Pat’e Perro (Wanderer)

The Parra family’s economic circumstances while Violeta was growing up were often precarious, like those of the majority of Chileans in the early twentieth century. The relative financial stability that both sets of Violeta’s grandparents enjoyed was not passed down to her parents. Her maternal grandfather’s agricultural prosperity as a small landowner would erode, presumably by the 1930s.¹ Violeta’s paternal grandfather, for his part, proved either unable or unwilling to ensure the financial security of Nicanor senior and his growing family. Nicanor senior’s bohemian lifestyle also played a significant role in the family’s economic instability.²

Not unusual for residents of the Central Valley who found themselves in financial straits, the Parra family became itinerant, moving from one place to the next in hopes of improving their lot. The Chilean expression for those who wander is pat’e perro or “dog’s paw.” Economic necessity, combined with the ease that the extensive train system permitted, made many Chileans pat’e perro in the first part of the twentieth century, Violeta’s family included. By the time Violeta was ten years old, they had moved five times: from the rural hamlet of San Fabián to the nearby town of San Carlos shortly after her birth; then north to Santiago for two years or so; then south to the town of Lautaro for several more years; and finally to Chillán in 1927. Violeta, who did not have her own fixed address until she was forty-two, would claim to have inherited her parents’ nomadic ways in her autobiography in verse: “As I was born a restless wanderer / Not even the devil could catch me” (Como nací pat’e perro / ni el diablo m’echaba el guante).³

Little is known about Violeta’s earliest years spent in the small towns of San Fabián and San Carlos in the Ñuble province. The contours of her time in Santiago, roughly from ages two to four, are somewhat more filled in. The family’s living and economic situation was tenuous at best. They stayed with relatives at first, as was common among newly arrived migrants to the capital. They next moved to a poor neighborhood near the Central Market that was rapidly expanding thanks primarily to the arrival of migrant families such as their own. Nicanor senior picked up odd jobs—tramway inspector, prison guard—while Clarisa, who was a gifted seamstress, found work at a department store. 

In 1921, the family’s fortunes improved considerably after Violeta’s father was offered a teaching position with a military regiment stationed in the town of Lautaro, some 400 miles south of Santiago. The journey to Lautaro would be an entirely different matter, however. It became the setting of a childhood trauma that literally scarred Violeta for life. 

The family left by train from Santiago at the height of a smallpox epidemic, one of several to strike the Chilean population in the early twentieth century.⁴ Violeta contracted the disease, her symptoms first appearing en route. The ravages of smallpox brought her close to death and left her face permanently pockmarked. In her autobiography in verse, Violeta ruefully declares, 

Here my sorrows begin
I say this sad and aggrieved,
They mock me by calling me “weed”
Because my appearance is frightening.

Aquí principian mis penas
lo digo con gran tristeza,
me sobrenombran “maleza”
porque parezco un espanto.⁵

Within the context of a larger society that shunned deformity, Violeta was transformed at a tender age, from someone who was pretty to someone whose appearance drew stares from strangers and taunts from classmates. Her “ugliness” did not fade with time, try as she did to get rid of the pockmarks with creams and other skin treatments. With the same casualness that in some parts of Latin America a chubby person is nicknamed gorda/o (fatso), a skinny one flaca/o, or someone with a limp coja/o (gimp), family, friends, acquaintances, reporters, and public figures commented openly and often on Violeta’s physical appearance.⁶ Her brother Roberto explained in an interview how he had affectionately nicknamed Violeta “la ‘Carcocha’ [junk heap] because her face was all pitted from pestilence.”⁷ Socialist Party representative Carmen Lazo in her eulogy to Violeta, delivered to the House of Representatives just days after Violeta’s death in 1967, first praised her talents, then noted that she “was not a beautiful woman; one could even say she was ugly.”⁸ Ricardo García, popular radio announcer and Violeta’s collaborator and loyal promoter, was kinder in his delivery, if not his assessment: Violeta was “beautifully ugly.”⁹ Violeta shared the consensus; she consistently referred to herself as “ugly” or, in the extreme, as “the ugliest woman on the planet.” Her childhood disfiguration would limit her options as a musician later in life in an industry that increasingly valued physical “beauty,” especially when it came to women performers. 

Violeta eventually recovered from smallpox. With the threat of disease lifted, her family found reprieve in Lautaro from the hardships they had endured in Santiago. Located in southern Chile in what was then the Cautín province (today Wallmapu), Lautaro was a small town in the 1920s, with a population of around 8,300 inhabitants.¹⁰ Nicanor senior’s teaching position came with a large house on the banks of a river that had more than enough room for his growing family, along with a garden, orchards, and one or two servants.¹¹ The young Parra siblings would later associate their five-or-so years in Lautaro with swimming in rivers, climbing trees, and eating ripe fruit straight from the branch. In a 1966 interview granted months before her death, Violeta would recall her family’s stay there as “the best days of my life.”¹²

Lautaro had a substantial Mapuche population, the largest Indigenous group within the territory claimed by Chile. Nicanor, who became an advocate for native rights, affirmed that he “got to know the Mapuche people from close up” growing up there and even learned how to count in their native language of Mapudungun.¹³ Living in the region also made a strong impression on Nicanor and Violeta’s parents, if the fact that they named their fourth and fifth sons after Mapuche warriors Lautaro and Caupolicán is any indicator. For her part, Violeta’s early experiences in Lautaro may have inspired her interest and concern for native people. As a folklorista in the late 1950s, she would return to Wallmapu to collect material among the Mapuche.¹⁴ In the early 1960s, she would draw attention to the situation of the Mapuche in songs and artwork that depicted their rituals or denounced their historical oppression.¹⁵ 

In 1927, the family’s happy times in Lautaro came to an abrupt end after General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo assumed the presidency in July of that year. Ibáñez was an authoritarian leader. He immediately enacted a series of measures as part of his modernizing agenda, among them a decree banning civilians from working for the military. Nicanor senior lost his position as teacher of the regiment from one day to the next.¹⁶ With nothing to hold them in Lautaro, Violeta’s parents decided to return to their family roots in Ñuble. Violeta was ten years old when the family moved back to Chillán. She would form her most lasting childhood memories in and around this provincial capital which, though not exactly the “end of the earth,” was still a far cry from Chile’s political, economic, and cultural capital of Santiago 250 miles to the north. Of the many places she lived in her first fifteen years, Chillán would become the one Violeta most strongly identified with, and she would proudly proclaim herself a chillaneja (person from Chillán) in poetry and in song.¹⁷

Violeta Volcánica I

In early December 1959, Chilean musician and composer Miguel Letelier was strolling through the Arts Fair along the banks of the Mapocho River in downtown Santiago when he came across Parra’s stall with her recent paintings and ceramic works on display. He found a crowd gathered round her as she played another recent creation: her musical composition “El Gavilán” (The Sparrowhawk). Parra performed the piece that day on guitar and voice, but she fully intended to stage it one day as a ballet accompanied by folk instruments and a symphony orchestra.

Letelier found the piece extraordinary. He immediately offered to record and transcribe it so that Parra could copyright it. Forty years later, he would compare “The Sparrowhawk” to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He would affirm that although Parra did not know how to write music, she had nonetheless been “able to take the cueca-tonada pairing, which is the most common folkloric expression of [Chile’s] central zone, to an unprecedented level of stylization and development that has not been surpassed to this day.”¹⁸

Letelier’s encounter with Parra occurred toward the end of the five-year interval between her return to Chile from Europe in December 1956 and her departure for Argentina at the close of 1961, from where she continued on to Europe six months later. Since returning to Chile, she had resumed and intensified her work as a folklorista in the dual meaning of the term as both a collector and disseminator of folklore. But Parra had also vastly expanded the range of her professional and creative activities. The scene at her booth at the 1959 Arts Fair offers a partial inventory of her diverse undertakings at this stage in her artistic trajectory. To those roles of ceramicist, painter, and composer that it illustrates, one can add songwriter, ethnographer, film music scorer, photographer, museum curator, teacher, poet, and tapestry-maker. A woman of “all occupations” is how her brother Nicanor put it in his 1960 poem “Defensa de Violeta Parra (Defense of Violeta Parra).¹⁹ Nicanor captures the explosive nature of both Violeta’s creative output and temperament during these critical years when, referring to her by her family nickname, he dubs her “Viola volcánica” (volcanic Viola). 

Violeta did not create in a vacuum. She was part of an inventive movement of leftist artists and intellectuals intent on eschewing European and US cultural models in order to create Chilean ones. The Chilean folk revival was an early manifestation of this larger undertaking to create and promote an alternative chilenidad or Chilean identity in simultaneous defiance of both conservative strains of patriotism and the US cultural invasion that advanced with increasing force after World War II. Over the course of the 1950s, the cultural Left extended its agenda beyond folklore, with its rural connotations and national boundaries, to embrace the popular in the broader sense of its Spanish meaning as related to the working poor, both rural and urban. 

The leftists’ cultural movement took root and flourished during a crucial moment in Chilean history, one that encompassed the hope and belief that real social change was possible. With the repeal of the anti-communist Law in Defense of Democracy in 1958, previously shuttered avenues of political participation opened up even as the state continued to meet mass protests by students and workers with violent repression. The triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution a year later inspired leftists in Chile and the world over, and led both the United States and the USSR to intensify their focus on and intervention in Latin America. In an era of rising social tensions and political polarization that would only increase across the 1960s, a tight-knit community of Chilean artists and intellectuals claimed the power to define themselves.

Parra was an eager participant in this movement. Unlike her transition from popular singer to folklorista, this new phase in her creative life did not entail any break with the past, nor did it follow a specific sequence from folklorista to artist. Instead, Parra continued her work as a folklorista even as she began to experiment with different media and invent new idioms. More importantly, and as Letelier’s reference to the traditional cueca-tonada in his commentary on “The Sparrowhawk” demonstrates, Parra welded the folklore that she collected to her own artistic endeavors. “Tradition and invention: that’s the pact that made her unique” is how her friend, the writer Gonzalo Rojas, described it.²⁰

Parra’s efforts over her five-and-a-half-year “volcanic period” did not necessarily translate into success or even stability. On the contrary, in many instances both she herself and much of her artistic output were located so far outside contemporary norms and official avenues for artistic recognition as to remain underappreciated or even unremarked. What follows is thus simultaneously and unavoidably a study of Parra’s social exclusions.

An Autobiography in Décimas and Other Unpublished Works

Three book projects are included on the long list of creative activities that Parra undertook during this period. Two were of the folk songs she collected, and the third was her autobiography in décimas. None would be published during her lifetime. 

The first and most elaborate project was the ethnographic manuscript that would eventually be published as Cantos folklóricos chilenos (Chilean Folk Songs). It was a collaborative effort consisting of first-person vignettes of Parra’s encounters with fifteen folk informants, including doña Rosa, don Isaías Angulo, and Parra’s mother Clarisa; the lyrics of fifty-eight folk songs; accompanying musical transcriptions by Gastón Soublette; and photos by both Sergio Larraín and Sergio Bravo. Despite Parra’s repeated pronouncements in the press that the book was already at the printer and that it would be out any day now, it would not be published until 1979.²¹

Parra made similarly optimistic claims about a forthcoming collection of fifty cuecas from the Concepción region that has yet to be published.²² According to the friend who accompanied her, Parra brought just the lyric sheets to the offices of Nascimiento, the same press that published her brother Nicanor Parra’s poetry. An employee of the press leafed through the pages and, noting that there were no musical transcriptions, asked Violeta if she had studied music, to which she answered, “No, but if I had, I would be the Bach of Chilean music.”²³

Parra’s third book project was her autobiography in décimas. Perhaps more than any other of her creative endeavors, this collection of ninety-six poems welded her work with that of the traditional singers whose folk poetry she dedicated years of her life to collecting and disseminating. Parra read excerpts of it on a January 1960 radio interview. She explained that her brother Nicanor was the one who had suggested that she write her autobiography in verse. At first, she had refused, as she had “other more important things to do, like taking care of my home and battling for folklore.”²⁴ Quoting from her décimas, she continued:

But heeding my brother’s counsel,
I thought about the matter,
And then I took pen in hand
And began to fill the pages.

Pero, pensándolo bien,
y haciendo juicio a mi hermano,
tomé la pluma en la mano
y fui llenando el papel.²⁵

Parra would eventually fill entire notebooks and sheaves of paper with her verses. At least one page included a shopping list on its margins—“1 liter of milk, 2 kg of meat, buttons.”²⁶

A poetic exercise in self-discovery and self-construction, Parra’s autobiography covers the period from her childhood through her return from her first European stay. The verses encompass a reckoning with her past: her father’s alcoholism and other prolonged illness, the family’s destitution after he squandered his inheritance, his premature death, long evenings spent helping her mother as she sewed, the failure of Parra’s first marriage, the sordid atmosphere of the “convent” or bar where she worked, and her feelings of sorrow and guilt over the loss of her infant child. A few of the décimas chronicle Parra’s adventures in Europe. Several address less personal topics. Some are philosophical. Others critique society’s injustices and hypocrisies, presaging Parra’s 1960s protest songs. Loose poems at the end of the manuscript include her homage to Gabriela Mistral, and musings on love’s disillusions inspired by the end of her affair with Julio Escámez. 

Parra’s autobiography signaled a shift in emphasis in her foundational narrative of authenticity, from her affinity with the humble, rural pueblo or folk that sustained her work as a folklorista, to her identification with the oppressed pueblo of class struggle that would underpin much of her politically engaged songwriting and visual artwork in the 1960s. Parra established her identity as a mujer del pueblo or “woman of the people”—with “people” now understood in its more politicized meaning as the working poor—in two principal ways. First, she highlighted her own experience of poverty as a child, with her mother working late into the night to feed her children its most salient illustration. Second, she provided an exaggerated account of her maternal grandfather’s exploitation.

Parra presented both of her grandfathers in a sequence of poems devoted to her family lineage. Her poetic portrayal of her paternal grandfather was accurate, on the whole. She wrote that he was an “esteemed” and “educated” man, who wore a pink tie, resided in a “grand old house,” and was visited by “The ladies, fans aflutter / The gentlemen in suits / Perfumed and snooty / As the rich always are” (las damas con abanico, / de fraque los caballeros, / perfumosos y altaneros, / como son siempre los ricos).²⁷ In effect, although Violeta’s paternal grandfather would not have been considered rich in Santiago where the Chilean upper-class was centralized, he was “rich” by the standards of Chillán. “An elegant man” with a “certain provincial prestige” was how Nicanor characterized him.²⁸

Violeta’s depiction of her maternal grandfather was far more inventive. She wrote that “the rich man, in all of his grace,” held her grandfather as a “bonded laborer” (obliga’o).²⁹ In her 1960  radio interview, she clarified that this meant he was an inquilino (tenant farmer) and explotado (someone who is exploited).” In fact, her maternal grandfather was a small landowner, of which there were many in the Ñuble province, who also worked as the administrator of a nearby landed estate. Nicanor described him as “pretty well off,” from the “campesino middle class.”³⁰

Violeta’s representation of her maternal grandfather as a poor and oppressed agricultural worker was an early example of the practice that would lead Nicanor to jokingly label her a “social descender” (abajista), his play on words for a person who exaggerated their social status downward as opposed to a social climber or arribista.³¹ And the downward slant Violeta gave to the Parra family history would only grow steeper with time. Moving forward, she would shed references to her paternal grandfather’s provincial-scale privilege and double down on casting her maternal grandfather as poor and exploited. Her accentuation of her and her family’s experience of poverty would bring her narratively closer to the pueblo or working poor with whom she identified and whom she now proposed to give voice to through her songs and artwork.

It is not clear precisely when and where Parra began to work on her autobiography in verse. She must have considered it complete or near completion when she premiered it on the radio in January 1960. She presented it later that year to members of the Communist Party’s cultural commission in hopes that they would publish it.³² The encounter took place in Pablo Neruda’s newest home, La Chascona, a rambling house in the bohemian Santiago neighborhood of Bella Vista that he shared with his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, and that, like his other houses, served as an unofficial headquarters of the cultural Left. Upon hearing Parra’s work, the literary critic of the communist daily El Siglo pronounced it extraordinary and compared it to the well-known epic poem “Martín Fierro” by the late nineteenth-century Argentine author José Hernández.³³ Their praise notwithstanding, party officials were unable to reach a consensus in support of the manuscript’s publication.³⁴

In the end, Parra’s sole publication in Chile within her lifetime was a one-page article on the folk ritual of the wake for the little angel, appearing in the December 1958 issue of the art review Pomaire.³⁵ That Parra was unable to get her work published in Chile was a great source of aggravation to her. In what seems to have become the pattern of her life, she would find better success publishing her work abroad, first in Argentina and later in France.

No matter the challenges Parra faced, they could not dampen her creative spirit and drive. On the contrary, her powers of invention appear to have been boundless during this period. There is perhaps no better example of this, unrivaled for its sheer exaggeration, than her invention of the centésima. Parra introduced the centésima during the January 1960 radio interview in which she premiered her autobiography in décimas. After reading a few examples of the traditional ten-line verse, Parra went on to explain that she had since moved on from the décima to the centésima, a new form of folk poetry that she had invented with verses of one hundred lines. She proceeded to read her centésima in its entirety on the air. In an animated voice, she then informed her listeners that she was working on a milésima that would go all the way up to 1,000. The radio program host and Parra jokingly agreed that from there she would have to go up to 10,000, then on to 1 million. As Parra affirmed, “[the possibilities] are infinite.”³⁶

1 D’Albuquerque “La Parra madre y los otros Parra,” 6. Although she does not specify the year, Clarisa’s recollection that “things got real bad for people from one moment to the next” suggests that Violeta’s maternal grandparents’ economic downturn was linked to the worldwide economic crisis of 1929 and the 1930s.
2 Ferrero, Escritores a trasluz, 88.
3 V. Parra, Décimas, 99.
4 “Epidemias,” Memoria Chilena, BNdeCh, www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-articl-93708.html.
5 V. Parra, Décimas, 49.
6 The title of the 1999–2001 telenovela (soap opera) Yo soy Betty, la fea (I Am Betty, the Ugly One) provides a more recent example of this phenomenon; “Yo soy Betty, la fea,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0233127/?ref=fn_al_tt_1. The show was adapted in the United States as the 2006–10 television series Ugly Betty; “Ugly Betty,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0805669/?ref=fn_al_tt_1.
7 R. Parra, “Hablan de ella los que no tienen idea cómo fue,” Fortín Mapocho (February 5, 1989).
8 Cámara de Diputados de Chile, “Sesión 48 (February 9, 1967),” Sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados (Santiago, Chile: La Cámara, 1967), 4686. 
9 García and Osorio, Ricardo García, 102.
10 Censo de población [. . .] 1920, 200. Wallmapu means “the surrounding land” in Mapudungun, language of the Mapuche.
11 San Martín, Lalo Parra, 27.
12 Alfonso Molina Leiva, “Violeta Parra,” Suplemento Dominical de El Mercurio, October 16, 1966. Reproduced in García, Violeta Parra en sus palabras, 103.
13 Quezada, En la mira de Nicanor Parra, 99.
14 Miranda, Loncón, and Ramay, Violeta Parra en el Wallmapu.
15 For a discussion of how Parra and Víctor Jara helped to make Indigenous cultures visible through their music, see Crow, Mapuche in Modern Chile, 130–37.
16 Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 214–21. Ibáñez won the presidency with 98 percent of the votes in what historian Brian Loveman termed a “carefully controlled election”; Loveman, Chile, 247. In her autobiography in verse, Parra refers to Ibáñez as a “dictator” and holds him responsible for her father’s depression and eventual demise following the loss of his teaching position in Lautaro; Décimas, 73–76.
17 Regional identifiers like chillaneja are not capitalized in Spanish.
18 “Reencuentro con Violeta Parra,” El Mercurio, December 26, 1999. Although Letelier did not specify the year of his encounter with Parra at the annual Arts Fair, held in December, I deduce it was 1959 based on the fact that Parra performed fragments of “El Gavilán” on the radio in January 1960; Céspedes, “En la radio,” in García, Violeta Parra en sus palabras.
19 The poem is available at “Nicanor Parra,” Universidad de Chile, accessed February 14, 2024, www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/antologia/otros/defensavioleta.html.
20 I. Parra, El libro mayor, 85.
21 Ángel discovered the manuscript’s pages arranged in no particular order in a clay pot in Violeta’s room after her death. He put them in order and sent the manuscript to Editorial Nascimiento in June 1973. The manuscript was not published as a book until 1979, with the six-year lapse most likely attributable to the military coup and subsequent dictatorship. Rodríguez Musso, “Más sobre los Parra,” Araucaria de Chile 16 (1981): 176.
22 Navasal, “Museo de música popular creó Violeta Parra”; Vicuña, “Entrevista,” 75–76.
23 Drysdale, “Violeta Parra,” 487.
24 Céspedes, “En la radio de la Universidad de Concepción,” in García, Violeta Parra en sus palabras, 32.
25 V. Parra, Décimas, 27.
26 Favre, “Les mémoires du Gringo,” 50.
27 V. Parra, Décimas, 29–30.
28 Cited in Ferrero, Escritores a trasluz, 88. In his discussion of Parra’s family origins, Herrero states that “both the wealth of the Parras [paternal grandparents] and the poverty of the Sandovals [maternal grandparents] seem to have become distorted with time”; Herrero, Después de vivir, 40–41. I concur with Herrero in the case of Parra’s maternal grandparents. In the case of her paternal grandparents, I have not found it the case that their wealth is distorted so much as that they themselves are omitted from the narrative.
29 V. Parra, Décimas, 31.
30 Morales T. and Parra, Conversaciones con Nicanor Parra, 31.
31 See, for example, Roberto Careaga, “Nicanor Parra: ‘La Violeta siempre fue abajista, yo siempre fui arribista,’” La Tercera, September 5, 2019.
32 The presentation must have taken place after the death of former president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo on April 28, 1960, as Parra makes reference to his death in her décimas; V. Parra, Décimas, 103–4.
33 Virginia Vidal, “Violeta Parra ya tiene museo,” Punto Final, December 17, 2015–January 6, 2016, 21.
34 Parra’s autobiography in verse was first published in Chile by Editorial Pomaire in 1970; Leonidas Morales T., “El retorno de las décimas de Violeta Parra,” Suplemento de Época, May 28, 1989. It has seen several editions since in Chile as well as Cuba and Venezuela.
35 Violeta Parra, “Velorios de Angelitos.”
36 Céspedes, “En la radio de la Universidad de Concepción,” in García, Violeta Parra en sus palabras, 40; V. Parra, En el Aula Magna de Concepción. Parra’s centésimas are published in V. Parra, Centésimas del Alma. The CD Décimas y centésimas consists of recordings of Parra reading her décimas and centésimas.

From Thanks to Life by Ericka Verba. Copyright © 2025 by The University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of The University of North Carolina Press.