación (Barcelona:EDHASA, 2012); Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society,1940–1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, “From the30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States,” Theory and Society 25:4 (August 1996), pp.501–543; Daniel J. Gonczy, “The Folk Music Movement of the 1960s: Its Rise and Fall,” Popular Music andSociety 10 (1985), pp. 15–31; E. David Gregory, “Lomax in London: Alan Lomax, the BBC and the Folk-Song Revival in England, 1950–1958,” Folk Music Journal 8:2 (2002), pp. 136–169; Dario Marchini, Notoquen: músicos populares, gobierno y sociedad (Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2008), pp. 125–162; Gillian A. M.Mitchell, “Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movements ofthe United States and Canada, 1958–1965,” Journal of American Studies 40:3 (December 2006), pp.593–614; Richard A. Reuss, “American Folksongs and Left-Wing Politics, 1935–1956,” Journal of the Folk-lore Institute 12:2/3 (1975), pp. 89–111; and Neil Rosenberg, Transforming Tradition: Folk Music RevivalsExamined (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

24. González et al. suggest that the Chilean folkloric performances of the 1950s were influenced andperhaps even inspired by post-World War II promotions of folklore in the Soviet bloc and its spheres ofinfluence: Historia Social, 1950–1970, p. 312. In contrast with the Soviet Union’s more straightforward and

Current works in the field of transnational cultural studies differentiatebetween the process whereby certain songs (and not others) are “col-lected,” and thus constituted as “folklore,” as opposed to that processwhereby “folklore” is adapted and performed for a cosmopolitan audience.Katherine Hagedorn and others have coined the term “folkloricization” forthe latter process.25 Parra and her fellow intérpretes folklóricos, in perform-ing Chilean folklore, were “cultural outsiders [who] transform and resignifynon-cosmopolitan practices to appeal to cosmopolitan audiences.”26 A shortnotice in Ecran, Chile’s premier entertainment magazine, published fromthe 1930s through the 1960s, may serve to illustrate this procedure. Itannounces the radio debut of a new folklorist, Gabriela Pizarro, and fea-tures a photograph of Pizarro in the requisite costume and pose of thehuasa27—the flowery dress, the white apron edged in lace, the hair in twobraids tied with bows, playing a ribbon-adorned guitar. Promising that shewould be performing “authentic themes from our folklore,” the notice thenquotes Pizarro’s own definition of her act: “Margot Loyola taught me howto sing folklore just the way it is, but musically; in other words, omittingonly its defects.”28

As this notice intimates, women played a prominent role in the 1950s folkmovement in Chile.29 In La historia social de la música popular en Chile,1950–1970, González, Ohlsen, and Rolle credit their strong presence to twofactors: women’s increased incorporation into public life, and the newdemands of the entertainment industry.30 I would add two more. It responded


consistent relationship to folk music performance, that of the U.S. during the Cold War was complex. On onehand, the U.S. supported the dissemination of American folkloric traditions through recordings, radio, andperformance, though never on the scale of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, U.S. Cold War ideology castthe U.S. as the great modernizer and promoter of freedom and thus tended to advocate a modernist “uni-versal” culture as superior to the provincialism and idiosyncrasy of national, ethnic, or local cultures. See JeanFranco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2002). Jazz and modern art were the preferred emissaries of this universal culture. The SovietUnion’s strong support for the “music of the people” may have contributed, additionally, to U.S. ambivalencetoward folk music, which during McCarthyism became associated with “un-American” or Communist sym-pathizers such as Pete Seeger and others (see works on the U.S. folk music revival in n23). For U.S. supportof Chilean folklorists as part of the Good Neighbor policies of the 1940s, see Corinne A. Pernet, “The Pop-ular Fronts and Folklore: Chilean Cultural Institutions, Nationalism and Pan-Americanism, 1936–1948,” inThe Norte-Americanización of Latin America?, Hans-Joachim König and Stefan Rinke, eds. (Stuttgart: HeinzVerlag, 2004), pp. 253–277.

25. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, pp. 9–12.26. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne,” p. 147.27. A huasa, also known as a china, is the female partner of the huaso or cowboy. 28. “Nueva folklorista: Gabriela Pizarro,” Ecran 1344 (October 23, 1956), p. 21. 29. Felícitas Klimpel lists 16 women (including Margot Loyola, Gabriela Pizarro, and Violeta Parra)

under the category “Música folklórica (Investigadores, Recopiladores y Compositoras)” in her book La MujerChilena (El aporte femenino al progreso de Chile), 1910–1960 (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1962), pp.202–203.

30. González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970, p. 324.

at least in part to the folklorists’ rigid categorization of folk traditions bygender which required, perforce, that women and men participate with someparity in their “authentic” performance, as huasas and huasos. On a deeperlevel, it reflected cosmopolitan gender notions that essentialized women as thetimeless conservers of tradition, thus making it relatively easy for them to enterthe field of folklore during a period when their access to other academic andartistic careers was more restricted.

Many of the 1950s generation of folkloric performers in Chile (and elsewhere)were leftists, Parra included. Staunch anti-imperialists, they viewed their workas the first line of defense in the “battle for the authentic” against the radioinvasion of foreign popular music, both from other parts of Latin America—rancheras, mambos, guarachas, and others—and from the United States.31

They also regarded it as a counterattack to the more commercial “músicatípica” of groups like Los Huasos Quincheros.32 Members of the leftist bandCuncumén even designed new costumes to replace those usually worn byhuaso groups, which they believed romanticized the harsh class relations of thehacienda system. They exchanged the typical huaso outfit, modeled on the ele-gant outfits of the patrón, for a campesino-inspired checked shirt, simple pants,and work boots or rubber sandals. The conjunto’s female members traded intheir huasa costumes, with their lace-trimmed aprons symbolic of servitude, forplain, solid-colored dresses and head scarves.33

Though many of the 1950s Chilean folklorists were leftists, their project wasnot exclusive to the political left. In contrast to the protest songs associatedwith the Chilean nueva canción of the 1960s and 1970s, the songs that madeup the 1950s folklorists’ repertoire were “authentic,” and therefore not overtlypolitical. The fact that the Chilean folklorists’ object of investigation was anidealized pueblo chileno, timeless and past, and not the present-day pueblo of


31. Quote from a 1957 radio interview with Violeta Parra on Radio Chilena. Cited in Oviedo, Mentiratodo lo cierto, p. 56.

32. For a history of the proliferation of huaso musical groups in Chile during the first half of the twenti-eth century, see González et al., Historia Social, 1890–1950, pp. 363–420. By the 1950s, the figure of the Chileanhuaso was a firmly established and versatile national icon. For a history of his transformation from country bump-kin to national symbol, see Patrick Barr-Melej, “Cowboys and Constructions: Nationalist Representations of Pas-toral Life in Post-Portalian Chile,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998), pp. 35–61, and ReformingChile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2001); and Stefan Rinke, Cultura de Masas: Reforma y Nacionalismo en Chile, 1910–1930 (Santiago:DIBAM, 2002). For a discussion of the more contemporary class and ethnic connotations of the huaso, seeMario Sznajder, “Who is Chilean? The Mapuche, the Huaso and the Roto as Basic Symbols of Chilean Collec-tive Identity,” in Constructing Collective Identities and Shaping Public Spheres: Latin American Paths, LuisRoniger and Mario Snajder, eds. (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), pp. 199–216.

33. See Joan Jara, An Unfinished Song (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), p. 47; and OsvaldoRodríguez Musso, La nueva canción chilena (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1988), pp. 72–73. Nueva canciónartists Victor Jara and Rolando Alarcón were both members of Cuncumén at one point.

class struggle, made the folkloric “boom” one of the few cultural arenas withinthe charged political atmosphere of the decade that could foster participationacross partisan divides.34 The band Cuncumén’s costume change, however,presaged the amplified political polarization that would render any concept ofa unifying national culture near impossible by the mid-1960s.35

Over the course of her last 13 years, Parra would reinvent herself, from “faith-ful interpreter of our authentic traditions,” to authentic artist in her own right.The 1954 Ecran interview, “Get to Know Violeta Parra,” may serve as a base-line for her metamorphosis. An accompanying photograph shows Parradressed in a light-hued turtleneck, wearing lipstick.36 The interview itself isdevoted almost entirely to Parra’s didactic explanations of Chilean folklore,along with biographical data about her sources. When asked about her origi-nal compositions, Parra answered that she had written 60, some “trivial”though commercially successful, and the rest in a serious genre (género serio),including “tonadas de corte folklórico, valses, etc.” Together, the interview andphoto indicate that at this point in time Chilean folklore was something out-side herself, located in the people she learned it from in other places, and notin her essential self. Her own compositions, in turn, were not yet authenticallyhers; they were either commercial—and thus “trivial,” in her view—or folkloricimitations (“de corte folklórico”). Her response to the question “When did youbegin to learn our folklore?” however, hints that her transformation wasalready under way: “From the moment I was born.”37

BECOMING AUTHENTIC

Many factors contributed to Parra’s exceptional capacity to relocate herself vis-à-vis her fellow cosmopolitans as an authentic “other” to be “discovered.”


34. According to Benjamin MacKenna, a member of Los Huasos Quincheros and a well-knownderechista, “true harmony” reigned between “those artists that could have been classified as leftist and thoseof us who did not share their position” during the period. Cited in González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970,p. 311. I have not encountered analogous claims by leftist musicians. Jedrek Mularski, whose dissertation,“Music and Chile’s Democratic Crisis: Song and the Formation of Political Identities, 1940–1973” (Univer-sity of California San Diego, 2012) examines the relationship between music and political identities in Chile,concurs that, generally, folk music crossed partisan lines during the 1950s. Personal communication, Septem-ber 2012.

35. For a groundbreaking study of, among other topics, how Chilean soccer reflected the growing polit-ical polarization of the 1960s, see Brenda Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Cen-tury Chile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). One could make the argument that, paradoxically, Com-munist sympathizer Violeta Parra has become a national icon in today’s neoliberal Chile. She has her ownpostage stamp, and the Chilean equivalent of the Grammy award carries her name. For a blistering critique ofthe distorting effects of the neoliberal marketplace on historical memory, see McClennen, “Chilex.”

36. Apparently the lipstick was an anomaly, as Parra rarely wore makeup on or off the stage by that pointin her life.

37. Marina de Navasal, “Conozca a Violeta Parra,” Ecran 1220 (June 8, 1954), pp. 18, 20.

First, the essentials. As a woman, she was presumed to be primitive, pure, andtraditional in contrast to the assumed masculine traits—modern and inventive.Parra’s face was pockmarked by a bout of childhood smallpox. “The ugliestwoman on the planet,” she was not considered attractive according to cosmo-politan standards of beauty, a fact that may have enhanced her ability to comeacross as “authentic,” even as it precluded other performative identities.Second, there was her life story. She was born in rural Chillán—though notexactly “the end of the world” still a far cry from more cosmopolitan Santiago.Parra’s family on her mother’s side were inquilinos or tenant farmers. Herfather, a musician and school teacher, died when Violeta was ten, leaving hermother to raise Violeta and her nine siblings on her own, working as a seam-stress. Parra had thus suffered hardships during her childhood. Although sheattended teaching school for a few years, she left it to pursue a musical careerbefore completing her degree. Unlike the vast majority of folklorists and artistsof her epoch, she had no academic preparation and no formal training in musicor art. Parra would turn these social disadvantages into assets. They constitutedthe foundational narrative of her authenticity, and thus became the basis ofhow others perceived her as well. Her considerable talents as a folklorist, forexample, were attributed to her rural upbringing; if she was so effective in con-vincing her sources to share their songs with her, it was because she was oneof them. Her originality as an artist, in turn, was due to the fact that she wasan autodidact.

Parra, like many cosmopolitan artists of her generation, was a communist.38

She hated the rich, and devoted her multiple talents to creating music and art-work that promoted social justice. Akin and contemporaneous to the Argen-tine singer and songwriter Atahualpa Yupanqui, she pioneered a genre ofprotest songs that would become known by the 1970s in Chile as nueva can-ción.39 In comparison with the non-partisan value of her authenticity ascampesina and autodidacta, Parra’s radicalism was a double-edged sword. Itsituated her firmly in the camp of the left, not as “other,” but as part of acommon struggle. It could thus potentially make her appear inauthentic—for-eign-inspired, a subverter of national values—in the eyes of those on theChilean political center and right.

Finally, personality must factor into any discussion of Parra’s authenticity. Theterm refers to those defining traits of character that account for Parra’s strong


38. To my knowledge, Parra never joined the Chilean Communist Party. She was no doubt, however,a lifelong sympathizer.

39. Although the Chilean new song movement emerged in the early 1960s, it did not get its name untilthe first Festival de la Nueva Canción, organized by radio disc jockey Ricardo García in Santiago, 1969.

desire and capacity to perform. Consider for example the curiosity, daring, andconcentration that enabled a seven-year-old girl to steal the key to her father’sguitar case and secretly teach herself to play the guitar.40 Or the imperiousnesswith which the adult Parra would often refer to herself in the third person, asin the announcement “Violeta Parra has arrived!”41 Or the stunning audacityof a comment she made to her friend and fellow artist, Alejandro Jodorowsky,when the two Chilean expatriates happened upon the Palais du Louvre whilestrolling along the banks of the Seine. In response to Jodorowsky’s bemoan-ing that Chilean culture could not hold a candle to the great works of civiliza-tion housed within the museum, Parra exclaimed, “Be quiet! . . . I’m just a tinywoman, but this edifice doesn’t impress me. Mark my words: before long,you’ll see my works exhibited here.”42

These anecdotes—culled from interviews, testimonials, and Jodorowsky’smemoir—are joined by countless more, all in some way illustrative of Parra’spersonality. Together, they demonstrate the impossibility of a pre-performativeanswer to the question of why Parra became a performer: the very social forcesthat shaped her personality were those that shaped her performance, and thereis no way to isolate the one from the other. At the same time, the myriad tes-timonies to Parra’s formidable personality prove it cannot be overlooked. Likeher leftist political affiliation, her personality could be a double-edged sword.Take, for example, her anger, by all accounts one of her more pronouncedcharacteristics (one perhaps expressive of the range of emotions her sense ofotherness could provoke, beyond its sorrows). Parra’s quick temper couldmake it difficult for her to negotiate successfully with her fellow cosmopolitans.Her stubborn determination, on the other hand, seemingly allowed her toachieve the impossible—including, as promised, a show at the Louvre. Thesheer force of her personality rendered her performance of authenticity cohe-sive and thus effective, as for Parra it was no “act.”

In her work on authenticity and Bolivian music, Michelle Bigenho makes a dis-tinction between “cultural-historical authenticity,” consistent in this contextwith the representational practices of Parra’s 1950s cohort of folkloric per-formers, versus “unique authenticity” or the “idea that something is authenticbecause it is singular, new, innovative, and usually perceived to emerge fromthe depths of a composing musician’s soul.”43 Parra’s case appears a variation


40. Magdalena Vicuña, “Violeta Parra, hermana mayor de los cantores populares,” Revista MusicalChilena 60 (July-August 1958), p. 72.

41. Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 106.42. Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

(Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2008), pp. xv–xvi.43. Bigenho, Sounding Indigenous, p. 20.

of the latter; her fellow cosmopolitans recognized her unique authenticity asan artist, but linked it not to modern inventiveness but to her biographicalauthenticity as campesina-autodidacta. Chilean musicologist MagdalenaVicuña’s review of Parra’s “anti-cuecas,” a set of short pieces for guitar com-posed in 1956 and referentially named after her brother Nicanor Parra’s bookPoemas y anti-poemas, may serve as example. Vicuña wrote that, although theanti-cuecas “bear the nomenclature of folklore . . . they are classical works[música culta], just like those one might hear at any chamber music concert.”Parra was a “unique composer” precisely because she had no formal trainingin composition, and instead had learned music “as the bird sings.”44 Alonganalogous lines, the Swiss art critic and documentary filmmaker Marie-Magdeleine Brumagne marveled in her Tribune de Lausanne review of Parra’sartwork that Parra had been making tapestries for only six years, and pro-nounced that Parra, without realizing it, had turned her life into art, “an artthat is crude and at the same time very refined, authentic.”45

Parra’s cosmopolitan admirers’ appraisal of her creative work reflected andreinforced prevailing gender norms that associated women with tradition.46 InParra’s case, these gender notions meshed with concepts of class and, for herEuropean public, race and nationality to accentuate her otherness. Theirassessment corresponds as well, however, to Parra’s own sense of self. Parra’sprofound identification with el pueblo is a core theme that weaves itselfthroughout the varied and ample record she has left us, from vast tapestries toher most intimate letters. It was arguably her greatest source of inspiration.47

The assertion that she was just another “mujer del pueblo” was the core of herfoundational narrative. In terms of her musical career, she once told an inter-viewer: “My only advantage has been that, thanks to the guitar, I stopped peel-ing potatoes.” She went on to explain that there were women just like her inevery region of Chile; they stayed home, cooking and taking care of their chil-dren and grandchildren, while she had gone on to sing with the little sheknew.48 As regards her work as a visual artist, Parra averred in a 1965 docu-mentary, filmed within a year of her triumphant Louvre exhibit, that she knewnothing about embroidery techniques, nor did she know how to draw. Whenasked if that meant that she had invented everything, she answered: “Yes, but


44. Vicuña, “Violeta Parra,” p. 77.45. “Cronique Artistique—Violeta Parra—Colette Rodde,” Tribune de Lausanne (May 11, 1964),

n.pag. 46. The comparison with Nicanor Parra, university professor and world-renowned modern poet, pro-

vides evidence of how profoundly each sibling’s respective artistic career was shaped by gender.47. José María Arguedas makes this point at an academic roundtable organized in Parra’s eulogy.

“Análisis de un genio popular hacen artistas y escritores: Violeta Parra,” Revista de Educación (Santiago, Chile)13 (1968), p. 72.

48. Quoted in Alcalde, Toda Violeta Parra, p. 41.

anyone can invent things.” Finally, in a playful act of subversion she turned thetables on Marie-Magdeleine Brumagne, her off-camera interviewer, makingher the “other” to Parra’s act of invention:

Brumagne: How is this mask made?

Parra: Out of pieces of cardboard. For example, to make this one I think ofyou. What is Magdeleine like? So I observe you for a while, without your real-izing it . . .49

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES

Chilean radio celebrity Ricardo García recounts his first impression of Parrawhen she arrived at the studios of Radio Chilena for an audition in 1954: “Oneday, a woman arrived at the radio station who was, for the radio scene in thosedays, a kind of ghost from another world. She was wearing a very humble, verysimple, dark dress, with her hair loose, and with a face scarred by smallpox.”50

As García’s recollection makes evident, Parra performed her authenticity bothoffstage and on. In her daily life as a folklorist and artist, Parra dressed mod-estly, wore no makeup, and ignored the latest fashions in hair styles, choosinginstead to wear hers long and loose. She thus marked herself as different—“from another world”—from the other women in her cosmopolitan milieu.51

Parra’s daily performance of authenticity represented a combination of thedeliberate, with her essential womanhood and physical appearance as “mujerfea.” It was also likely a reflection of her challenged economic circumstances,as Parra’s private correspondence is replete with complaints that she is desper-ately broke.52 In sum, it was gendered and classed.

On stage, Parra performed the authentic in her capacity as a professional musi-cian. It was how she made her living. Parra stood out from other folkloric per-formers of her era in several ways. First, she purposefully imitated the roughsinging style of her female sources, and thus distinguished herself from otherwomen performers whose singing was more refined. She also spearheaded therevival of both the rural folksong genre known as el canto a lo poeta53 and its tra-


49. Brumagne’s documentary, originally made for Swiss television, is excerpted in Luis R. Vera’s docu-mentary, Viola Chilensis (Alerce, Chile: La Otra Música, 2006). It is also easily accessible at www.youtube.com.A Spanish translation of the interview, “Entrevista a Violeta Parra, realizada en su taller en Ginebra, Suiza,1965,” is available at the Fundación Violeta Parra website: http://www.violetaparra.cl/ (accessed July 12,2011).

50. Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 58. 51. The first impressions of Parra by Joan Jara (Victor Jara’s wife) and record producer Rubén

Nouzeilles are strikingly similar to those of García, and thus indicative of how uniformly Parra’s otherness wasperceived by those in the artistic circles in which she moved. Jara, An Unfinished Song, p. 45; Stambuk et al.,Violeta Parra, p. 101.

52. See Parra’s letters published in Isabel Parra, Libro mayor.

ditional instrument of accompaniment, the guitarrón.54 Beyond these elements,Parra’s staged performances as intérprete folklórica did not deviate substantiallyfrom the standard folkloric show like the one promised by Gabriela Pizarro inthe Ecran announcement cited above. Parra dressed as a huasa and performedthe folk songs she had collected from the many regions of Chile, along with theoccasional original “de corte folklórico.” The “Andean” costumes she and herfamily wore when touring through Europe as Los Parra de Chile during theAndean music craze of the 1960s, discussed below, were conceptually parallelto her huasa outfit in their formulaic (and rather fantastical) projection.55

As “folkloric interpreter,” Parra’s job was to make the authentic folklore shecollected from non-cosmopolitans in non-cosmopolitan sites understandableto her cosmopolitan audience in cosmopolitan settings and media—theaters,recordings, radio, and eventually television. Parra’s first Chilean LP, VioletaParra, Canto y Guitarra: el folklore de Chile, Vol. I (1956), illustrates her roleas intermediary. Its liner notes highlight her professional role as folklorist—“This song was collected by Violeta Parra from the lips of doña FlorenciaDurán, an elderly woman of 94 years”; “This serenade was sung to VioletaParra by señora Mercedes viuda de Sanchez, age 70”—and commend her forhaving led “new generations to discover a musical Chile that had been hith-erto unknown.” The album’s cover photo shows Parra, dressed in what was forher fashionable attire, seated and playing her guitar. The shot is set in a record-ing studio, and framed in such a way that the recording equipment in front ofher is almost as prominent as Parra herself. The LP notes and cover thus por-tray Parra as an embodied conduit between her non-cosmopolitan “sources”and the modern technologies of the recording industry.56

The format of her popular 1950s radio show, Así canta Violeta Parra, con-structs a similar transitive chain. One of a handful of radio programs of thedecade that aired Chilean folk music, Parra’s was unique within this genre


53. A traditional Chilean song style, a direct descendent of the décima espinela of medieval Spain. Itsmost definitive instrument is the guitarrón, a 25-string guitar unique to the Chilean countryside.

54. The guitarrón was believed to be on the verge of extinction before Parra’s “rediscovery” of it. Formore on the guitarrón, including a discussion of Parra’s role in its revival, see Emily Jean Pinkerton, “TheChilean Guitarrón: The Social, Political, and Gendered Life of a Folk Instrument,” (Ph.D. diss., University ofTexas at Austin, 2007). For an indepth discussion of the role Parra played in the “discovery” of a “hidden”authentic Chilean culture, see Jorge Aravena Décart, “Opciones armónicas, estilo musical y construcción iden-titaria: una aproximación al aporte de Violeta Parra en relación con la música típica,” Revista Musical Chilena55:196 (July 2001).

55. For an example of the Parra family dressed as “andinos,” see photograph no. 16 of the section“Iconografía” in Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, n.pag. More photographs of Violeta Parra and family members per-forming in costume are available at the Fundación Violeta Parra website, http://www.violetaparra.cl/.

56. EMI Odeón Chilena (1956), LDC-36019. The covers of this and many other Parra recordings aredigitally reproduced at http://www.cancioneros.com/nd/2673/4/el-folklore-de-chile-violeta-parra.(Accessed September 2, 2012).

because she would invite her folkloric subjects—her viejitos, as she affection-ately referred to them, for they were inevitably elderly—into the studio to beinterviewed. There, the show’s star announcer Ricardo García would introduceParra, who in turn would introduce and interview her folkloric guest of thehour. The program thus positioned Parra as translator of timeless traditions forher presumed modern radio audience (the actual makeup of which is addressedbelow), while reinforcing the gender-based dichotomy of tradition (woman)and modern (man) in the process.57

For the Chilean left, Parra’s role as bridge between the non-cosmopolitan andcosmopolitans served a political purpose as well: it offered them a much-needed antidote to the alienation of cultural imperialism. In this context,Parra’s translation skills were applied, not to introducing the traditional to themodern, but to recovering an authentically national alternative to the foreign.The photographer Sergio Larraín, Parra’s sometime collaborator, explains:“We lived caught up in European and U.S. culture, listening to their music,imitating them, buying their novels, seeing their movies. . . . But then westarted feeling alienated from all this foreign stuff . . . and that’s when Violetawas like a guide for us, a connection to Chile. . . . In other words, she servedas translator, so that we could know ourselves, so that we would not be alwayslooking outside of Chile.”58

By the late 1950s, Parra’s repertoire had shifted, from the folk songs she hadcollected to her own songs of love and longing, political protest, and universalthemes. This transition coincided, roughly, with her adoption of a more urbanstyle of presentation, one influenced by her years performing in the more inti-mate and informal boîtes de nuit of Paris’s Left Bank (addressed more fully inthe next section). Parra shed her huasa/andina costume, and dressed insteadin everyday clothes, thus blurring the distinction between artist and audience.With her new repertoire of mostly originals, and her trendy, boîte-inspiredanti-costume (often bohemian black), Parra repositioned herself vis-à-vis herpublic. No longer the faithful interpreter of an authentic “other,” she was nowthe revealer of an authentic self.59 The three solo albums she recorded in Chile


57. For a more in-depth discussion of the radio show, see my article, “Violeta Parra, Radio Chilena, andthe ‘Battle in Defense of the Authentic’ during the 1950s in Chile,” Studies in Latin American Popular Cul-ture 26 (2007), pp.151–165. Since publication, I have learned that Radio Chilena was not an independentstation, as claimed, but a project of the progressive Chilean cleric Cardinal José María Caro. This error, thoughregrettable, does not fundamentally alter the substance of my analysis.

58. Stambuk et. al., Violeta Parra, p. 96–97. My emphasis.59. Parra’s boîte-style attire is reminiscent of Edith Piaf’s trademark performance outfit of a simple

black dress. For a discussion of the emic quality of Parra’s urban performance style, see Rodrigo TorresAlvarado, “Cantar la diferencia: Violeta Parra y la canción chilena,” Revista Musical Chilena 58:201 (January-June 2004).

during the 1960s reflect this change.60 Their song selections are almost exclu-sively Parra originals,61 and the artist herself is exposed in their packaging. Thecover of Toda Violeta Parra (1960) features candid shots taken by photogra-pher Fernando Krahn of Parra playing her guitar. The cover of Violeta Parra,recordando a Chile (Una chilena en Paris) (1965) displays two of her tapestries.Her last album, Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra, recorded in 1966and released posthumously in 1967, shows a by now well-known black-and-white close-up of Parra, hair loose, face unadorned, dressed simply, looking offin the distance, strumming a charango.62

Parra never made a complete turn from folkloric huasa to urban performer. Forthe rest of her life she would employ both performance practices, dependingon the context. The two styles were also not particular to Parra. As discussedabove, her folkloric act was for the most part consistent, and often performedin conjunction with those of the other intérpretes folklóricos of her 1950scohort. By the mid-1960s, in turn, street clothing was quickly becoming thepreferred attire, not only for Parra, but for cosmopolitan folk singers from NewYork’s Greenwich Village, to Paris’s Quartier Latin, to Santiago’s Peña de losParra after its founding in 1964.

In her discussion of authenticity and Bolivian music, Bigenho uses the term“experiential authenticity” to denote the entire sensory experience of music per-formances; “it is an authenticity that is not alienable; it is connected to a sharedexperience with others, a fleeting moment of the groove.”63 Starting in Septem-ber 1958, visitors could experience this “groove” at the ramada Parra mountedduring the Fiestas Patrias that year and every year thereafter that she was in Chileon September 18th. She would rent a plot in the Quinta Normal or the ParqueCousiño and set up her stand alongside those of her similarly entrepreneurialcompatriots. With the family members she dragged along with her, she wouldwork and sleep at the ramada for the entire three days the festivities lasted. There,she sang, danced the cueca with her customers into the wee hours of the morn-ing, and plied them with empanadas and ponche. Parra gathered a cluster of addi-


60. Toda Violeta Parra: el folklore de Chile, Vol. VIII, EMI Odeón Chilena (1960), LDC-36344; VioletaParra, recordando a Chile (Una chilena en Paris), EMI Odeón Chilena (1965), LDC-36533; and Las últimascomposiciones de Violeta Parra, RCA Victor, Chile (1966), CML-2456. The last LP is technically not a soloalbum; although Parra does all of the singing, she is at times accompanied instrumentally by Isabel and ÁngelParra, and by Alberto Zapicán. Parra’s first recording in this new artistic phase as composer/song writer of non-commercial music was the EP Violeta Parra: composiciones para guitarra. It is also her sole recording of purelyinstrumental music, and includes two of her “anti-cuecas.” Odeón, Chilena (1957), MSOD/E-51020.

61. The sole exceptions are Parra’s settings of two poems, one by Pablo Neruda and the other by herbrother Nicanor.

62. A small guitar originally from the Andean region, often made from the back of an armadillo.63. Bigenho, Sounding Indigenous, pp. 17–18.

tional musicians beyond her family members for this enterprise, includingGabriela Pizarro, Rolando Alarcón, Héctor Pavez, and Victor Jara. One year, theactivities included the screening of filmmaker Sergio Bravo’s documentaries aswell, for which Parra composed some of the soundtracks.64

Parra’s ramada stood among scores of other ramadas likewise dedicated topatriotic celebration. What made hers authentic, per Clifford’s conceptualiza-tion of authenticity, was that it was set up and run not by your typical FiestasPatrias entrepreneur, but by well-known folk musicians and artists. Parrawould construct ramada-like sets for her performances as a visual artist as well.At the 1959 and 1960 Ferias de Artes Plásticos held in Santiago’s Parque Fore-stal, for example, she transformed her small booth into a performance spacewhere she sang, played guitar, painted, and sculpted in clay in front of herpublic.65 As explored further in the next section, in the early 1960s Parrawould recreate her ramada in galleries and public squares in Geneva, and at hersolo show at the Louvre. These European performances melded Parra’sauthenticity as campesina/autodidacta with her unique authenticity as an artistand the experiential authenticity of the ramada. Accordingly, Parra designed aone-of-a-kind costume to wear at these events: a colorful, patchwork dressmade especially for her by her seamstress mother, which Parra linked in inter-views to the poverty she had known as a child.66

During the last year of her life, Parra’s onstage and offstage performance ofauthenticity would seem to merge into one at her Carpa de la Reina. TheCarpa consisted of a large circus tent Parra set up on an empty lot in theremote Santiago neighborhood of La Reina in late 1965. In a 1966 interviewwith the Communist daily El Siglo, Parra conveyed her intentions to turn itinto a “centro de arte popular” where her public “could listen to unknownsongs, those that burst forth from campesinas, from the sorrows and joys ofminers, the dances and poetry of the islanders of Chiloé.”67 Parra’s multifac-eted tent was a performance space, a gallery for her artwork, and her residence,as she lived beside it in a one-room shack of her own construction. It was alsothe site of her tragic suicide on February 4, 1967.

Parra’s performance of authenticity at the Carpa may thus, sadly, be consideredher last act. Inside the tent, she created the experience of authenticity for her


64. Jara, An Unfinished Song, p. 49; Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 110. 65. Fundación Violeta Parra, “El viaje de las obras,” in Violeta Parra, obra visual (Santiago: Ocho

Libros Editores, 2007), p. 19. See also Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 110; and Sáez, Violeta Parra, pp.113–114.

66. Parra wears the dress and explains its origins in Brumagne’s documentary (see n49).67. Excerpted in Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 206.

Carpa audience. Rincón Juvenil reporter Osmur (pseud.) describes her per-formance: “[Violeta Parra] is everywhere at once. She welcomes those friendswho have come to greet her. She attends to her regular customers. She poursthe wine into glasses, then serves it from trays. . . . She serves as master of cer-emonies. . . . She plays the guitar . . . she sings.”68 Parra’s Carpa performanceextended into the intimacy of her living quarters as well. This can be seen in theinterview she gave to El Mercurio reporter Alfonso Molina Leiva aimed at build-ing the venue’s public. She greeted him by proclaiming: “Come in . . . this ismy home, this is how I live.” In response to the reporter’s shocked incompre-hension that he was being welcomed into a rustically furnished, one-room shackwith dirt floors, she explained: “To you, all of this must seem strange, that I livethis way. . . . For me, this is comfort, I grew up in the countryside and lived likethis for a long time and I have never changed my lifestyle [modo de vida].”69

According to her daughter Isabel, Parra’s resolution to live at the Carpa signi-fied a “total rejection of the conventional, a return to the earth.” Isabel wrotethat her mother no longer wanted to have anything to do with “carpets norhouses with shiny floors,” and reproached her children for their “bourgeoislifestyle.”70 In her profound refusal of modern comforts, Violeta Parra livedout her last months under conditions similar to those of the countless Chileancampesinas and other workers with whom she identified and whose songs shehad promised would be heard at the Carpa. Their lives were poor and unre-markable. Parra’s represented a modern lifestyle, as defined by the possessionof a particular set of symbolic goods or, in Parra’s case, her newsworthy deci-sion to forgo them.71

PARRA’S RECEPTION AT HOME AND ABROAD

Parra first made a name for herself with the radio program already noted, Asícanta Violeta Parra, which aired in 1954 on Radio Chilena. The show was anunexpected hit. Its fan base included an eclectic mix of urban intellectuals—classical music lovers, anti-imperialist leftists—all eager to “discover” anauthentic Chile. To the surprise of many of Parra’s colleagues at the radio sta-tion, the program also developed a substantial following among recent ruralmigrants to Santiago and, where the transmission could be picked up, in rural


68. Ellipses in the original text. “Ángel e Isabel Parra: ‘Nuestro mayor orgullo es nuestra madre,’”Rincón Juvenil 81 (July 6, 1966), p. 7.

69. “Vengan a cantar junto a mí,” interview published in the “Suplemento Dominical” of El Mercurio(October 1966). Transcription available at Fundación Violeta Parra website, accessed July 12, 2011.

70. Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 209.71. José Joaquín Brunner, Un espejo trizado: ensayos sobre cultura y políticas culturales (Santiago:

FLACSO, 1988), p. 248. See also Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.

sectors as well.72 For this last, more extensive group of listeners, the show rep-resented a process of recovery more than discovery, as it featured songs thatreminded them of those sung in their towns of origin. Fan letters inundatedthe radio station over the course of the year the show aired, some clearlypenned by the formally educated, but many others only semi-literate. Parra’smore humble admirers thanked her for playing their music and embraced heras one of their own. Their expressions of nostalgia for the songs of their youthimplied that they too were quickly becoming modern in their sensibilities andpractices, thanks in no small part to the modern medium of radio. Parra’sEuropean public would have much in common with the listening audience forher Chilean show, minus its semirural strata. The program’s popularity led theChilean Association of Entertainment Journalists to award Parra the presti-gious Caupolicán prize for best folklorist in 1955. It also resulted in an invita-tion for Parra to join the Chilean delegation to the Communist-affiliatedWorld Festival of Youth and Students, held in Warsaw, Poland, that sameyear.73 After the festival and a brief tour of the Soviet Union, Parra made herway to Paris. There, what was meant to be a two-month stint stretched intomore than a year, her stay abroad no doubt prolonged by her immeasurablegrief at the death in Santiago of her youngest daughter, Rosita Clara, justweeks after her departure to Europe.

In Paris, Parra was able to carve out a living as an artist. She performed regu-larly at L’Escale, a Left Bank boîte and a favored haunt of expatriate LatinAmerican artists, musicians, and students.74 She also recorded for the Muséede l’Homme and the French record label Le Chant du Monde in Paris, theBritish Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, and UNESCO inGeneva, and appeared on French television, among a wide range of other activ-ities. In an effervescent letter penned just prior to her return to Chile in late1956, Parra enumerated the many exploits of her months in Paris and a ten-day blitz in London. She went on to explain what she believed was the sourceof her enthusiastic reception:


72. The 1950s and 1960s saw a “flood” of rural migrants to Santiago, and the corresponding expan-sion of shantytowns on the outskirts of the city. Collier and Sater estimate that about a half million peoplelived in Santiago shantytowns by the mid-1960s. History of Chile, p. 294.

73. Violeta, Isabel, and Ángel Parra, the band Cuncumén (with Rolando Alarcón and Victor Jara) anda host of other musicians from Chile and all parts of Latin America traveled to Europe to perform at Soviet-sponsored World Festivals of Youth and Students during the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that so many of theseartists eventually made their way west to Paris, however, indicates that the sensibilities and exigencies of mod-ernist-capitalist cosmopolitanism were more influential in shaping their respective performing careers thanthose associated with modernist-socialist cosmopolitanism.

74. For more on L’Escale, see Rios, “La Flûte Indienne,” pp. 150–151.

My sincerity in interpretation is natural and comes from strong and undeniablefolkloric roots in our Chilean countryside. My European public . . . tired of super-ficial performers and keenly desirous of the real [lo verdadero], has understood this. . . I love this capital with boundless affection, because it is here that I have foundthe solution to my artistic aspirations [inquietud artística] and because it hasaccepted me as I am [tal como soy].75

As her letter implies, Parra’s performance appealed to her European audiences’modern longing to come into contact with an authentic “other”—her “lo ver-dadero.” Many factors coincided to produce the “continuing potency” of cul-tural exoticism in French society during “the period of its most intense andwide-ranging embrace of the modern.”76 France underwent a prolongedperiod of accelerated demographic and economic growth from 1945 to 1975,an era often referred to as the “trente glorieuses” (glorious thirty) in French his-toriography. It also experienced an intensified process of Americanization post-World War II, one that seemed to threaten the very existence of French cul-tural exceptionalism.77 These years were additionally demarcated bydecolonization struggles, particularly the Algerian War of Independence(1954–1962). Rapid and critical social transformation, combined with thebrutality of war, led to a collective soul-searching about France’s place in theworld, and, more broadly, about the pros and cons of modernity itself.78

Parra’s Parisian audience’s desire for the “real” was grafted, not onto a time-less pueblo, but onto an equally timeless undeveloped world, represented in thisparticular instance by Chile. In France, somewhat ironically given that Chilewas foreign, Chilean folk music could also serve as a nonthreatening counter-weight to successive “invasions” of more popular “foreign” music—Elvis inthe 1950s, the Beatles in the 1960s—much as it did for Chilean folklorists intheir battle against, among other things, the very same Anglophile rock-and-roll onslaughts.79 Parra’s folkloric performance in France, as in Chile, couldadditionally provide the authentic antidote to more commercial, and thusinauthentic, music from Latin America. The biographical insert from Parra’sChant du Monde LPs roundly condemns the latter: “What spectator, what lis-tener of good faith would not want to weep at the multiplication of these Latin


75. “Violeta Parra hizo llorar a los franceses,” Ecran 1351 (December 11, 1956), p. 19. The article con-sists of excerpts from a letter to Chilean sound engineer Luis Marcos Stuven.

76. Here I borrow Daniel J. Sherman’s wording from his study of French primitivism during thisperiod, convinced that it applies equally to exoticism. French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 3.

77. David L. Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, and Debate,(Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 11.

78. Sherman, French Primitivism; Tyler Stovall, France Since the Second World War (New York: Long-man, 2002).

79. For a discussion of the Anglophile rock invasion of France, see Looseley, Popular Music, pp. 21–35.

American ensembles where, all too often, an indigent amateurism competeswith a primitive cabaret exoticism!” It goes on to praise Parra for not dressingup like “some frilly [froufoutante] Chilean from Hollywood” and instead“restoring to us the Chilean soul in all of its verité.”80

Parra’s performance of authenticity thus fulfilled many similar, though by nomeans identical, cosmopolitan yearnings in France as it did in Chile. Moreimportantly for Parra, her authenticity—her “tal como soy”—was easier toacquire in Europe than in her native land. Parra’s representation of Chileanfolklore was “read” differently in the cultural centers of Europe than at home.In Chile, folkloricizations were linked to issues of nationalism and the assertion(or creation) of an authentic pueblo chileno. As a “folkloric interpreter,” Parra“interpreted” the authentic “other” for her Chilean public, but was not, forthe most part, conflated with that other. When she donned her highly stylizedhuasa costume in a Santiago theater, for example, it marked her not as acampesina, but as a professional performer; her cosmopolitan Chilean audienceknew from experience that folk musicians dressed in that fashion, butcampesinas did not.81 In contrast, when Parra dressed up as a huasa/andinaand sang on a Paris stage in her unrefined and, some would say, harsh voice,she could easily become exoticized in the European cosmopolitan imaginary asa Latin American peasant of Indian.

Parra’s offstage performance was likewise “read” differently in Europe than inChile. Shorter and darker than many if not most northern Europeans, Parrafit their description of how a Latin American (read “exotic other”) shouldlook, and she made the same impression on at least one U.S. expatriate aswell—the folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax was introduced to Parra in 1956during her brief trip to London where he was living and working for theBBC.82 Upon meeting her, Lomax treated Parra as he would any other of hisfolkloric subjects; he recorded her performing five songs and labeled the tapebox “Authentic Chile.”83 His actions suggest that Parra could weave some-


80. Insert, “Chants et danses du Chili (Vols. I et II). Violeta Parra, guitare et chant,” Le Chant duMonde (1956), LDY-4060-4071.

81. In contrast with the male huaso costume, which dates back to the 1920s, the huasa costume wasnot clearly established until the 1940s. González et al. credit música típica singer Silvia Infantes with itsdesign, inspired by a career in acting where she learned the importance of wardrobe. Historia Social,1950–1970, p. 326. Their research confirms Chilean composer Alfonso Letelier’s earlier assessment that “thewoman’s costume that the folklorists tend to perform in is totally invented.” “In Memoriam: Violeta Parra,”Revista Musical Chilena 21:100 (April–June 1967), p. 110.

82. On Alan Lomax’s career at the BBC, see Gregory, “Lomax in London.” 83. Index entry for sound recording T0171, Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004), American Folk-

life Center, Library of Congress. The recording is accessible online through the Association for CulturalEquity’s website, http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do;jsessionid=3D456FFC77207BCA6D5EE86F478B7A87?ix=recording&id=12971:113&idType=subregion&sortBy=abc (accessed July 19,2013).

what seamlessly between her onstage and offstage performance of the authen-tic while in Europe.

As a Latin American peasant woman who had conveniently made her way to theirdoorstep, Parra encountered numerous performance opportunities in the capi-tals of Western Europe. A celebratory homecoming piece in Ecran, published inearly 1957 and headlined “Violeta Parra is Back: I Triumphed in Europe. SoonI will Return to the Old World,” further illuminates the very real attractions thatthe “Old World” had to offer to an itinerant Chilean folk musician—and why,most likely, she was already planning her next visit. Her trip had been both anartistic and financial success; “She came home full of emotion . . . and withmoney.”84 The article points to the obvious: France, in the terminology of theera, was a “developed” nation and thus wealthier than “underdeveloped” Chile.Parra’s performance could thus automatically command a higher value therethan in Chile. The article also most likely exaggerates. Although it may have beenless difficult for Parra to earn a living in Paris than in Santiago in the 1950s, herlife in Paris, crammed into a tiny apartment above one of the clubs where shegigged, was hardly one of affluence. Exoticized “ethnic” musicians, Parra amongthem, were and are notoriously poorly paid within modernist capitalism; theirlow wages parallel those of other types of “ethnic” labor pools.

Parra resided in Europe from 1955 to 1956, and again from 1962 to 1965.Her European sojourns dovetailed, more or less, with two consecutive andsomewhat overlapping Latin music fads that hit the continent’s cosmopolitancenters. The first trend, dating from the 1950s, was festive; the second, fromthe 1960s onward, Andean-inspired.85 Parra did not fit very well into the fun-oriented Latin American music scene in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s.Her professed belief in both the integrity of the Chilean folklore she had col-lected, and the need for its proper (serio) rendition in performance, did not jibewell with the pachanguera atmosphere of L’Escale. In an interview, the Span-ish musician and fellow boîte performer Paco Ibañez recalled how peoplesometimes grumbled, “Here comes that Chilienne again” when she arrived,because of her insistence they be silent during her performance.86 Regardlessof the mismatch, the cover of Parra’s French LP Chants et Dances du Chili:Violeta Parra, chant et guitar, Vol. II (1956) reflects this more festive Latin


84. Ellipsis in the original article. Marina de Navasal, “Volvió Violeta Parra: Triunfo en Europa. Prontoregreso al viejo mundo,” Ecran 1354 (January 1, 1957), p. 23. The article allows for a reading that differsfrom the original intent of the lyrics, reproduced in the Ecran piece, of Parra’s nostalgic song “¿Por qué mevine de Chile?”: Antes de salir de Chile / yo no supe comprender / lo que vale ser chilena ¡ Ahora sí que lo sé!(Before I left Chile / I did not understand / The value of being Chilean / Now I understand it!).

85. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne.” 86. From Vera’s documentary, Viola Chilensis.

music vogue. Even as the biographical insert in the LP condemns “primitivecabaret exoticism,” the cover artwork is a blatant contradiction: it shows a still-life of artifacts, presumably from Chile, that together amount to a veritableanthropological pastiche—a primitive-looking mask, a colorfully paintedceramic vessel, and a Caribbean-style conga drum adorned with zigzag pat-terns, all arranged decoratively on a woven manta.87

When Parra arrived back in Paris in 1962, the Andean music craze was justbeginning. As Fernando Rios has documented, from the early 1960s throughthe 1970s and beyond, Parisians’ fascination with “indigenous peoples” (peu-ples indiens), and especially with the flûte indienne or quena,88 would makeLatin American folk music synonymous with Andean music, which was con-ceived and experienced as indigenous and primordial. This trend most likelyaccounts for the title of Parra’s 1965 bilingual songbook Poésie populaire desAndes, with its geographic as opposed to national reference.89 It also no doubtexplains why there is a photograph of a Mapuche woman sitting horseback onthe cover of Le Chant du Monde’s 1963 compilation and reissue of Parra’s1950s recordings of “songs and dances [Chants et danses] from Chile.” Evi-dently, Chilean and Mapuche were interchangeable in the 1960s Europeans’lexicon of the exotic.90

As Rios notes, Parra herself became caught up in the Andean music craze. Sheadopted the charango as a frequent choice of accompaniment, and encouragedher lover, the Swiss musician Gilbert Favre, to learn the quena. Parra, whooften performed on European stages with Favre and her children Isabel andÁngel and granddaughter Tita, even invented new “Andean-style” outfits forthe Parra clan during this period—long ponchos and sandals for everyone,man, woman, or child.91 Rios credits the Parra family with playing a decisiverole in the introduction of Andean folkloric-popular music to Chile, where itwould eventually meld into the signature sound of the nueva canción chilena.92

Always the self-inventor, by the mid-1960s Parra would tentatively claimindigenous ancestry, a detail absent from all autobiographical accounts up to


87. Chants et danses du Chili: Violeta Parra, chant et guitare, Vol. 2, Le Chant du Monde (1956), LDY-4071. To be clear, there is no drumming, conga or otherwise, recorded on the album—just, as advertised,Violeta Parra on song and guitar.

88. A bamboo flute with a notched mouthpiece, originally from the Andean region. 89. Violeta Parra, Poésie populaire des Andes (Paris: François Maspero, 1965).90. Chants et danses du Chili: Violeta Parra, guitare et chant, Le Chant du Monde (1963) LD-S-4271. 91. Rodríguez Musso, La nueva canción, p. 73. Rodríguez ascribes a political motivation to Parra’s cos-

tume shift: “she realized that neither the bourgeois nor the china costumes would work, so she replaced themwith a common costume for both men and women of a long poncho and sandals.” I would venture that thecostume change was also intended to capitalize on the Andean music craze.

92. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne.” For a discussion of the Chilean Andean music scene, including its nuevacanción component, see González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970, pp. 357–367.

that point, to my knowledge. In her 1965 Geneva interview with documentaryfilmmaker Brumagne, she answered the interviewer’s question “Are youindigenous?” with “My grandmother was indigenous and my grandfatherSpanish, so I believe I have a little Indian blood in me.” She went on to expressher implicit wish that indigenous roots had formed part of her foundationalnarrative; “I would have liked it if my mother had married an Indian.” Sheconcluded by asserting a linked authenticity; “in any case, as you can see, I livejust like them.”93

Parra’s musical career in Europe thus benefited—albeit unevenly—from cos-mopolitan Latin music fads of the 1950s and 1960s. It was further enhancedby her association with international communism. As previously mentioned,Parra first made her way to Europe as a delegate to the 1955 World Festival ofYouth and Students in Warsaw. Her second European sojourn began similarlyat the 1962 World Festival in Helsinki. Parra’s affiliation with the CommunistParty provided her with additional performance opportunities beyond her reg-ular gigs in Parisian boîtes and occasional work for European cultural andethnographic institutions, the highlight of which was her performance beforea crowd of thousands at the 1963 Festival de l’Humanité. As already noted,Parra began writing protest songs before the genre became popular in the mid-1960s. According to Rios, she was one of a handful of Latin American musi-cians in Paris during the 1950s and early 1960s to incorporate political songsinto her repertoire, a practice that earned her the nickname “the Commu-nist.”94 By the mid-1960s, however, the Parisian left had begun associatingLatin America, and by extension Latin American music, with anticolonialiststruggles and revolution.95 Parra’s Poésie populaire des Andes, published in1965 by the leftist press Librairie François Maspero, is both constitutive andreflective of this trend, as it includes a section of original songs, most of them“chansons revolutionnaires.”96


93. “Entrevista a Violeta Parra.” Brumagne’s account of her first encounter with Parra at one of herexhibits epitomizes the European exoticizing/indigenousizing gaze that Parra may well have been respond-ing to: “I no longer knew where I was on that rainy wintry day. As if by magic, the walls had disappeared,leaving in their place vast Andean plateaus, under a clear, high altitude sun. Indian men and women, dressedin ponchos, came and went in the décor that Violeta had created, at ten o’clock in the morning, in this placewithout history, thousands of kilometres from her native Chile!” Brumagne, Qui se souvient de sa vie? (Lau-sanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1992), p. 135.

94. Atahualpa Yupanqui was another. See Rios, “La Flûte Indienne,” pp. 153–155. For more on Yupan-qui’s French connection, see Fabiola Orquera, “From the Andes to Paris: Atahualpa Yupanqui, the Commu-nist Party, and the Latin American Folksong Movement,” in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside theCommunist Bloc, Robert Adlington, ed. (Oxford University Press/British Academy: 2013).

95. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne,” pp. 157–158.96. Fanchita González-Batlle, “Introduction,” Poésie populaire des Andes, p. 8. Both Maspero’s pub-

lishing house and the record label Le Chant du Monde were associated with international communism. Theythus offer examples of the cultural output of communist-affiliated institutions when modernist-socialist con-ceptualizations of the authentic are crossed by modernist-capitalist market forces. In the case of Le Chant du

It was during Parra’s second European sojourn, from 1962 to 1965, that shebecame known as a visual artist. Parra the tapestry maker, sculptor, and painterwas as much the performer as Parra the musician. As stated above, she recre-ated the traditional Chilean ramada in public squares and art galleries inGeneva, and at her solo show at the Louvre. According to Clifford’s theorythat authenticity requires a process of relocation, Parra’s ramada first becameauthentic in Santiago, not as just another Fiestas Patrias stand, but one withinthe purview of cosmopolitan musicians and artists. In Europe, it was furtherauthenticated by its complete disassociation from Chile’s Fiestas Patrias and itsrelocation to that bastion of cosmopolitanism, the Louvre museum. Le Mondeart critic P. M. Grand described the scene in his review of Parra’s exhibit:

Violeta is present . . . to play the guitar, to sing sad and expressive music, to inventas she embroiders . . . Petite and brunette . . . simple and complex like a figurefrom Lorca, or like one of her sculptures, where the tangle of metallic wires makegolden flowers burst from a black tree.97

As Grand’s review shows, Parisians could just as readily conflate Parra the artistwith her artwork as they could confuse Parra the huasa-costumed performer withan actual campesina. She embodied authenticity. Once her art had received theLouvre’s stamp of approval, somewhat ironically given her leftist politics, Parrabegan receiving the attentions of wealthy patrons—the Baroness Rothschild whobought one of her tapestries, or the wealthy Swiss couple with “an interest . . .in out-of-the-ordinary people” who offered her temporary residence in thetower of their chateau where, in Parra’s words, she could “work like a queen.”98

Parra returned to Chile in 1956 and stayed until 1961; she returned in late1965 and died there in early 1967. As Sophia McClennen points out, culturalvalue follows a similar trajectory within modern capitalism; “the local [must]attain value, first in the ‘World’ economy and later in the form of heightenedlocal appreciation.”99 Parra’s case confirms this: her European triumphs greatlyenhanced her stature at home, and virtually every Chilean who wrote abouther from 1956 onward proclaimed them. The liner notes, for instance, of the


Monde, the two record covers discussed in this article strongly suggest that the label’s producers were moreinterested in sales than accuracy when packaging the authentic music of the peoples of the world. For a his-tory of the record label, see Vincent Casanova, “Jalons pour une histoire du Chant du Monde. À l’heure dela guerre froide (1945–1953),” Bulletin de l’Institut Pierre Renouvin 18 (Spring 2004), available athttp://ipr.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?article210 (accessed January 11, 2012). See also the record company’s dig-ital brochure, “History of Le Chant du Monde,” available at http://cdm.harmonia-mundi.biz/__media/cdm_digital_booklet_en.pdf (accessed September 27, 2012).

97. “Trois variations sur themes populaires,” Le Monde, (April 17, 1964), p. 12.98. Violeta Parra to Marie-Magdeleine Brumagne, cited in Brumagne, Qui se souvient . . . ?, p. 140. 99. McClennen, “Chilex,” p. 4.

first in a series of LPs of Chilean folk music Parra recorded for Odeón Chilenabetween 1956 and 1958 boast that she went to Europe with a “criolla guitarunder her arm” as her only calling card, and ended up ensuring “that theauthentic music of Chile be appreciated in the cultural centers of Paris andLondon and in the central offices of UNESCO.”100 Parra’s record of achieve-ment in Europe opened new artistic avenues for her in Chile, including therecording of the Odeón Chilena folk series and a residency under universityauspices in Concepción, where she founded a museum of folk art.

In Chile, Parra’s performance of authenticity earned her a small but fervent fanbase among Chilean intellectuals and alienated leftists who shared their Euro-pean counterparts’ modern longing for the authentic, but with nationalist andanti-imperialist overtones. Of far more import to Parra herself, she also built asubstantial and loving following among the pueblo, through her radio showsand her travels as a folklorist and performer. In spite of her Chilean audience’sloyalty and diversity, Parra’s artistic career was one of constant struggle, evenmore so in Chile than in Europe. Many factors conspired to make this the case.First and as already noted, it was easier for Parra to be her authentic self inEurope than in Chile. In Paris, London, and Geneva, Parra was simply pre-sumed authentic, on stage and off. Europeans therefore experienced her the-atrical performance of authenticity as more immediate and visceral than did heraudiences in Chile, where she was understood to be primarily an interpreter ofthe authenticity found in that removed, semi-mythical site where her folkloricsubjects resided. Furthermore, Parra’s offstage performance of the authenticwas more problematic in Chile. Like their European counterparts, cosmopoli-tan Chileans—Parra included—often romanticized the pueblo as pure andtimeless. But Parra herself, dressed as a campesina, could also be “read” as apoor person, and thus relocated not to the authentic, but to the sometimesuncomfortable and inherently divisive terrain of class difference. The diversereactions to Parra’s 1954 audition at Radio Chilena illustrate a range of possi-ble readings within Chile. According to Ricardo García, some of his colleaguesat the station showed “a great admiration and interest,” others made negativecomments, and some were even “a little frightened.”101

In politically polarized Chile, there was also the issue of Parra’s associationwith the left. In France, as the exotic other, Parra could be viewed as somehow


100. Violeta Parra, Canto y guitarra, Vol. I. A conceptual cousin to the practice of advertising Parra’sEuropean success was to lament that Europeans were better able to appreciate true Chilean talent thanChileans themselves. See for example the piece penned by a regular Ecran columnist writing under the pseu-donym “Hablador” and decrying the lack of interest in Chile for Parra’s recordings of folk music: “Los pro-fetas fuera de casa . . . y otros detalles . . . ,” Ecran 1322 (May 22, 1956), pp. 20–21.

101. Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 58.

outside of class politics by those who valued her authenticity but not necessar-ily her radical ideals. The economic and social injustices she denounced in artand song, in turn, could be easily dismissed as the troubles of a distant andbackward nation. In Chile, Parra’s affiliation with the left was another story.Although it earned her performance opportunities—with notoriously poorpay—at leftist events, it made her the political opponent of those on theChilean center and right, and thus unlikely to attract their support.

Finally, the very biographical components that enhanced Parra’s authenticity inChile as folklorist and artist—her relatively humble origins, her lack of formaleducation or artistic training—impeded her from receiving official support forher work in the classist milieus of Chilean academics and the fine arts. In thissense, Parra was too closely identified with the marginalized pueblo that she feltherself part of and strove to represent, and therefore she was herself marginal-ized. This seems to have been particularly the case in the rarefied world of thebellas artes. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Parra found no Chileancounterpart to her wealthy patrons in Europe, and some of the same artworksthat Parra exhibited at the Louvre in 1964 had been rejected by the selectioncommittee of the Feria de Artes Plásticas in Santiago in years prior.102 As artistMario Carreño would bluntly state at an academic roundtable organized in hereulogy: “Violeta Parra had to disappear in order for people in Chile to realizethat her work was of exceptional quality.”103

THE AUTHENTIC AND THE NEW

In Chile and other modernist-capitalist sites, the 1960s represented a period ofaccelerated social change and political polarization. It was also the decade foryoung people. When Parra returned to Chile for the last time in 1965, itsyouth culture was already in full swing. To give just one example of its vertig-inous rise, the three popular youth-oriented entertainment magazines El Musi-quero, Rincón Juvenil, and Ritmo de la Juventud were all launched between1964 and 1965. In Chile, as elsewhere, the explosion of media, performancevenues, and musical styles oriented primarily toward young people was con-nected to their increased buying power as members of an expanding middleclass. It also coincided with greater access to higher education and the relatedexpansion of young people’s political activism.104


102. Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 127.103. “Análisis de un genio,” p. 70.104. See Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen, pp. 210–211; and Gabriel Salazar and Julio Pinto, Historia

Contemporánea de Chile: niñez y juventud, Vol. 5 (Santiago: LOM, 2002). Patrick Barr-Melej’s forthcomingbook promises to be enlightening on the topic of youth culture in Chile. Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counter-

Violeta Parra’s children Isabel and Ángel—both lifelong leftists, then in theirearly twenties—returned to Chile from Paris in 1964 in order to campaign forthe left coalition’s presidential candidate Salvador Allende. They opened theirPeña de los Parra that same year in an old house in Santiago’s center. The Parrasiblings modeled their peña (folk music club) after the Parisian boîtes wherethey had performed in the early 1960s, both with their mother and as a duo,with the difference that the Chilean locale had a markedly leftist orientation.105

Like the 1950s Chilean folk revival, the emerging Chilean nueva canciónmovement may best be understood as both a response to local conditions andan international cultural trend, as protest music became popular across themodernist-capitalist cosmopolitan cultural formation during the 1960s. Freedfrom the intrinsic nationalism of the 1950s folkloric movement, the Chileannew song artists were susceptible to influences of like movements in Spanish-speaking countries that could sustain larger markets for folk music, and partic-ularly neighboring Argentina.106

Isabel and Ángel Parra ran their peña as a collective with fellow musiciansRolando Alarcón, Patricio Manns, and Victor Jara.107 The boîte-influenced styleof the youthful peña musicians contrasted starkly with the more didactic andnarrative folkloric shows of their mother’s 1950s-era cohort of folk musicians.A short piece published in Rincón Juvenil on the occasion of the peña’s firstanniversary describes the club’s more informal ambience: “The spectators havethe opportunity to see the artists up close . . . dressed in sporty trousers and adark pullover, take up their guitars and sing.” 108 As in the Parisian boîtes—butnot the actos folklóricos—there was no distance between performers and public.In lieu of huaso or huasa costumes, the musicians dressed in a manner indistin-guishable from members of their audience. Perhaps most significantly, they wereno longer “interpreters,” but “artists.” These contrasts, taken together, suggestthat the “authentic” folkloricizations of the 1950s might well have been read as“inauthentic” by youthful peña-goers in the mid-1960s.109


culture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, forthcoming).

105. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne,” pp. 153–154.106. For the impact of Argentine folk musicians on the Chilean folk music scene, see Sergio H. Car-

rasco, “Victor Jara: ‘El plagio, buen bocado por mediocridad,’” El Siglo (September 18, 1966), reproducedin Claudio Acevedo et al., Victor Jara: Obra Musical Completa (Santiago: Fundación Victor Jara, 1997), p. 38;González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970, pp. 355 and 446–454; and Jara, An Unfinished Song, pp. 82–83.

107. As the participation of former Cuncumén band members Alarcón and Jara demonstrates, severalof the 1950s folklorists were active in the 1960s new song movement as well.

108. María Inés Sáez, “Un año de folklore en la Peña de los Parra,” Rincón Juvenil 72 (May 4, 1966),p. 4. The word “pullover” appears in English in the Spanish original.

109. In 1965, Ecran provided a forum for a debate on whether folkloric groups should continue towear the huaso costume, among other topics. Participants included Hernán Arenas, musical director of SilviaInfantas y los Condores, Luis Enrique Urquidi, musical director of Los Cuatro Cuartos, members of the band

By the time Violeta Parra returned to Chile in 1965, La Peña de los Parra hadbecome a favored gathering spot for leftists of all stripes, especially students,and could boast of long lines of people waiting to get in on weekend nights,most of them young.110 Parra immediately took to this new music scene, sosimilar to the one she had just left in Paris, yet so grounded in the Chilean left.She literally moved into the building with her lover, Gilbert Favre, andremained there for her first few months back home. On the surface, it wouldappear to have been easy for Parra senior to incorporate herself into this thriv-ing movement of leftist musicians. She was familiar with and often a practi-tioner of the peña artists’ more informal performance style thanks to her yearsworking at L’Escale and other Parisian boîtes. More importantly, she hadalready composed many of the protest songs that would eventually becomestandards of the nueva canción movement, including her tongue-in-cheekpaean to youth activism “Me gustan los estudiantes.” The power and beauty ofher songs earned her the 1965 award for best composer from Ricardo Garcia’strendsetting radio show, Discomanía.111

Parra nevertheless ended up not fitting in that well with the younger gen-eration of leftist musicians. The reasons were many. First, she was perhapstoo closely associated with that whole “folklore thing” of the 1950s. IsabelParra recalls the shift her generation made: “All of a sudden a magnificentworld of [Latin American] music opened up to us, and all of that Chileanfolklore became a little passé, we moved onto other things.”112 Parra’snationalist background as folklorist, along with her unwavering identifica-tion, both performative and personal, with el pueblo chileno put her some-what out of sync with a new generation that saw itself as part of the “ThirdWorld,” and the anticolonialist struggles of Chile, Vietnam, and Angola asone common cause.113


Los de Santiago, Esther Soré, Angel Parra, Osvaldo Silva, and Camilo Fernández. See “Proceso al Folklore,”Ecran 1784 (April 6, 1965), pp. 39–41, 1788 (May 5, 1965), pp. 78–79; 1790 (May 15, 1965), pp. 43–45;1794 (June 15, 1965), pp. 44–45.

110. Sáez, “Un año de folklore,” pp. 4–5. The bibliography on the Chilean nueva canción movementis substantial, and includes Fernando Barraza, La nueva canción chilena (Santiago: Quimantú, 1972); RenéGilberto Largo Farías, La nueva canción chilena (Mexico: Casa de Chile, 1977); Rodríguez Musso, La nuevacanción; and “Nueva canción” in González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970, pp. 371–435.

111. González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970, p. 137.112. Cited in González Bermejo, “Isabel Parra,” Crisis 3:28 (August 1975), p. 48.113. González et al. note that “the idea of stepping outside of the national borders . . . in folklore has

always been resisted in Chile.” Historia Social, 1950–1970, p. 355. Parra confirms this, as for a time she triedvery hard to dissuade Ángel Parra from performing songs by Atahualpa Yupanqui. Ángel Parra, Violeta se fue,p. 158; Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, 108. By the mid-1960s, however, Parra had become less rigidly nationalis-tic; she performed on instruments from other Latin American countries, and even composed a few songs onpan-Latin American themes. Her repertoire, however, remained consistently and exclusively the folk songs shecollected in Chile and her own compositions.

Second, there was evidently not as much room for women performers in the1960s nueva canción movement as there was during the folk music boom ofthe 1950s. In contrast to their numeric near-parity and impressive leadershipin the earlier movement, women were noticeably scarce among the ranks ofChilean new song artists.114 González, Ohlsen, and Rolle note their “signifi-cant absence” (setting apart Violeta and Isabel Parra), but fail to explain whythis should be the case.115 I would argue that the relative paucity of womenartists was related to the pronounced masculinity of the Chilean left during theheady days of guerrilla warfare and “el hombre nuevo.” The popular nueva can-ción band Quilapayún was emblematic. The name means “the three beardedones” in Mapudungun (Mapuche language). The band members’ stage outfitsconsisted of long black ponchos. They sang with “virile voices,” and their per-formance style was, according to one of their members, “masculine withoutbeing machista.”116 To state the obvious: beards, ponchos, virile voices, andmasculinity are all attributes exclusionary of women. At the same time, themovement never developed a distinct feminine identity equivalent to the folk-loric huasa. These dynamics, in my opinion, go a long way toward explainingthe preponderance of men in the movement.117

Finally, there was Parra’s relative age. From the perspective of the juventud, shewas old enough to be—and, in Isabel and Ángel’s case, literally was—theirmother, this in an era when advertising and mass media “depicted older peopleas backward” and “encouraged [young people] . . . to identify with oneanother through consumption.”118 Tellingly, the headline of a 1966 piece inRincón Juvenil on Parra’s Carpa de la Reina is angled from the viewpoint ofthe younger generation: “Ángel and Isabel Parra: ‘Our Mother is Our Great-est Source of Pride.’”119 The Carpa, Parra’s ambitious project of creating a folkart center in the inconveniently located circus tent, never truly got off the


114. Barraza lists only three women performers on his 1972 roster of nueva canción artists (CharoCofré, Isabel Parra, and Silvia Urbina). La nueva canción, pp. 86–93. Their reduced number stands in con-trast to the 16 women folklorists listed in Klimpel’s La Mujer Chilena (see n29).

115. Historia Social, 1950–1970, p. 408. Elsey seems to make the opposite claim in noting that the newsong movement “offered opportunities for female artists,” that is until one realizes her assessment is made inimplicit contrast to the even more male-exclusive world of soccer. Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen, p. 222.

116. Eduardo Carrasco, quoted in Jara, An Unfinished Song, p. 107.117. This may also explain why an experimental female version of Quilapayún, dressed in long black

skirts instead of ponchos, never really got off the ground. Jara, An Unfinished Song, p. 197. Women’s periph-eral position within the Chilean new song movement, and the organized left in general, is perhaps best encap-sulated in the lyrics of the unofficial hymn of the Unidad Popular and later, the Chilean resistance, “El PuebloUnido Jamás Será Vencido”—written, not coincidently, by Quilapayún band member Sergio Ortega. Itannounces—tragically, in hindsight—the imminent triumph of el pueblo (read “working class”). Its last stanzachimes in: “And you are there too, mujer, with strength and courage, united with the worker.” “El PuebloUnido,” http://unionsong.com/u443.html (accessed September 14, 2012).

118. Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen, p. 210.119. Osmur (pseud.), “Ángel e Isabel Parra,” pp. 6–7.

ground.120 In a 1966 interview, she blamed youth culture, at least in part, forthe Carpa’s poor attendance, lamenting “the indifference of young peopletoward these folk music gatherings.”121 She would end up playing more therole of asesora or madrina to the blossoming collective of younger leftist musi-cians, drilling them on the “correct” way to perform this or that folkloric style.Too inventive to be simply an intérprete folklórica, too folklórica and matureto be part of the leftist youth culture, she would spend her last months in rel-ative isolation, living and performing at her Carpa. The significant contribu-tion that Violeta Parra made to the movement that would soon call itself “lanueva canción chilena” and eventually claim her as their “madre” would be rec-ognized only upon her tragic death in 1967.122

CONCLUSION

This article has explored how Violeta Parra reinvented herself as authenticother and demanded to be seen and heard by her fellow cosmopolitans.Authenticity, like all things modern, would prove an unstable foundation forher aspirations, for numerous and interrelated reasons. Here are but a few. Per-formers of the authentic, with rare exception, are poorly paid. As authenticityis defined in opposition to commercialism, its audience is perforce a nicheaudience. Then there is the competition. In Europe, Parra had to competewith the latest exotic discovery from Le Chant du Monde’s ever-expandingcatalog of international folk sensations, and in Chile, with the swelling ranks ofintérpretes folklóricos who made the 1950s folk “boom” a boom.123 Audi-ences that seek out the authentic are notoriously fickle, as for something to beexperienced as authentic it must come with a sense of revelation. This meantthat many of the qualities associated with Parra’s 1950s performance ofauthenticity—pure, traditional, timeless—could morph into their negatives—repressed, old-fashioned, stale—with the youth culture explosion and snow-balling momentum of modernizing utopian projects of the 1960s. And so on.

Parra’s performance of authenticity was thus not without its challenges.González, Ohlsen, and Rolle hold her up as a prime example of a mid-twenti-


120. See González et al., Historia Social, 1950–1970, pp. 235–236.121. Alfonso Molina Leiva, “Vengan a cantar junto a mí.”122. The tributes and commemorations began immediately after her death in Chile, and continue to

this day throughout the world. Nueva canción artist Patricio Manns has insisted in a fairly recent interviewthat Parra’s status as “mother” of the new song movement is a myth. See Salvador Allende: presencia en laausencia, Miguel Lawner et al., eds. (Santiago: LOM/CENDA, 2008), pp. 364, 367. However, Manns seemsto stand alone in his opinion.

123. Parra’s somewhat dogmatic insistence that the authentic be interpreted as authentically as possiblemay have proven an additional liability, as many cosmopolitans may have found her coarse singing style grat-ing and her repertoire of slow, drawn-out “cantos a lo pueta” monotonous.

eth-century cultural innovator trying to survive outside of both the market andacademia, underscoring the element of choice in her marginalization from thecommercial industries and cultural institutions that might have helped to sus-tain her. I concur, up to a point. After all, Parra turned toward the authenticand away from a respectable and even promising career as a composer and per-former of a potentially more lucrative música popular. Even then, she couldhave pursued the safer and duller career of an academic, but then, as musicol-ogist Gastón Soublette points out, “she would not have been Violeta Parra,she would not have lived the way she lived, she would not have given us all thatshe gave us.”124

I also agree, however, with “new biographer” Jo Burr Margandant’s admoni-tion that the difficulties performing women encounter “should not be under-estimated,” as “no one ‘invents’ a self apart from cultural notions available tothem in a particular historical setting.”125 At mid twentieth century, in Santi-ago as in Paris, the performance of authenticity may well have been the bestroute available to the “ugliest woman” from the “end of the world.” Cos-mopolitan circles, like all circles, are formed to include and exclude. The wayspeople fit into the loops that bind modernist-capitalist cosmopolitans togetherare mediated by physical and social characteristics of gender, class, age, race,and nationality. In some instances, these essentializing factors may serve aspoints of entry; in others, they represent formidable obstacles. In Parra’s case,the results of her efforts to create an opening where none was clearly demar-cated were extremely mixed. They include both the high point of her tri-umphant Louvre exhibit, and the loneliness of her last months at the Carpa.126

Parra’s struggle reveals how difficult it was for a woman, lacking in “beauty”and inherited class status, to break through modernity’s barriers of exclusion,as it confirms her bold tenacity to do so.

We may never know the source of the image of a petite woman, simply dressed,weighed down by a bundle of her tapestries, standing alone in front of thepalatial Louvre museum.127 Perhaps Parra herself invented it. Neither “pure”nor naïve, she represented herself according to cosmopolitan sensibilities of theauthentic, because these were also her set of aesthetics and social values; they


124. Cited in Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 85.125. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2000), p. 2.126. The distance between the two has become a trope for explaining Parra’s suicide, her desolation at

the end of her life linked to the European heights from which she fell.127. This same image, by and large, is recreated cinematographically in Andre Wood’s recent biopic,

Violeta se fue a los cielos (Wood Productions, Maiz Productions, and Bossa Nova Films, 2011), except thatWood relocates it to the interior of the museum.

were what mattered to her. She also had faith, seemingly against all odds, inher artistic talents. In the end, her act of self-creation was constrained by veryreal inequalities, of gender and class, and between nations. Like her tapestriesshown at the Louvre, sewn onto burlap from odd spools of yarn, she took thecultural materials that were available to her, and crafted herself.

California State University, Dominguez Hills ERICKA KIM VERBA

Carson, California


violeta invencion

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