Verba 2013

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To Paris and Back: Violeta Parra's Transnational

Performance of Authenticity
Ericka Kim Verba
The Americas / Volume 70 / Issue 02 / October 2013, pp 269 - 302

DOI: 10.1017/S0003161500003242, Published online: 17 February 2015
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003161500003242
How to cite this article:

Ericka Kim Verba (2013). To Paris and Back: Violeta Parra's Transnational Performance of
Authenticity. The Americas, 70, pp 269-302 doi:10.1017/S0003161500003242
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THE AMERICAS
70:2/0ctober 2013/269-302
COPYRIGHT BY THE ACADEMY OF
AMERICAN FRANCISCAN HISTORY
To PARIS AND BACK:

Violeta Parra's Transnational Performance
of Authenticity
I
n 1964, at what was surely the acme of her career, Violeta Parra became
the first Latin American to have a solo show at the Louvre. During the
five-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 exposition
hall into a veritable Chilean ramada.1 The exhibit received favorable reviews in
the press, and was visited by important dignitaries and a who's who of die
Parisian and expatriate Latin American artistic community. Parra sold several of
her tapestries, including one to the Baroness Rothschild. By all accounts, the
show was a great success.
How Parra reached this pinnacle is the subject of opposing narratives. One
anecdote claims that Parra was given a business card with an address on it by
someone 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-
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 Violeta
Parra. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at The Aesthetic of Revolt: Latin America in the
1960s, a conference held at the Latin American Studies Center, University of Maryland, College Park, in April
2011. My thanks to conference organizers Mary Kay Vaughan and Karin Rosemblatt for the opportunity and
support. 1 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, Kiniberly Davis, Jedrek
Mularski, and Claudia Vizcarra for help along the way. My thanks to archivists Guillemette Delaporte at the
Bibliotheque des Arts Ddcoratifs, Paris, and Aaron M. Bittel at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive for their
generous 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 Cesar, 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's
Independence Day, September 18th.
2. Patricia M. Stambuk and Patricia Bravo, Violeta Parra: el canto tie todos (Santiago: Pehuen Editores,
2011), pp. 125-126. Note: This is a revised and augmented version of the book that has appeared in various
previous editions under the title, Gracias a la Vida. Violeta Parra, Testimonio.
269
270 To PARIS AND BACK
ever, reveal a different version of events. Parra arrived at die museum by

appointment, one obtained via a letter of introduction from the Chilean
ambassador at the time, Carlos Morla Lynch, to Jean Cassou, director of the
Musee National d'Art Moderne. In it, Ambassador Lynch identifies Madame
Violeta Parra as "a Chilean artist who resides in Paris," and requests that
Cassou 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 The
first story positions Parra as authentic—naive, unworldly, standing outside of
the 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, in
contrast, offers a cosmopolitan Parra with considerable savoir faire.
This article strives to uncover the common roots of these divergent accounts. It
explores how Parra reinvented herself as non-cosmopolitan "other" and insisted
that she be "discovered" by the cosmopolitan world. My contention that Parra
"performed" her authenticity is not meant to imply that she was somehow a
fake—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 a
socially agreed-upon construct."4 Neither object nor event, Parra embodied
authenticity. It was her defining feature but itself had no fixed definition. It
could thus take on different meanings depending on the time and place of her
performance. Although multivalent, authenticity is always claimed in reference
to and thus constitutive of modernity. It represents "a peculiar longing, at once
modern and antimodern. It is oriented toward the recovery of an essence whose
loss has been realized only through modernity, and whose recovery is feasible
only through methods and sentiments created in modernity."5
Parra, in addition to visual artist, was a folklorist, composer, and musician. Her
multimedia performance of authenticity spanned two decades and two conti-
nents. She was a leader of the 1950s folkloric "boom" in Chile, a pioneer and,
3. Carlos Morla Lynch to Jean Cassou, n.d., dossier of the Exposition "Violetta [sic] Parra: tapisseries,
peintures, sculptures," Archives of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. This and all other translations are by the
author.
4. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), p. 5.
5. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of
Wisconsin 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.: Harvard
University Press, 1988); Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Moder-
nity, Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
David Grazian, Blue Chicago. The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 2003); and Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1995).
ERICKA KIM VERBA 27I
upon her death, a source of inspiration for the genre of 1960s-1970s protest
music that came to be known as nueva cancion chilena. This study, through its
investigation of Parra, thus sheds light on two key cultural movements of the
second half of the twentieth century: folk music revivals of the 1950s, and protest
music of the 1960s and beyond. Rapid modernization and urbanization in the
post-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 counterculture
movements of the 1960s. Both movements depended on technological advances
as well as innovations in the increasingly global entertainment industry. Both
played out against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Parra staged her performance primarily in Santiago and Paris, with brief stints
in Buenos Aires, London, Geneva, and Conception. In all of these settings,
Parra appealed to her cosmopolitan public's shared discomfort with modernity
and nostalgia for an idealized past and place. On both sides of the Adantic, die
value of her performance was assessed based on its ability to offer an alternative
to mass consumer culture. Parra's Chilean and European acts thus held much
in common. That said, diey differed in certain fundamental aspects. First and
foremost, Parra was Chilean, and her performance in her native land was thus
intertwined widi issues of nationalism and political debate over the constitution
and rights of el pueblo chileno. In Paris and other capitals of Western Europe, on
the other hand, Parra's performance was viewed through a colonial gaze that
had a long, deep history, and enacted during a period of acute anti-colonial
struggle that directly challenged that gaze. The disproportionate wealdi of the
cultural power centers of modernist capitalism, and their correlated one-way
cultural impact on more peripheral sites, created additional differentiating char-
acteristics in Parra's performance. In concrete terms, they meant, among other
things, diat she was paid better in Europe dian in Chile, and that her European
reception affected her reception in Chile, but not vice versa.
The analysis offered in diis article is informed by works in the interdisciplinary

field of transnational studies that reframe cultural phenomena, hitherto con-
ceptualized as nationally produced, as transnational processes. 6 In particular, it
adopts Thomas Turino's conceptualization of a cosmopolitan cultural forma-
6. See for example: Katherine J. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances: The Performance ofAfro-Cuban Santeria
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); Deborah Pacini Hernandez, "Dancing with the
Enemy: 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: Miisica 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 through

communication loops independently binding people culturally who are not,
otherwise, related by location or heritage."7 To use Parra's Louvre exhibit as
illustration, its French and expatriate Latin American visitors and Parra herself
were 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 the
researcher to move beyond the obfuscating dyads of traditional/modern,
underdeveloped/developed, or more recently, local/global that would situate
Parra as somehow outside of the cosmopolitan milieu that embraced her. For
brevity's sake, this article refers to the specific cosmopolitan cultural formation
of mid-twentieth-century modernist capitalism as cosmopolitanism, and its
members as cosmopolitans.8
Parra may have been bound through communication loops to a diversity of

other cosmopolitans, but how and where she entered those loops mattered. As
Anthony 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 same
fundamentals, in combination and, arguably, in equal measure to her own cos-
mopolitan sensibilities, influenced and may very well have determined the
artistic pathways Parra travelled. This article is therefore necessarily a study of
gender, class, and race relations.10
Parra was well known in Chile during her lifetime, and achieved a degree of
recognition in certain European artistic circles as well. Her full embrace as an
international figure would occur only after her tragic death in 1967, her life
and 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 of
Zimbabwean Popular Music," British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12:2 (2003), pp. 51-79; p. 62. My thanks
to Fernando Rios, who first introduced me to Turino's conceptualization of cosmopolitanism, and whose
research on the Andean music scene in Paris during the 1960s, and particularly the Parra family's involvement
in it, is crucial to my own analysis. Rios, "La Flute Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-Popular
Music in France and its Impact on Nueva Cancion," Latin American Music Review 29:2 (Fall-Winter 2008),
pp. 145-189.
8. Turino identifies two other prominent cosmopolitan cultural formations of thesecond half of the
twentieth 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 of
cultural processes is sometimes misconstrued to imply that we consider them of no consequence. This is not
the case.
ERICKA KIM VERBA 273
history.'1 Today, Violeta Parra is celebrated as the "mother" of the Chilean new
song movement, and as an important twentieth-century Latin American woman
artist.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 several
biographies, a historical novel, a recent biopic, and a growing number of scholarly
treatises.14 Though varied in format, the vast majority of nonacademic work, and
much of the academic output as well, reifies Parra as authentic and proceeds to
celebrate her authenticity (in testimonials and biographies), or to parse the ways
it 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 her
lifetime, as it marks the extent to which the essentializing notions of gender and
class 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 considers
how her performance was received by cosmopolitan audiences in Chile and
Western Europe. A brief final section examines Parra's relationship with the
emerging Chilean nueva cancion movement. As processes of creation, per-
formance, and reception are intrinsically linked, their division in this case is
merely 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 La
Nueva Cancion Chilena," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 5 (1986), pp. 108-125; Cristian
Gonzalez Farfan and Gabriela Bravo Chiappe, Ecos del tiempo subterraneo: laspeiias en Santiago durante el reg-
imen militar (1973-1983) (Santiago: LOM, 2009); and Sophia A. McClennen, "Chilex: The Economy of
Transnational Media Culture," Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Thought and Practice 3:1
(2000), http://eserver.org/clogic/3-l&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 singing
her best-known song, "Gracias a la vida," registered 1,958,551 hits. Both searches were conducted April 7,
2012.
13. Angel Parra, Violeta sefue a loscielos(Santiago: Catalonia, 2006); Isabel Parra, Ellibro 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: By
the Whim of the Wind (Albuquerque, N.M.: ABQ Press, 2010); Diana Malizia, Violeta Parra: mujer de cuerpo
entero (Buenos Aires, Capital Intelectual, 2008); Patricio Manns, Violeta Parra: lajjuitarra indocil (Concep-
ci6n: LAR, 1986); Carmen Oviedo, Mentira todo lo cierto: trasla huella de Violeta Parra (Santiago: Editorial
Universitaria, 1990); and Fernando Saez, Violeta Parra: la vida intranquila, biografia esencial (Santiago: Edi-
torial Sudamericana, 1999). Monica Echeverria wrote the novel, To Violeta (Santiago: Plaza Janes, 2010). The
biopic is Violeta sefue a los cielos, directed by Andres Wood, and based on the book of the same title by Angel
Parra. 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 Nicanor
Parra, her brother and a renowned poet, are portrayed in biographical and literary studies. The siblings shared
the same background, and both drew inspiration from Chilean folklore. Nicanor, however, has been allowed
to "grow up" into a modern artist, while Parra remains "pure," "natural," "campesina," "one of the
people"—in short, authentic. See for example Jaime Quezada, Nicanor Parra de cuerpo entero (Santiago: Edi-
torial Andres Bello, 2007); Efrain Szmulewicz, Nicanor Parra: biografia emotiva (Santiago: Ediciones
Rumbos, 1988); and Pamela Zuniga, El mundo de Nicanor Parra: antibiografta (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1995).
Parra's performance of authenticity was never guaranteed success. Case in

point: 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, die
ugliest woman on the planet, who comes from a tiny country, from Chilian,
tiie end of the world?"17 Her query underscores that her positioning as otiier
was 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 deeply
she felt herself to be just that. I use die word "performance" in this article's
tide, but could just as well have used "ascription" or "experience." If I choose
the 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 or
custom 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 a
prime mover in this process.
T H E FOLK " B O O M "
The year 1953 marked a turning point in Parra's life. Then 35, she had built a
respectable career for herself performing a commercial musica popular with her
sister Hilda, as die duo Las Hermanas Parra.19 That year, encouraged by her
brother, the poet Nicanor Parra, she abruptly and definitively left it behind and
began her work collecting and disseminating the folk songs and traditions of
Chile that would earn her renown, during her lifetime and beyond, as one of
the 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 a
veritable "boom" of folkloric performers that included Margot Loyola, Gabriela
Pizarro, and the conjunto Cuncumen, among others.20 Their project, like most
16. The museum's selection committee initially rejected Parra's proposal, and the show went forward
only 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 recorded
several singles with RCA Victor. See Alfonso Alcalde, Toda Violeta Parra (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor,
1974), pp. 25-26, 36-37; Juan Pablo Gonzalez and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la musica popular en
Chile, 1890-1950 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad CarxMica de Chile, 2004), p. 435; Saez, Violeta Parra, pp.
47-53; and Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, pp. 51-61. For a list of the duo's RCA Victor recordings, see Isabel
Parra, Libro mayor, p. 231.
20. Juan Pablo Gonzalez, Oscar Ohlsen, and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la musica popular en
Chile, 1950-1970(Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Cat61ica de Chile, 2009), pp. 311-367. Together, the two
tomes by self-professed "academicos-fandticof Gonzalez and Rolle, and (for the second volume) Ohlsen, offer
copious information on virtually every aspect of Chilean musica popular for the period from 1890 to 1970.
folkloric projects, was national in scope: they viewed Chile as the sum of its
varied regions, and the folklore of diese regions as the nation's patrimony. The
folklorists' charge was to discover, rescue, and restore the "true" folklore of el
pueblo cbileno 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 rapid
processes of modernization and urbanization. To give but one example of the
striking rate of change, the population of Santiago grew from roughly 500,000
in 1920, to 2,000,000 by the end of the 1950s.21 The fast pace of economic
and social transformations provided thus both the context and impetus for the
folklorists' activities. In terms of its political moment, the Chilean folklore
revival took place during a decade marked by government harassment and cen-
sorship of the left, in particular of the Communist Party.22 Though nationalist
in intent, the reinvigorated Chilean folk scene was cosmopolitan; parallel folk
renewals with similar characteristics were taking place in the 1950s throughout
the 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
2 1 . Simon Collier and William Sater, A History of Chile, 1808-2004 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 2 9 1 .
22. The Chilean Communist Party was banned from 1948 to 1958 under the so-called "Law for the
Permanent Defense of Democracy." For a history of this period, see Carlos Huneeus, La Guerra Fria Cbilcna:
Gabriel Gonzalez Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago: Debate, 2009); and Olga Ulianova, "Algunas reflexiones
sobre la Guerra Fria desde el fin del m u n d o , " in Ampliando miradas: Chile y sti historia en tin tiempoglobal,
Fernando Purcell and Alfredo Riquelme, eds., (Santiago: RIL Editores, 2009), pp. 2 3 5 - 2 6 0 . Anti-Commu-
nist government repression in Chile does not appear to have had as direct an adverse effect on the individual
careers of leftist Chilean folk musicians active in the 1950s as McCarthyism had on their U.S. counterparts
during 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. 3 7 0 - 3 8 0 ; Paul Austerlitz, "Birch-Bark Horns and
Jazz in the National Imagination: The Finnish Folk Music Vogue in Historical Perspective," Etlmomusicology
44:2 (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: Sugar
Elites, Criollo Workers, and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, 1900-1955 (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2010), and Breve historia del movimiento folclorico argentino: cultura, identidad y nacion (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 the
30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States," Theory and Society 25:4 (August 1996), pp.
5 0 1 - 5 4 3 ; Daniel J. Gonczy, "The Folk Music Movement of the 1960s: Its Rise and Fall," Popular Music and
Society 10 (1985), pp. 1 5 - 3 1 ; E. David Gregory, "Lomax in London: Alan Lomax, the BBC and the Folk-
Song Revival in England, 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 8 , " Folk Music Journal 8:2 (2002), pp. 1 3 6 - 1 6 9 ; Dario Marchini, No
toauen: musicos populares, gobierno y sociedad (Buenos Aires: Catalogos, 2008), pp. 125-162; Gillian A. M.
Mitchell, "Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movements of
the United States and Canada, 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 5 , " Journal of American Studies 40:3 (December 2006), pp.
5 9 3 - 6 1 4 ; Richard A. Reuss, "American Folksongs and Left-Wing Politics, 1 9 3 5 - 1 9 5 6 , " Journal of the Folk-
lore Institute 1 2 : 2 / 3 (1975), pp. 8 9 - 1 1 1 ; and Neil Rosenberg, Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals
Examined (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
24. Gonzalez et al. suggest that the Chilean folkloric performances of the 1950s were influenced and
perhaps even inspired by post-World War II promotions of folklore in the Soviet bloc and its spheres of
influence: 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 differentiate

between the process whereby certain songs (and not others) are "col-
lected," and thus constituted as "folklore," as opposed to that process
whereby "folklore" is adapted and performed for a cosmopolitan audience.
Katherine Hagedorn and others have coined the term "folkloricization" for
the latter process.25 Parra and her fellow interpretes folkloricos, in perform-
ing Chilean folklore, were "cultural outsiders [who] transform and resignify
non-cosmopolitan practices to appeal to cosmopolitan audiences."26 A short
notice in Ecran, Chile's premier entertainment magazine, published from
the 1930s through the 1960s, may serve to illustrate this procedure. It
announces the radio debut of a new folklorist, Gabriela Pizarro, and fea-
tures a photograph of Pizarro in the requisite costume and pose of the
huasa11—the flowery dress, the white apron edged in lace, the hair in two
braids tied with bows, playing a ribbon-adorned guitar. Promising that she
would be performing "authentic themes from our folklore," the notice then
quotes Pizarro's own definition of her act: "Margot Loyola taught me how
to sing folklore just the way it is, but musically; in other words, omitting
only its defects."28
As this notice intimates, women played a prominent role in the 1950s folk
movement in Chile.29 In La bistoria social de la musica popular en Chile,
1950-1970, Gonzalez, Ohlsen, and Rolle credit their strong presence to two
factors: women's increased incorporation into public life, and the new
demands 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 one
hand, the U.S. supported the dissemination of American folkloric traditions through recordings, radio, and
performance, though never on the scale of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, U.S. Cold War ideology cast
the 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 Jean
Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002). Jazz and modern art were the preferred emissaries of this universal culture. The Soviet
Union's strong support for the "music of the people" may have contributed, additionally, to U.S. ambivalence
toward 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. support
of 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," in
The Norte-Americanizacion of Latin America?, Hans-Joachim Konig and Stefan Rinke, eds. (Stuttgart: Heinz
Verlag, 2004), pp. 253-277.
25. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, pp. 9-12.
26. Rios, "L« Flute lndienne" 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. Felicitas Klimpel lists 16 women (including Margot Loyola, Gabriela Pizarro, and Violeta Parra)
under the category "Musica folkl6rica (Investigadores, Recopiladores y Compositoras)" in her book La Mujer
Chilena (El aporte femenino al prqgreso de Chile), 1910-1960 (Santiago: Editorial Andres Bello, 1962), pp.
202-203.
30. Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1950-1970, p. 324.
at least in part to the folklorists' rigid categorization of folk traditions by

gender which required, perforce, that women and men participate with some
parity in their "authentic" performance, as huasas and huasos. On a deeper
level, it reflected cosmopolitan gender notions that essentialized women as the
timeless conservers of tradition, thus making it relatively easy for them to enter
the field of folklore during a period when their access to other academic and
artistic 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 work
as the first line of defense in the "battle for the authentic" against die radio
invasion 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 "musica
tipica" of groups like Los Huasos Quincheros.32 Members of the leftist band
Cuncumen even designed new costumes to replace those usually worn by
huaso groups, which they believed romanticized the harsh class relations of the
hacienda system. They exchanged the typical huaso outfit, modeled on the ele-
gant outfits of the patron, for a campesino-inspired checked shirt, simple pants,
and work boots or rubber sandals. The conjunto's female members traded in
their huasa costumes, with their lace-trimmed aprons symbolic of servitude, for
plain, solid-colored dresses and head scarves.33
Though many of die 1950s Chilean folklorists were leftists, their project was
not exclusive to die political left. In contrast to die protest songs associated
with the Chilean nueva cancion of the 1960s and 1970s, the songs that made
up the 1950s folklorists' repertoire were "authentic," and therefore not overdy
political. The fact that the Chilean folklorists' object of investigation was an
idealized pueblo chileno, timeless and past, and not die present-day pueblo of
31. Quote from a 1957 radio interview with Violeta Parra on Radio Chilena. Cited in Oviedo, Mentira
totio 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 Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1890-1950, pp. 363^20. By the 1950s, the figure of the Chilean
huaso was afirmlyestablished 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 Reforming
Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 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, see
Mario 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: Latift American Paths, Luis
Roniger 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 Osvaldo
Rodriguez Musso, La nueva cancion chilena (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1988), pp. 72-73. Nueva cancion
artists Victor Jara and Rolando Alarc6n were both members of Cuncumen at one point.
class struggle, made die folkloric "boom" one of the few cultural arenas within
the charged political atmosphere of the decade that could foster participation
across partisan divides.34 The band Cuncumen's costume change, however,
presaged die amplified political polarization that would render any concept of
a 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 Parra
dressed in a light-hued turtleneck, wearing lipstick.36 The interview itself is
devoted 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 {genero serio),
including "tonadas de corte folklorico, raises, etc.'''' Together, the interview and
photo 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 not
in her essential self. Her own compositions, in turn, were not yet authentically
hers; they were either commercial—and thus "trivial," in her view—or folkloric
imitations ("rfe corte folklorico'''). Her response to the question "When did you
begin to learn our folklore?" however, hints that her transformation was
already under way: "From the moment I was born."37
BECOMING AUTHENTIC
Many factors contributed to Parra's exceptional capacity to relocate herself vis-

a-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-known
derechista, "true harmony" reigned between "those artists that could have been classified as leftist and those
of us who did not share their position" during the period. Cited in Gonzalez 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: Futbol 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 own
postage stamp, and the Chilean equivalent of the Grammy award carries her name. For a blistering critique of
the 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 point
in 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, and
traditional in contrast to the assumed masculine traits—modern and inventive.
Parra's face was pockmarked by a bout of childhood smallpox. "The ugliest
woman on the planet," she was not considered attractive according to cosmo-
politan standards of beauty, a fact that may have enhanced her ability to come
across as "authentic," even as it precluded other performative identities.
Second, there was her life story. She was born in rural Chilian—though not
exactly "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. Her
father, a musician and school teacher, died when Violeta was ten, leaving her
mother to raise Violeta and her nine siblings on her own, working as a seam-
stress. Parra had thus suffered hardships during her childhood. Although she
attended teaching school for a few years, she left it to pursue a musical career
before completing her degree. Unlike the vast majority of folklorists and artists
of her epoch, she had no academic preparation and no formal training in music
or art. Parra would turn these social disadvantages into assets. They constituted
the foundational narrative of her authenticity, and thus became the basis of
how others perceived her as well. Her considerable talents as a folklorist, for
example, 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 one
of them. Her originality as an artist, in turn, was due to the fact that she was
an 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 of
protest songs that would become known by the 1970s in Chile as nueva can-
cion. 39 In comparison with the non-partisan value of her authenticity as
campesinn and autodidacta, Parra's radicalism was a double-edged sword. It
situated her firmly in the camp of the left, not as "other," but as part of a
common struggle. It could thus potentially make her appear inauthentic—for-
eign-inspired, a subverter of national values—in the eyes of those on the
Chilean political center and right.
Finally, personality must factor into any discussion of Parra's authenticity. The
term 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 until
the first Festival de la Nueva Cancion, organized by radio disc jockey Ricardo Garcia in Santiago, 1969.
desire and capacity to perform. Consider for example the curiosity, daring, and
concentration that enabled a seven-year-old girl to steal the key to her father's
guitar case and secredy teach herself to play the guitar.40 Or the imperiousness
with which the adult Parra would often refer to herself in the third person, as
in the announcement "Violeta Parra has arrived!"41 Or the stunning audacity
of a comment she made to her friend and fellow artist, Alejandro Jodorowsky,
when the two Chilean expatriates happened upon the Palais du Louvre while
strolling 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 tiny
woman, 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's

memoir—are joined by countless more, all in some way illustrative of Parra's
personality. Together, they demonstrate the impossibility of a pre-performative
answer to the question of why Parra became a performer: the very social forces
that shaped her personality were those that shaped her performance, and there
is 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. Like
her leftist political affiliation, her personality could be a double-edged sword.
Take, for example, her anger, by all accounts one of her more pronounced
characteristics (one perhaps expressive of the range of emotions her sense of
otherness could provoke, beyond its sorrows). Parra's quick temper could
make it difficult for her to negotiate successfully with her fellow cosmopolitans.
Her stubborn determination, on the other hand, seemingly allowed her to
achieve the impossible—including, as promised, a show at the Louvre. The
sheer 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 context
with the representational practices of Parra's 1950s cohort of folkloric per-
formers, versus "unique authenticity" or the "idea that something is authentic
because it is singular, new, innovative, and usually perceived to emerge from
the depths of a composing musician's soul."43 Parra's case appears a variation
40. Magdalena Vicuna, "Violeta Parra, hermana mayor de los cantores populares," Revista Musical
Chilena 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 as

an artist, but linked it not to modern inventiveness but to her biographical
authenticity as campesina-autodidacta. Chilean musicologist Magdalena
Vicuna'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 book
Poemas y anti-poemas, may serve as example. Vicuna wrote that, although the
anti-cuecas "bear the nomenclature of folklore . . . they are classical works
[musica culta], just like those one might hear at any chamber music concert."
Parra was a "unique composer" precisely because she had no formal training
in composition, and instead had learned music "as the bird sings."44 Along
analogous lines, the Swiss art critic and documentary filmmaker Marie-
Magdeleine Brumagne marveled in her Tribune de Lausanne review of Parra's
artwork 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 art
that is crude and at the same time very refined, authentic."45
Parra's cosmopolitan admirers' appraisal of her creative work reflected and

reinforced prevailing gender norms that associated women with tradition.46 In
Parra's case, these gender notions meshed with concepts of class and, for her
European public, race and nationality to accentuate her otherness. Their
assessment corresponds as well, however, to Parra's own sense of self. Parra's
profound identification with el pueblo is a core theme that weaves itself
throughout the varied and ample record she has left us, from vast tapestries to
her 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 her
foundational 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 in
every 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 she
knew.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 knew
nothing about embroidery techniques, nor did she know how to draw. When
asked if that meant that she had invented everything, she answered: "Yes, but
44. Vicuna, "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. Jose Maria Arguedas makes this point at an academic roundtable organized in Parra's eulogy.
"Analisis de un genio popular hacen artistas y escritores: Violeta Parra," Revista de Education (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 die
tables on Marie-Magdeleine Brumagne, her off-camera interviewer, making
her 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 of
you. What is Magdeleine like? So I observe you for a while, without your real-
izing it . . ,49
PERFORMANCE PRACTICES
Chilean radio celebrity Ricardo Garcia recounts his first impression of Parra
when she arrived at the studios of Radio Chilena for an audition in 1954: "One
day, a woman arrived at the radio station who was, for the radio scene in those
days, a kind of ghost from another world. She was wearing a very humble, very
simple, dark dress, with her hair loose, and with a face scarred by smallpox."50
As Garcia's recollection makes evident, Parra performed her authenticity both
offstage 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, choosing
instead 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 the
deliberate, with her essential womanhood and physical appearance as "mujer
fea." 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 rough
singing style of her female sources, and thus distinguished herself from other
women performers whose singing was more refined. She also spearheaded the
revival of both the rural folksong genre known as el canto a lopoeta53 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 Miisica, 2006). It is also easily accessible at wwvv.youtube.com.
A Spanish translation of the interview, "Entrevista a Violeta Parra, realizada en su taller en Ginebra, Suiza,
1965," is available at the Fundaci6n 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 Rub£n
Nouzeilles are strikingly similar to those of Garcia, and thus indicative of how uniformly Parra's otherness was
perceived 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 guitarron.54 Beyond these elements,

Parra's staged performances as interprete folklorica did not deviate substantially
from the standard folkloric show like tiie one promised by Gabriela Pizarro in
the Ecran announcement cited above. Parra dressed as a huasa and performed
the folk songs she had collected from the many regions of Chile, along with the
occasional original "de corte folklorico." The "Andean" costumes she and her
family wore when touring through Europe as Los Parra de Chile during the
Andean music craze of the 1960s, discussed below, were conceptually parallel
to her huasa outfit in their formulaic (and rather fantastical) projection.55
As "folkloric interpreter," Parra's job was to make die authentic folklore she
collected from non-cosmopolitans in non-cosmopolitan sites understandable
to her cosmopolitan audience in cosmopolitan settings and media—theaters,
recordings, radio, and eventually television. Parra's first Chilean LP, Violeta
Parra, Canto y Guitarra: el folklore de Chile, Vol. 7(1956), illustrates her role
as intermediary. Its liner notes highlight her professional role as folklorist—
"This song was collected by Violeta Parra from the lips of dona Florencia
Duran, an elderly woman of 94 years"; "This serenade was sung to Violeta
Parra by sefiora Mercedes viuda de Sanchez, age 70"—and commend her for
having 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 for
her 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 of
her 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, Asi canta Violeta Parra, con-
structs a similar transitive chain. One of a handful of radio programs of the
decade that aired Chilean folk music, Parra's was unique within this genre
53. A traditional Chilean song style, a direct descendent of the dicima espincla of medieval Spain. Its
most definitive instrument is the fjuitarron, a 25-string guitar unique to the Chilean countryside.
54. The guitarron was believed to be on the verge of extinction before Parra's "rediscovery" of it. For
more on the guitarrdn, including a discussion of Parra's role in its revival, see Emily Jean Pinkerton, "The
Chilean Guitarron: The Social, Political, and Gendered Life of a Folk Instrument," (Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas at Austin, 2007). For an indepth discussion of the role Parra played in the "discovery" of a "hidden"
authentic Chilean culture, see Jorge Aravena Decart, "Opciones armonicas, estilo musical y construcci6n iden-
titaria: una aproximacidn al aporte de Violeta Parra en relation con la musica tipica," Revista Musical Chilcnn
55:196 (July 2001).
55. For an example of the Parra family dressed as "andinos," see photograph no. 16 of the section
"Iconografia" in Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, n.pag. More photographs of Violeta Parra and family members per-
forming in costume are available at the Fundaci6n Violeta Parra website, http://www.violetaparra.cl/.
56. EMI Odeon Chilena (1956), LDC-36019. The covers of this and many other Parra recordings are
digitally reproduced at http://www.cancioneros.eom/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 be
interviewed. There, the show's star announcer Ricardo Garcia would introduce
Parra, who in turn would introduce and interview her folkloric guest of the
hour. The program thus positioned Parra as translator of timeless traditions for
her presumed modern radio audience (the actual makeup of which is addressed
below), 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 and
cosmopolitans 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 the
modern, but to recovering an authentically national alternative to the foreign.
The photographer Sergio Larrain, 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 we
started feeling alienated from all this foreign stuff. . . and that's when Violeta
was like a guide for us, a connection to Chile. . . . In other words, she served
as translator, so that we could know ourselves, so that we would not be always
looking outside of Chile."58
By the late 1950s, Parra's repertoire had shifted, from the folk songs she had
collected to her own songs of love and longing, political protest, and universal
themes. This transition coincided, roughly, with her adoption of a more urban
style of presentation, one influenced by her years performing in the more inti-
mate and informal boites de nuit of Paris's Left Bank (addressed more fully in
the next section). Parra shed her huasa/awrfma costume, and dressed instead
in everyday clothes, thus blurring the distinction between artist and audience.
With her new repertoire of mosdy originals, and her trendy, boite-inspired
anti-costume (often bohemian black), Parra repositioned herself vis-a-vis her
public. No longer the faithful interpreter of an authentic "other," she was now
the 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, and
the '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 independent
station, as claimed, but a project of the progressive Chilean cleric Cardinal Jose Maria Caro. This error, though
regrettable, does not fundamentally alter the substance of my analysis.
58. Stambuk et. al., Violeta Parra, p. 96-97. My emphasis.
59. Parra's boite-style attire is reminiscent of Edith PiaPs trademark performance outfit of a simple
black dress. For a discussion of the emic quality of Parra's urban performance style, see Rodrigo Torres
Alvarado, "Cantar la diferencia: Violeta Parra y la canci6n 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. The
cover 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 ultimas composiciones de Violeta Parra, recorded in 1966
and released posthumously in 1967, shows a by now well-known black-and-
white close-up of Parra, hair loose, face unadorned, dressed simply, looking off
in the distance, strumming a charan/jo.62
Parra never made a complete turn from folkloric huasa to urban performer. For
the rest of her life she would employ both performance practices, depending
on the context. The two styles were also not particular to Parra. As discussed
above, her folkloric act was for the most part consistent, and often performed
in conjunction with those of the other interpretes folkloricos of her 1950s
cohort. By the mid-1960s, in turn, street clothing was quickly becoming the
preferred attire, not only for Parra, but for cosmopolitan folk singers from New
York's Greenwich Village, to Paris's Quartier Latin, to Santiago's Pena de los
Parra after its founding in 1964.
In her discussion of autlienticity 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 shared
experience with others, a fleeting moment of the groove."63 Starting in Septem-
ber 1958, visitors could experience this "groove" at the ramada Parra mounted
during the Fiestas Patrias that year and every year thereafter that she was in Chile
on September 18th. She would rent a plot in the Quinta Normal or the Parque
Cousino and set up her stand alongside those of her similarly entrepreneurial
compatriots. With the family members she dragged along with her, she would
work 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 Ode6n Chilena (I960), LDC-36344; Violeta
Parra, recordando a Chile (Una chilena en Paris), EMI Ode6n Chilena (1965), LDC-36533; and Las ultimas
composiciones de Violeta Parra, RCA Victor, Chile (1966), CML-2456. The last LP is technically not a solo
album; although Parra does all of the singing, she is at times accompanied instrumentally by Isabel and Angel
Parra, and by Alberto Zapican. Parra's first recording in this new artistic phase as composer/song writer of non-
commercial music was the EP Violeta Parra: composiciones paraguitarra. It is also her sole recording of purely
instrumental music, and includes two of her "anti-cuecas." Ode6n, Chilena (1957), MSOD/E-51020.
61. The sole exceptions are Parra's settings of two poems, one by Pablo Neruda and the other by her
brother 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, including
Gabriela Pizarro, Rolando Alarcon, Hector Pavez, and Victor Jara. One year, the
activities included the screening of filmmaker Sergio Bravo's documentaries as
well, for which Parra composed some of the soundtracks.64
Parra's ramada stood among scores of other ramadas likewise dedicated to

patriotic celebration. What made hers authentic, per Clifford's conceptualiza-
tion of authenticity, was that it was set up and run not by your typical Fiestas
Patrias entrepreneur, but by well-known folk musicians and artists. Parra
would construct ramada-like sets for her performances as a visual artist as well.
At the 1959 and 1960 Ferias de Artes Plasticos held in Santiago's Parque Fore-
stal, for example, she transformed her small boodi into a performance space
where she sang, played guitar, painted, and sculpted in clay in front of her
public.65 As explored further in die next section, in the early 1960s Parra
would recreate her ramada in galleries and public squares in Geneva, and at her
solo show at the Louvre. These European performances melded Parra's
authenticity as campesina/autodidacta with her unique authenticity as an artist
and the experiential authenticity of the ramada. Accordingly, Parra designed a
one-of-a-kind costume to wear at these events: a colorful, patchwork dress
made 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 of
authenticity would seem to merge into one at her Carpa de la Reina. The
Carpa consisted of a large circus tent Parra set up on an empty lot in die
remote Santiago neighborhood of La Reina in late 1965. In a 1966 interview
with the Communist daily El Siglo, Parra conveyed her intentions to turn it
into a "centro de arte popular''' where her public "could listen to unknown
songs, those that burst forth from campesinas, from the sorrows and joys of
miners, the dances and poetry of die islanders of Chiloe."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 also
the site of her tragic suicide on February 4, 1967.
Parra's performance of authenticity at tiie Carpa may thus, sadly, be considered

her last act. Inside the tent, she created the experience of authenticity for her
64. Jara, An Unfinished Sotig, p. 49; Isabel Parra, Libra mayor, p. 110.
65. Fundaci6n Violeta Parra, "El viaje de las obras," in Violeta Parra, obra visual (Santiago: Ocho
Libros Editores, 2007), p. 19. See also Isabel Parra, Libra mayor, p. 110; and Saez, 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. Rincon Juvenil reporter Osmur (pseud.) describes her per-
formance: "[Violeta Parra] is everywhere at once. She welcomes those friends
who have come to greet her. She attends to her regular customers. She pours
the 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 performance
extended into the intimacy of her living quarters as well. This can be seen in die
interview 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 is
my 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 shack
with dirt floors, she explained: "To you, all of this must seem strange, that I live
this way. . . . For me, this is comfort, I grew up in the countryside and lived like
this 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 wrote
that her mother no longer wanted to have anything to do with "carpets nor
houses with shiny floors," and reproached her children for their "bourgeois
lifestyle."70 In her profound refusal of modern comforts, Violeta Parra lived
out her last months under conditions similar to those of the countless Chilean
campesinas and other workers with whom she identified and whose songs she
had promised would be heard at the Carpa. Their lives were poor and unre-
markable. Parra's represented a modern lifestyle, as defined by the possession
of a particular set of symbolic goods or, in Parra's case, her newsworthy deci-
sion to forgo them.71
PARRA'S R E C E P T I O N A T H O M E A N D A B R O A D
Parra first made a name for herself with the radio program already noted, Asi
canta Violeta Parra, which aired in 1954 on Radio Chilena. The show was an
unexpected hit. Its fan base included an eclectic mix of urban intellectuals—
classical music lovers, anti-imperialist leftists—all eager to "discover" an
authentic Chile. To the surprise of many of Parra's colleagues at the radio sta-
tion, the program also developed a substantial following among recent rural
migrants to Santiago and, where the transmission could be picked up, in rural
68. Ellipses in the original text. "Angel e Isabel Parra: 'Nuestro mayor orgullo es nuestra madre,'"
Rincon Juvenil 81 (July 6, 1966), p. 7.
69. "Vengan a cantar junto a mi," interview published in the "Suplemento Dominical" of El Mercurio
(October 1966). Transcription available at Fundacion Violeta Parra website, accessed July 12, 2011.
70. Isabel Parra, Libro mayor, p. 209.
71. Jose Joaquin Brunner, Un espejo trizado: ensayos sobre cultura y politicas 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 that
reminded them of those sung in tiieir towns of origin. Fan letters inundated
the radio station over the course of the year the show aired, some clearly
penned by the formally educated, but many others only semi-literate. Parra's
more humble admirers thanked her for playing their music and embraced her
as one of their own. Their expressions of nostalgia for the songs of their youth
implied that they too were quickly becoming modern in their sensibilities and
practices, thanks in no small part to the modern medium of radio. Parra's
European public would have much in common with the listening audience for
her Chilean show, minus its semirural strata. The program's popularity led the
Chilean Association of Entertainment Journalists to award Parra the presti-
gious Caupolican prize for best folklorist in 1955. It also resulted in an invita-
tion for Parra to join the Chilean delegation to the Communist-affiliated
World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Warsaw, Poland, that same
year.73 After the festival and a brief tour of the Soviet Union, Parra made her
way to Paris. There, what was meant to be a two-month stint stretched into
more than a year, her stay abroad no doubt prolonged by her immeasurable
grief at the death in Santiago of her youngest daughter, Rosita Clara, just
weeks 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 boite and a favored haunt of expatriate Latin
American artists, musicians, and students.74 She also recorded for the Musee
de l'Homme and the French record label Le Chant du Monde in Paris, the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, and UNESCO in
Geneva, 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 late
1956, 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 source
of 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 people
lived in Santiago shantytowns by the mid-1960s. History of Chile, p. 294.
73. Violeta, Isabel, and Angel Parra, the band Cuncumen (with Rolando Alarcon and Victor Jara) and
a 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 these
artists 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 than
those associated with modernist-socialist cosmopolitanism.
74. For more on L'Escale, see Rios, "La Flute Indienne," pp. 150-151.
My sincerity in interpretation is natural and comes from strong and undeniable

folkloric 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 found
the solution to my artistic aspirations [inquietud artistica] and because it has
accepted 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 "/o ver-
dadero." Many factors coincided to produce the "continuing potency" of cul-
tural exoticism in French society during "die period of its most intense and
wide-ranging embrace of die modern." 7 6 France underwent a prolonged
period of accelerated demographic and economic growth from 1945 to 1975,
an era often referred to as die " 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 by
decolonization struggles, particularly the Algerian War of Independence
(1954-1962). Rapid and critical social transformation, combined with the
brutality of war, led to a collective soul-searching about France's place in the
world, 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 this
particular instance by Chile. In France, somewhat ironically given that Chile
was foreign, Chilean folk music could also serve as a nonthreatening counter-
weight to successive "invasions" of more popular "foreign" music—Elvis in
the 1950s, the Beades in the 1960s—much as it did for Chilean folklorists in
their battle against, among other things, the very same Anglophile rock-and-
roll onslaughts. 79 Parra's folkloric performance in France, as in Chile, could
additionally provide the authentic antidote to more commercial, and dius
inauthentic, music from Latin America. The biographical insert from Parra's
Chant du Monde LPs roundly condemns die latter: "What spectator, what lis-
tener of good faidi 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 this
period, 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 competes

with a primitive cabaret exoticism!" It goes on to praise Parra for not dressing
up like "some frilly [froufoutante] Chilean from Hollywood" and instead
"restoring to us the Chilean soul in all of its verite."80
Parra's performance of authenticity thus fulfilled many similar, though by no

means identical, cosmopolitan yearnings in France as it did in Chile. More
importantly for Parra, her authenticity—her "tal como soy"—was easier to
acquire in Europe than in her native land. Parra's representation of Chilean
folklore 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" die authentic "other" for her Chilean public, but was not, for
die most part, conflated with that other. When she donned her highly stylized
huasa costume in a Santiago tiieater, for example, it marked her not as a
campesina, but as a professional performer; her cosmopolitan Chilean audience
knew from experience that folk musicians dressed in that fashion, but
campesinas did not.81 In contrast, when Parra dressed up as a huasa/andina
and sang on a Paris stage in her unrefined and, some would say, harsh voice,
she could easily become exoticized in the European cosmopolitan imaginary as
a Latin American peasant of Indian.
Parra's offstage performance was likewise "read" differently in Europe than in

Chile. Shorter and darker than many if not most nortiiern Europeans, Parra
fit their description of how a Latin American (read "exotic other") should
look, and she made the same impression on at least one U.S. expatriate as
well—the folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax was introduced to Parra in 1956
during her brief trip to London where he was living and working for the
BBC.82 Upon meeting her, Lomax treated Parra as he would any other of his
folkloric subjects; he recorded her performing five songs and labeled the tape
box "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 du
Monde (1956), LDY-4060-4071.
81. In contrast with the male huaso costume, which dates back to the 1920s, the huasa costume was
not clearly established until the 1940s. Gonzalez et al. credit musica tipica singer Silvia Infantes with its
design, 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 "the
woman'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 Cultural
Equity's website, http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do;jsessionid=3D456FFC77207BCA6
D5EE86F478B7A87?ix=recording&id=12971:113&idType=subregion&sortBy=abc (accessed July 19,
2013).
ERICKA KIM VERBA 29 I
what seamlessly between her onstage and offstage performance of the authen-
tic while in Europe.
As a Latin American peasant woman who had conveniendy made her way to their
doorstep, Parra encountered numerous performance opportunities in the capi-
tals of Western Europe. A celebratory homecoming piece in Ecran, published in
early 1957 and headlined "Violeta Parra is Back: I Triumphed in Europe. Soon
I will Return to die Old World," further illuminates the very real attractions that
the "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 an
artistic and financial success; "She came home full of emotion . . . and with
money." 84 The article points to die obvious: France, in the terminology of the
era, was a "developed" nation and thus wealdiier than "underdeveloped" Chile.
Parra's performance could thus automatically command a higher value there
than in Chile. The article also most likely exaggerates. Although it may have been
less difficult for Parra to earn a living in Paris than in Santiago in the 1950s, her
life in Paris, crammed into a tiny apartment above one of the clubs where she
gigged, was hardly one of affluence. Exoticized "ethnic" musicians, Parra among
them, were and are notoriously poorly paid within modernist capitalism; their
low 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 and
somewhat overlapping Latin music fads that hit the continent's cosmopolitan
centers. The first trend, dating from the 1950s, was festive; the second, from
the 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 jibe
well with the pachanguera atmosphere of L'Escale. In an interview, the Span-
ish musician and fellow boite performer Paco Ibanez recalled how people
sometimes grumbled, "Here comes that Chilienne again" when she arrived,
because of her insistence they be silent during her performance. 86 Regardless
of 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, "Volvio Violeta Parra: Triunfo en Europa. Pronto
regreso al viejo mundo," Ecran 1354 (January 1, 1957), p. 23. The article allows for a reading that differs
from the original intent of the lyrics, reproduced in the Ecran piece, of Parra's nostalgic song "<Por que me
vine de Chile?": Antes de salir de Chile /yo no supe comprender / lo que vale ser chilena j Ahora si que lo si!
(Before I left Chile / I did not understand / The value of being Chilean / Now I understand it!).
85. Rios, "La Flute Indienne.™
86. From Vera's documentary, Viola Chilensis.
292 T o PARIS AND BACK
music vogue. Even as the biographical insert in the LP condemns "primitive

cabaret exoticism," the cover artwork is a blatant contradiction: it shows a still-
life of artifacts, presumably from Chile, that together amount to a veritable
anthropological pastiche—a primitive-looking mask, a colorfully painted
ceramic vessel, and a Caribbean-style conga drum adorned with zigzag pat-
terns, all arranged decoratively on a woven mantaP
When Parra arrived back in Paris in 1962, the Andean music craze was just
beginning. As Fernando Rios has documented, from the early 1960s through
the 1970s and beyond, Parisians' fascination with "indigenous peoples" (peu-
ples indiens), and especially with the flute indienne or quena,88 would make
Latin American folk music synonymous with Andean music, which was con-
ceived and experienced as indigenous and primordial. This trend most likely
accounts for the title of Parra's 1965 bilingual songbook Poesie populaire des
Andes, with its geographic as opposed to national reference. 89 It also no doubt
explains why there is a photograph of a Mapuche woman sitting horseback on
the cover of Le Chant du Monde's 1963 compilation and reissue of Parra's
1950s recordings of "songs and dances [Chants et danses] from Chile." Evi-
dendy, 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. She
adopted the charango as a frequent choice of accompaniment, and encouraged
her lover, die Swiss musician Gilbert Favre, to learn the quena. Parra, who
often performed on European stages with Favre and her children Isabel and
Angel and granddaughter Tita, even invented new "Andean-style" outfits for
the Parra clan during this period—long ponchos and sandals for everyone,
man, woman, or child. 91 Rios credits the Parra family with playing a decisive
role in the introduction of Andean folkloric-popular music to Chile, where it
would eventually meld into the signature sound of the nueva cancion chilena. 92
Always the self-inventor, by the mid-1960s Parra would tentatively claim
indigenous ancestry, a detail absent from all autobiographical accounts up to
87. Chants et danses du Chili: Violeta Parra, chant etguitare, 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, Poesie populaire des Andes (Vara: Francois Maspero, 1965).
90. Chants et danses du Chili: Violeta Parra,guitare et chant, Le Chant du Monde (1963) LD-S-4271.
91. Rodriguez Musso, La nueva cancion, p. 73. Rodriguez 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 them
with a common costume for both men and women of a long poncho and sandals." I would venture that the
costume change was also intended to capitalize on the Andean music craze.
92. Rios, "La Flute Indienne." For a discussion of the Chilean Andean music scene, including its nueva
cancion component, see Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1950-1970, pp. 357-367.
ERICKA KJM VERBA 293
that point, to my knowledge. In her 1965 Geneva interview with documentary

filmmaker Brumagne, she answered the interviewer's question "Are you
indigenous?" with "My grandmother was indigenous and my grandfather
Spanish, so I believe I have a little Indian blood in me." She went on to express
her implicit wish that indigenous roots had formed part of her foundational
narrative; "I would have liked it if my motiier had married an Indian." She
concluded by asserting a linked authenticity; "in any case, as you can see, I live
just 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 enhanced
by her association with international communism. As previously mentioned,
Parra first made her way to Europe as a delegate to the 1955 World Festival of
Youth and Students in Warsaw. Her second European sojourn began similarly
at the 1962 World Festival in Helsinki. Parra's affiliation with the Communist
Party provided her with additional performance opportunities beyond her reg-
ular gigs in Parisian boites and occasional work for European cultural and
etlinographic institutions, the highlight of which was her performance before
a crowd of thousands at the 1963 Festival de l'Humanite. As already noted,
Parra began writing protest songs before die 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 songs
into her repertoire, a practice that earned her the nickname "the Commu-
nist."94 By the mid-1960s, however, the Parisian left had begun associating
Latin America, and by extension Latin American music, with anticolonialist
struggles and revolution.95 Parra's Poesie populaire des Andes, published in
1965 by the leftist press Librairie Francois Maspero, is both constitutive and
reflective of this trend, as it includes a section of original songs, most of diem
" chansons revolutionnaires. " 96
93. "Entrevista a Violeta Parra." Brumagne's account of her first encounter with Parra at one of her
exhibits epitomizes the European exoticizing/indigenousizing gaze that Parra may well have been respond-
ing to: "I no longer knew where 1 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, dressed
in ponchos, came and went in the decor that Violeta had created, at ten o'clock in the morning, in this place
without history, thousands of kilometres from her native Chile!" Brumagne, Qiii se louvicnt de sa ^ ' ( L a u -
sanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1992), p. 135.
94. Atahualpa Yupanqui was another. See Rios, "ifl Flute 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 the
Communist Bloc, Robert Adlington, ed. (Oxford University Press/British Academy: 2013).
95. Rios, " l a Flute lndienne? pp. 157-158.
96. Fanchita Gonzalez-Batlle, "Introduction," Poesie populaire des Andes, p. 8. Both Maspero's pub-
lishing house and the record label Le Chant du Monde were associated with international communism. They
thus 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 she
became known as a visual artist. Parra the tapestry maker, sculptor, and painter
was as much the performer as Parra the musician. As stated above, she recre-
ated the traditional Chilean ramada in public squares and art galleries in
Geneva, and at her solo show at the Louvre. According to Clifford's theory
that authenticity requires a process of relocation, Parra's ramada first became
authentic in Santiago, not as just another Fiestas Patrias stand, but one within
the purview of cosmopolitan musicians and artists. In Europe, it was further
authenticated by its complete disassociation from Chile's Fiestas Patrias and its
relocation to that bastion of cosmopolitanism, the Louvre museum. Le Monde
art 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 invent
as she embroiders . . . Petite and brunette . . . simple and complex like a figure
from Lorca, or like one of her sculptures, where the tangle of metallic wires make
golden flowers burst from a black tree.97
As Grand's review shows, Parisians could just as readily conflate Parra the artist
with her artwork as they could confuse Parra the huasa-costumed performer with
an actual campesina. She embodied authenticity. Once her art had received the
Louvre's stamp of approval, somewhat ironically given her leftist politics, Parra
began receiving the attentions of wealthy patrons—the Baroness Rothschild who
bought one of her tapestries, or die wealthy Swiss couple with "an interest . . .
in out-of-the-ordinary people" who offered her temporary residence in the
tower 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 late
1965 and died there in early 1967. As Sophia McClennen points out, cultural
value follows a similar trajectory within modern capitalism; "the local [must]
attain value, first in the 'World' economy and later in the form of heightened
local appreciation." 99 Parra's case confirms this: her European triumphs greatly
enhanced her stature at home, and virtually every Chilean who wrote about
her 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 more
interested 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. A I'heure de
la guerre froide (1945-1953)," Bulletin de I'Institut Pierre Renouvin 18 (Spring 2004), available at
http://ipr.univ-parisl.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, Qtti se souvient. . . ?, p. 140.
99. McClennen, "Chilex," p. 4.
first in a series of LPs of Chilean folk music Parra recorded for Odeon Chilena
between 1956 and 1958 boast that she went to Europe with a "criolla guitar
under her arm" as her only calling card, and ended up ensuring "that the
authentic music of Chile be appreciated in the cultural centers of Paris and
London and in die central offices of UNESCO." 1 0 0 Parra's record of achieve-
ment in Europe opened new artistic avenues for her in Chile, including the
recording of die Odeon Chilena folk series and a residency under university
auspices in Concepcion, where she founded a museum of folk art.
In Chile, Parra's performance of authenticity earned her a small but fervent fan
base among Chilean intellectuals and alienated leftists who shared their Euro-
pean counterparts' modern longing for the authentic, but with nationalist and
anti-imperialist overtones. Of far more import to Parra herself, she also built a
substantial and loving following among the pueblo, through her radio shows
and her travels as a folklorist and performer. In spite of her Chilean audience's
loyalty and diversity, Parra's artistic career was one of constant struggle, even
more 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 in
Europe 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 her
audiences in Chile, where she was understood to be primarily an interpreter of
the authenticity found in that removed, semi-mythical site where her folkloric
subjects resided. Furthermore, Parra's offstage performance of the authentic
was more problematic in Chile. Like their European counterparts, cosmopoli-
tan Chileans—Parra included—often romanticized the pueblo as pure and
timeless. But Parra herself, dressed as a campesina, could also be "read" as a
poor person, and thus relocated not to the authentic, but to the sometimes
uncomfortable and inherently divisive terrain of class difference. The diverse
reactions to Parra's 1954 audition at Radio Chilena illustrate a range of possi-
ble readings within Chile. According to Ricardo Garcia, some of his colleagues
at the station showed "a great admiration and interest," others made negative
comments, and some were even "a little frightened." 101
In politically polarized Chile, there was also the issue of Parra's association
with the left. In France, as the exotic other, Parra could be viewed as somehow
100. Violeta Parra, Canto yguitarra, Vol. I. A conceptual cousin to the practice of advertising Parra's
European success was to lament that Europeans were better able to appreciate true Chilean talent than
Chileans 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, Libra 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 art
and song, in turn, could be easily dismissed as the troubles of a distant and
backward nation. In Chile, Parra's affiliation with the left was another story.
Although it earned her performance opportunities—with notoriously poor
pay—at leftist events, it made her the political opponent of those on the
Chilean center and right, and thus unlikely to attract their support.
Finally, the very biographical components that enhanced Parra's authenticity in

Chile as folklorist and artist—her relatively humble origins, her lack of formal
education or artistic training—impeded her from receiving official support for
her work in the classist milieus of Chilean academics and the fine arts. In this
sense, Parra was too closely identified with the marginalized pueblo that she felt
herself 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 the
bellas artes. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Parra found no Chilean
counterpart to her wealthy patrons in Europe, and some of the same artworks
that Parra exhibited at die Louvre in 1964 had been rejected by the selection
committee of the Feria de Artes Plasticas in Santiago in years prior.102 As artist
Mario Carrefio would blundy state at an academic roundtable organized in her
eulogy: "Violeta Parra had to disappear in order for people in Chile to realize
that her work was of exceptional quality."103
T H E AUTHENTIC AND THE N E W
In Chile and other modernist-capitalist sites, the 1960s represented a period of

accelerated social change and political polarization. It was also the decade for
young people. When Parra returned to Chile for the last time in 1965, its
youth culture was already in full swing. To give just one example of its vertig-
inous rise, the three popular youth-oriented entertainment magazines ElMusi-
quero, Rincon Juvenil, and Ritmo de la Juventud were all launched between
1964 and 1965. In Chile, as elsewhere, the explosion of media, performance
venues, and musical styles oriented primarily toward young people was con-
nected to their increased buying power as members of an expanding middle
class. It also coincided with greater access to higher education and the related
expansion of young people's political activism.104
102. Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 127.

103. "Analisis de un genio," p. 70.
104. See Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen, pp. 210-211; and Gabriel Salazar and Julio Pinto, Historia
Contempordnea de Chile: ninezy juventud, Vol. 5 (Santiago: LOM, 2002). Patrick Barr-Melej's forthcoming
book promises to be enlightening on the topic of youth culture in Chile. Psychedelic Chile: Touth, Counter-
Violeta Parra's children Isabel and Angel—both lifelong leftists, then in their
early twenties—returned to Chile from Paris in 1964 in order to campaign for
the left coalition's presidential candidate Salvador Allende. They opened their
Pena de los Parra that same year in an old house in Santiago's center. The Parra
siblings modeled their pena (folk music club) after the Parisian boites where
they 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 cancion
movement may best be understood as both a response to local conditions and
an international cultural trend, as protest music became popular across die
modernist-capitalist cosmopolitan cultural formation during the 1960s. Freed
from the intrinsic nationalism of the 1950s folkloric movement, the Chilean
new 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 Angel Parra ran their pena as a collective with fellow musicians
Rolando Alarcon, Patricio Manns, and Victor Jara.107 The boite-influenced style
of the youthful pena musicians contrasted starkly with the more didactic and
narrative folkloric shows of their mother's 1950s-era cohort of folk musicians.
A short piece published in Rincon Juvenil on the occasion of the peiia's first
anniversary describes the club's more informal ambience: "The spectators have
the opportunity to see the artists up close . . . dressed in sporty trousers and a
dark pullover, take up their guitars and sing." 108 As in the Parisian boites—but
not the actosfolkloricos—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 significandy, they were
no longer "interpreters," but "artists." These contrasts, taken together, suggest
that the "authentic" folkloricizations of the 1950s might well have been read as
"inauthentic" by youthful pena-goers in the mid-1960s.109
culture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, forthcoming).
105. Rios, "£« Flute 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), reproduced
in Claudio Acevedo et al., Victor Jara: Obra Musical Completa (Santiago: Fundaci6n Victor Jara, 1997), p. 38;
Gonzalez 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 Cuncumen band members Alarc6n and Jara demonstrates, several
of the 1950s folklorists were active in the 1960s new song movement as well.
108. Maria In£s Saez, "Un ano de folklore en la Pena de los Parra," Rincon 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 to
wear the huaso costume, among other topics. Participants included Hernan Arenas, musical director of Silvia
Infantas 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 Pena de los Parra had
become 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, so
similar 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, and
remained there for her first few months back home. On the surface, it would
appear 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 pena artists' more informal performance style thanks to her years
working at L'Escale and other Parisian boites. More importandy, she had
already composed many of the protest songs that would eventually become
standards of the nueva cancion movement, including her tongue-in-cheek
paean to youth activism aMegustan los estudiantes."The power and beauty of
her songs earned her the 1965 award for best composer from Ricardo Garcia's
trendsetting radio show, Discomania.'l'
Parra nevertheless ended up not fitting in that well with the younger gen-
eration of leftist musicians. The reasons were many. First, she was perhaps
too closely associated with that whole "folklore thing" of the 1950s. Isabel
Parra recalls the shift her generation made: "All of a sudden a magnificent
world of [Latin American] music opened up to us, and all of that Chilean
folklore became a little passe, we moved onto other things." 112 Parra's
nationalist 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 "Third
World," and the anticolonialist struggles of Chile, Vietnam, and Angola as
one common cause.113
Los de Santiago, Esther Sore, Angel Parra, Osvaldo Silva, and Camilo Fernandez. See "Proceso al Folklore,"
Ecran 1784 (April 6, 1965), pp. 39-41, 1788 (May 5, 1965), pp. 78-79; 1790 (May 15, 1965), pp. 4 3 ^ 5 ;
1794 (June 15, 1965), pp. 44-45.
110. Sacz, "Un ano de folklore," pp. 4-5. The bibliography on the Chilean nueva canci6n movement
is substantial, and includes Fernando Barraza, La nueva cancion chilena (Santiago: Quimantu, 1972); Rene
Gilberto Largo Farias, La nueva cancion chilena (Mexico: Casa de Chile, 1977); Rodriguez Musso, La nueva
cancion; and "Nueva canci6n" in Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1950-1970, pp. 371—435.
111. Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1950-1970, p. 137.
112. Cited in Gonzalez Bermejo, "Isabel Parra," Crisis 3:28 (August 1975), p. 48.
113. Gonzalez 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 tried
very hard to dissuade Angel Parra from performing songs by Atahualpa Yupanqui. Angel Parra, Violeta sefite,
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 on
pan-Latin American themes. Her repertoire, however, remained consistently and exclusively the folk songs she
collected in Chile and her own compositions.
Second, there was evidendy not as much room for women performers in the
1960s nueva cancion movement as there was during die folk music boom of
the 1950s. In contrast to tlieir numeric near-parity and impressive leadership
in the earlier movement, women were noticeably scarce among the ranks of
Chilean new song artists.114 Gonzalez, Ohlsen, and Rolle note their "signifi-
cant absence" (setting apart Violeta and Isabel Parra), but fail to explain why
this should be the case.115 I would argue that the relative paucity of women
artists was related to the pronounced masculinity of the Chilean left during the
heady days of guerrilla warfare and "elhombre nwvo." The popular nueva can-
cion band Quilapayun was emblematic. The name means "the three bearded
ones" in Mapudungun (Mapuche language). The band members' stage outfits
consisted of long black ponchos. They sang with "virile voices," and their per-
formance style was, according to one of their members, "masculine without
being machista..'"116 To state the obvious: beards, ponchos, virile voices, and
masculinity are all attributes exclusionary of women. At the same time, the
movement never developed a distinct feminine identity equivalent to the folk-
loric huasa. These dynamics, in my opinion, go a long way toward explaining
the preponderance of men in the movement.117
Finally, there was Parra's relative age. From the perspective of the juventud, she
was old enough to be—and, in Isabel and Angel's case, literally was—their
mother, this in an era when advertising and mass media "depicted older people
as backward" and "encouraged [young people] . . . to identify with one
another through consumption."118 Tellingly, the headline of a 1966 piece in
Rincon Juvenil on Parra's Carpa de la Reina is angled from the viewpoint of
the younger generation: "Angel and Isabel Parra: 'Our Mother is Our Great-
est Source of Pride."'119 The Carpa, Parra's ambitious project of creating a folk
art 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 canci6n artists (Charo
Cofre, Isabel Parra, and Silvia Urbina). La nueva cancion, pp. 86-93. Their reduced number stands in con-
trast to the 16 women folklorists listed in Klimpel's La Mujer Cbilena (see n29).
115. Historia Social, 1950-1970, p. 408. Elsey seems to make the opposite claim in noting that the new
song movement "offered opportunities for female artists," that is until one realizes her assessment is made in
implicit 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 Quilapayun, 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 Pueblo
Unido Jamas Sera Vencido"—written, not coincidendy, by Quilapayun band member Sergio Ortega. It
announces—tragically, in hindsight—the imminent triumph of el pueblo (read "working class"). Its last stanza
chimes in: "And you are there too, mujer, with strength and courage, united with the worker." "El Pueblo
Unido," http://unionsong.com/u443.html (accessed September 14, 2012).
118. Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen, p. 210.
119. Osmur (pseud.), "Angel e Isabel Parra," pp. 6-7.
ground.120 In a 1966 interview, she blamed youth culture, at least in part, for
the Carpa's poor attendance, lamenting "the indifference of young people
toward these folk music gatherings."121 She would end up playing more the
role 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 interprets folklorica, too folklorica and mature
to 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 "la
nueva cancion 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 authentic
other and demanded to be seen and heard by her fellow cosmopolitans.
Authenticity, like all things modern, would prove an unstable foundation for
her aspirations, for numerous and interrelated reasons. Here are but a few. Per-
formers of the authentic, with rare exception, are poorly paid. As authenticity
is defined in opposition to commercialism, its audience is perforce a niche
audience. Then there is the competition. In Europe, Parra had to compete
with the latest exotic discovery from Le Chant du Monde's ever-expanding
catalog of international folk sensations, and in Chile, with the swelling ranks of
interpretes folkloricos who made the 1950s folk "boom" a boom.123 Audi-
ences that seek out the authentic are notoriously fickle, as for something to be
experienced as authentic it must come with a sense of revelation. This meant
that many of the qualities associated with Parra's 1950s performance of
authenticity—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.

Gonzalez, Ohlsen, and Rolle hold her up as a prime example of a mid-twenti-
120. See Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1950-1970, pp. 235-236.

121. Alfonso Molina Leiva, "Vengan a cantar junto a mi."
122. The tributes and commemorations began immediately after her death in Chile, and continue to
this day throughout the world. Nueva cancion artist Patricio Manns has insisted in a fairly recent interview
that Parra's status as "mother" of the new song movement is a myth. See Salvador AllcnAe: preseiuia en la
ausencia, Miguel Lawner et al., eds. (Santiago: LOM/CENDA, 2008), pp. 364, 367. However, Manns seems
to stand alone in his opinion.
123. Parra's somewhat dogmatic insistence that the authentic be interpreted as authentically as possible
may 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.
ERICKA KJM VERBA 301
eth-century cultural innovator trying to survive outside of both the market and
academia, underscoring the element of choice in her marginalization from the
commercial industries and cultural institutions that might have helped to sus-
tain her. I concur, up to a point. After all, Parra turned toward the authentic
and away from a respectable and even promising career as a composer and per-
former of a potentially more lucrative musica popular. Even then, she could
have pursued the safer and duller career of an academic, but then, as musicol-
ogist Gaston 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 that
she gave us." 1 2 4
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 to
them 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 best
route available to the "ugliest woman" from the "end of the world." Cos-
mopolitan circles, like all circles, are formed to include and exclude. The ways
people fit into the loops that bind modernist-capitalist cosmopolitans together
are mediated by physical and social characteristics of gender, class, age, race,
and nationality. In some instances, these essentializing factors may serve as
points 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 the
palatial Louvre museum. 127 Perhaps Parra herself invented it. Neither "pure"
nor naive, she represented herself according to cosmopolitan sensibilities of the
authentic, 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 file a los cielos (Wood Productions, Maiz Productions, and Bossa Nova Films, 2011), except that
Wood relocates it to the interior of the museum.
were what mattered to her. She also had faith, seemingly against all odds, in
her artistic talents. In the end, her act of self-creation was constrained by very
real inequalities, of gender and class, and between nations. Like her tapestries
shown at the Louvre, sewn onto burlap from odd spools of yarn, she took the
cultural materials that were available to her, and crafted herself.
California State University, Dominguez Hills ERICKA KIM VERBA

Carson, California

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To Paris and Back: Violeta Parra's Transnational

Ericka Kim Verba

The Americas / Volume 70 / Issue 02 / October 2013, pp 269 - 302

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003161500003242

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To PARIS AND BACK:

ever, reveal a different version of events. Parra arrived at die museum by

The analysis offered in diis article is informed by works in the interdisciplinary

tion through which "ideas, practices, and technologies . . . travel through

Parra may have been bound through communication loops to a diversity of

This article turns Parra's too-often assumed authenticity into an investigation.

Parra's performance of authenticity was never guaranteed success. Case in

T H E FOLK " B O O M "

Current works in the field of transnational cultural studies differentiate

at least in part to the folklorists' rigid categorization of folk traditions by

Many of the 1950s generation of folkloric performers in Chile (and elsewhere)

Many factors contributed to Parra's exceptional capacity to relocate herself vis-

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

These anecdotes—culled from interviews, testimonials, and Jodorowsky's

of the latter; her fellow cosmopolitans recognized her unique authenticity as

Parra's cosmopolitan admirers' appraisal of her creative work reflected and

44. Vicuna, "Violeta Parra," p. 77.

Brumagne: How is this mask made?

On stage, Parra performed the authentic in her capacity as a professional musi-

ditional instrument of accompaniment, the guitarron.54 Beyond these elements,

Parra's ramada stood among scores of other ramadas likewise dedicated to

Parra's performance of authenticity at tiie Carpa may thus, sadly, be considered

My sincerity in interpretation is natural and comes from strong and undeniable

As her letter implies, Parra's performance appealed to her European audiences'

American ensembles where, all too often, an indigent amateurism competes

Parra's performance of authenticity thus fulfilled many similar, though by no

Parra's offstage performance was likewise "read" differently in Europe than in

music vogue. Even as the biographical insert in the LP condemns "primitive

that point, to my knowledge. In her 1965 Geneva interview with documentary

Parra's musical career in Europe thus benefited—albeit unevenly—from cos-

Finally, the very biographical components that enhanced Parra's authenticity in

T H E AUTHENTIC AND THE N E W

In Chile and other modernist-capitalist sites, the 1960s represented a period of

102. Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 127.

Parra's performance of authenticity was thus not without its challenges.

120. See Gonzalez et al., Historia Social, 1950-1970, pp. 235-236.

I also agree, however, with "new biographer" Jo Burr Margandant's admoni-

124. Cited in Stambuk et al., Violeta Parra, p. 85.

California State University, Dominguez Hills ERICKA KIM VERBA

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