Violeta Parra: Life and Work is a portrait of this major Chilean artist and folklorist that should engage casual fans and Parra specialists alike. With a foreword, introduction, and conclusion, each of the nine chapters builds to lay out the stages and varied facets of Violeta Parra's life (1917-1967) and work as a performing musician, composer and poet, folklorist, visual artist, and mother of the nueva canción movement.

The first two chapters are foundational essays on Parra translated into English for the first time. Leónidas Morales traces Parra's art, biography, and identity to the clash of traditional Chilean life with modernity. Growing up outside the urban mainstream but then moving to Santiago at fifteen, Parra, according to Morales, embodies this tension. Echoing Parra's own sense of the decline of “folk” music and culture, which energized her song collecting and presentations, Morales writes: “The same urban aggression that had broken her feeling of unity equally broke the continuity of folk culture. Biography and collective history converged” (23). In chapter 2, Patricio Manns gives some background on Chilean political history and then traces Parra's continuity with earlier popular political song and poetry genres. Chapter 3 is an interview with Parra's celebrated literary brother Nicanor that makes clear how he set her on her path to discovering the depths of rural Chilean art forms, and other ways he was instrumental in her career. These three essays provide a loving glimpse and the canonic narrative of Parra as an artist and researcher of and for the rural Chilean people in style, genres, and politics.

In chapter 5, Paula Miranda describes Parra's activities as a student of rural Chilean musical genres during the 1950s. Miranda claims that Parra's success as a folklorist was based in the strong mutual identification with the singers she worked with. She was as interested in the lives and stories of these people, and just hanging out, as she was intent on collecting, per se. My takeaway is that Parra was ahead of her time in terms of fieldwork attitudes and methods foreshadowing “the reflexive turn,” a deeper type of participant observation, and activist engagement in folkloristics, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.

In chapter 4, Ericka Verba disrupts standard views by laying out Parra's musical career between her arrival in Santiago in 1932 and her emergence as a folklorist in the early 1950s: when Parra “danced flamenco, and belted out Mexican corridos over the airwaves,” as well as sang commercial music in seedy bars. Verba convincingly argues that this less-known career phase has largely been ignored because it doesn't fit Parra's, and others’, later narrative that jumps from her rural roots to her championing rural Chilean arts. This chapter is also fascinating for the depiction of musical life in Santiago during the 1930s and 40s and the gender politics of gigging musicians. The issue of self-fashioning is also forcefully front-and-center in Serda Yalkin's “Violeta Parra at the Louvre: The 'Naive' as a Strategy of the Authentic” (chapter 7). This author traces how Parra got an exhibition at the museum, and the way she constructed her own presentation as a self-taught, naive, visual artist to fit with French anti-modernist sentiments of the period. The next chapter, by Lorna Dillon, follows up on Parra's work as an avant-garde visual artist in Europe during the 1960s. This author gives a series of close readings of pieces that clearly indicate the sophistication and intellectual rigor of Parra's work belying any claim to innocence and naivete.

All of this takes us back to Morales's opening suggestion that Parra embodied the clash of the modern and the traditional. The mosaic picture of Parra that emerges from this book is one of complexity and the bridging/embodying of contradictions. As Romina A. Green-Rioja writes in “Unearthing Violeta Parra: Counter-Memory, Rupture and Authenticity Outside of the Modern” (chapter 6), “As quickly as an image of her is constructed, a counter-image comes to the fore…a communist, a social democrat, an artist, an emotional female, a strong female, a religious singer, a possible atheist, a mother, a depressive, the embodiment of a national culture” (105); and I would add, a lover, an aggressive combatant, a nativist, a cosmopolitan, an intellectual, an anti-intellectual, a passionate lover of life, a suicide. Miranda claims that her song collecting “would, over the years, make her into the most experimental folklorist and the most traditional avant-gardist of our music and poetry” (84). These facets and more emerge, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, in this volume.

The final chapter, by Catherine Boyle, describes La Carpa de la Reina, the performance/cultural space Parra created outside of Santiago at the end of her life. Located on donated land beyond the bus lines, it had been Parra's hope that La Carpa would be a place to create the contemporary and future cultural lifeways of campesinos and the working class with whom she identified. Since it could only be arrived at by taxi or private cars, however, its audiences tended to be of the wealthier classes or tourists, when people came at all. Boyle writes: “Rather than being a place of community, it became in part what Violeta loathed most--a place for a social event, a 'noche de gala', a point on the tourist itinerary…and for a lot of intellectuals” (184). This final, doomed, project exemplifies the tragedy of Parra's contradictions and loneliness, as well as her surety of vision, creativity, energy, and hope.

For people not very familiar with Violeta Parra and the extent of her work, this book is a good introduction, and it provides exceptional insights into the articulation of Parra's work and complex subject positions. However, to a large degree it also requires prior acquaintance with Chilean music, her music, and her visual art. With a few exceptions (e.g., Dillon's analysis of her visual pieces, or Green-Rioja's providing part of a Parra poem in chapter 6), we get little detailed description, transcription, or analysis of her actual work--the sound of her music, or the Chilean genres she studied and incorporated. In Green-Rioja's discussion of Parra's anti-cuecas, we learn that these compositions are equidistant between the “popular and the cultured,” and that they involved atonality and the chromatic scale, but this is about all (127). Moreover, one needs to know what cuecas are to make sense of the artistic move Parra was making here. Likewise, the total lack of plates of her visual art may have been due to publishing costs or copyright issues, but I longed for them when reading Yalkin's and Dillon's descriptions. For me, another major absence is any detailed discussion of how Parra's musical activities fit within the contemporaneous cosmopolitan folk revivals around the world and the influence of this phenomenon--e.g., as Parra encountered it in Paris--to parallel Yalkin's analysis of Parra's self-fashioning as a visual artist.

With these lacunae noted, I conclude by saying that I loved this book. Much of the writing is moving, and in some cases beautiful. Parra is a fascinating person who, past the grave, seems to have demanded the same skill, dedication, and loyalty of these authors as she did of her students at La Carpa de la Reina at the end of her life.

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[Review length: 1195 words • Review posted on May 15, 2018]