Pat\u2019e Perro (Wanderer)<\/b><\/p>\n
The Parra family\u2019s 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\u2019s grandparents enjoyed was not passed down to her parents. Her maternal grandfather\u2019s agricultural prosperity as a small landowner would erode, presumably by the 1930s.<\/span>1 <\/span><\/sup>Violeta\u2019s paternal grandfather, for his part, proved either unable or unwilling to ensure the financial security of Nicanor senior and his growing family. Nicanor senior\u2019s bohemian lifestyle also played a significant role in the family\u2019s economic instability.<\/span>2<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>pat\u2019e perro<\/span><\/i> or \u201cdog\u2019s paw.\u201d Economic necessity, combined with the ease that the extensive train system permitted, made many Chileans pat\u2019e perro in the first part of the twentieth century, Violeta\u2019s family included. By the time Violeta was ten years old, they had moved five times: from the rural hamlet of San Fabi\u00e1n 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 Chill\u00e1n in 1927. Violeta, who did not have her own fixed address until she was forty-two, would claim to have inherited her parents\u2019 nomadic ways in her autobiography in verse: \u201cAs I was born a restless wanderer \/ Not even the devil could catch me\u201d (<\/span>Como nac\u00ed pat\u2019e perro \/ ni el diablo m\u2019echaba el guante).<\/span><\/i>3<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Little is known about Violeta\u2019s earliest years spent in the small towns of San Fabi\u00e1n and San Carlos in the \u00d1uble province. The contours of her time in Santiago, roughly from ages two to four, are somewhat more filled in. The family\u2019s living and economic situation was tenuous at best. They stayed with relatives at first, as was common among newly arrived migrants <\/span>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\u2014tramway inspector, prison guard\u2014while Clarisa, who was a gifted seamstress, found work at a department store.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 1921, the family\u2019s fortunes improved considerably after Violeta\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span>4<\/span><\/sup> 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,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Here my sorrows begin Aqu\u00ed principian mis penas 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 \u201cugliness\u201d 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 <\/span>gorda\/o<\/span><\/i> (fatso), a skinny one <\/span>flaca\/o<\/span><\/i>, or someone with a limp <\/span>coja\/o<\/span><\/i> (gimp), family, friends, acquaintances, reporters, and public figures commented openly and often on Violeta\u2019s physical appearance.<\/span>6 <\/span><\/sup>Her brother Roberto explained in an interview how he had affectionately nicknamed Violeta \u201cla \u2018Carcocha\u2019 [junk heap] because her face was all pitted from pestilence.\u201d<\/span>7<\/span><\/sup> Socialist Party representative Carmen Lazo in her eulogy to Violeta, delivered to the House of Representatives just days after Violeta\u2019s death in 1967, first praised her talents, then noted that she \u201cwas not a beautiful woman; one could even say she was ugly.\u201d<\/span>8<\/sup> <\/span>Ricardo Garc\u00eda, popular radio announcer and Violeta\u2019s collaborator and loyal promoter, was kinder in his delivery, if not his assessment: Violeta was \u201cbeautifully ugly.\u201d<\/span>9<\/span><\/sup> Violeta shared the consensus; she consistently referred to herself as \u201cugly\u201d or, in the extreme, as \u201cthe ugliest woman on the planet.\u201d Her childhood disfiguration would limit her options as a musician later in life in an industry that increasingly valued physical \u201cbeauty,\u201d especially when it came to women performers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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 Caut\u00edn province (today Wallmapu), Lautaro was a small town in the 1920s, with a population of around 8,300 inhabitants.<\/span>10<\/span><\/sup> Nicanor senior\u2019s 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.<\/span>11<\/span><\/sup> 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\u2019s stay there as \u201cthe best days of my life.\u201d<\/span>12<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n 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 \u201cgot to know the Mapuche people from close up\u201d growing up there and even learned how to count in their native language of Mapudungun.<\/span>13<\/span><\/sup> Living in the region also made a strong impression on Nicanor and Violeta\u2019s parents, if the fact that they named their fourth and fifth sons after Mapuche warriors Lautaro and Caupolic\u00e1n is any indicator. For her part, Violeta\u2019s 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.<\/span>14<\/span><\/sup> In the early 1960s, she would draw attention to the situation of the Mapuche <\/span>in songs and artwork that depicted their rituals or denounced their historical oppression.<\/span>15<\/span><\/sup>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 1927, the family\u2019s happy times in Lautaro came to an abrupt end after General Carlos Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez del Campo assumed the presidency in July of that year. Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez 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.<\/span>16<\/span><\/sup> With nothing to hold them in Lautaro, Violeta\u2019s parents decided to return to their family roots in \u00d1uble. Violeta was ten years old when the family moved back to Chill\u00e1n. She would form her most lasting childhood memories in and around this provincial capital which, though not exactly the \u201cend of the earth,\u201d was still a far cry from Chile\u2019s political, economic, and cultural capital of Santiago 250 miles to the north. Of the many places she lived in her first fifteen years, Chill\u00e1n would become the one Violeta most strongly identified with, and she would proudly proclaim herself a <\/span>chillaneja<\/span><\/i> (person from Chill\u00e1n) in poetry and in song.<\/span>17<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cEl Gavil\u00e1n\u201d (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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cThe Sparrowhawk\u201d to Igor Stravinsky\u2019s The Rite of Spring. He would affirm that although Parra did not know how to write music, she had nonetheless been \u201cable to take the cueca-tonada pairing, which is the most common folkloric expression of [Chile\u2019s] central zone, to an unprecedented level of stylization and development that has not been surpassed to this day.\u201d<\/span>18<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Letelier\u2019s 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 \u201call occupations\u201d is how her brother Nicanor put it in his 1960 poem \u201cDefensa de Violeta Parra (Defense of Violeta Parra).<\/span>19<\/span><\/sup> Nicanor captures the explosive nature of both Violeta\u2019s creative output and temperament during these critical years when, referring to her by her family nickname, he dubs her \u201cViola volc\u00e1nica\u201d (volcanic Viola).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>popular<\/span><\/i> in the broader sense of its Spanish meaning as related to the working poor, both rural and urban.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The leftists\u2019 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s reference to the traditional cueca-tonada in his commentary on \u201cThe Sparrowhawk\u201d demonstrates, Parra welded the folklore that she collected to her own artistic endeavors. \u201cTradition and invention: that\u2019s the pact that made her unique\u201d is how her friend, the writer Gonzalo Rojas, described it.<\/span>20<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Parra\u2019s efforts over her five-and-a-half-year \u201cvolcanic period\u201d 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\u2019s social exclusions.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 d\u00e9cimas. None would be published during her lifetime.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The first and most elaborate project was the ethnographic manuscript that would eventually be published as <\/span>Cantos folkl\u00f3ricos chilenos<\/span><\/i> (Chilean Folk Songs). It was a collaborative effort consisting of first-person vignettes of Parra\u2019s encounters with fifteen folk informants, including do\u00f1a Rosa, don Isa\u00edas Angulo, and Parra\u2019s mother Clarisa; the lyrics of fifty-eight folk songs; accompanying musical transcriptions by Gast\u00f3n Soublette; and photos by both Sergio Larra\u00edn and Sergio Bravo. Despite Parra\u2019s 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 <\/span>1979<\/span>.21<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n Parra made similarly optimistic claims about a forthcoming collection of fifty cuecas from the Concepci\u00f3n region that has yet to be published.<\/span>22<\/span><\/sup> 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\u2019s 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, \u201cNo, but if I had, I would be the Bach of Chilean music.\u201d<\/span>23<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Parra\u2019s third book project was her autobiography in d\u00e9cimas. 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 \u201cother more important things to do, like taking care of my home and battling for folklore.\u201d<\/span>24<\/span><\/sup> Quoting from her d\u00e9cimas, she continued:<\/span><\/p>\n But heeding my brother\u2019s counsel, Pero, pens\u00e1ndolo bien, Parra would eventually fill entire notebooks and sheaves of paper with her verses. At least one page included a shopping list on its margins\u2014\u201c1 liter of milk, 2 kg of meat, buttons.\u201d<\/span>26<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n A poetic exercise in self-discovery and self-construction, Parra\u2019s 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\u2019s alcoholism and other prolonged illness, the family\u2019s destitution after he squandered his inheritance, his premature death, long evenings spent helping her mother as she sewed, the failure of Parra\u2019s first marriage, the sordid atmosphere of the \u201cconvent\u201d or bar where she worked, and her feelings of sorrow and guilt over the loss of her infant child. A few of the d\u00e9cimas chronicle Parra\u2019s adventures in Europe. Several address less personal topics. Some are philosophical. Others critique society\u2019s injustices and hypocrisies, presaging Parra\u2019s 1960s protest songs. Loose poems at the end of the manuscript include her homage to Gabriela Mistral, and musings on love\u2019s disillusions inspired by the end of her affair with Julio Esc\u00e1mez.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Parra\u2019s 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 \u201cwoman of the people\u201d\u2014with \u201cpeople\u201d now understood in its more politicized meaning as the working poor\u2014in 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\u2019s exploitation.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cesteemed\u201d and \u201ceducated\u201d man, who wore a pink tie, resided in a \u201cgrand old house,\u201d and was visited by \u201cThe ladies, fans aflutter \/ The gentlemen in suits \/ Perfumed and snooty \/ As the rich always are\u201d <\/span>(las damas con abanico, \/ de fraque los caballeros, \/ perfumosos y altaneros, \/ como son siempre los ricos<\/span><\/i>).<\/span>27<\/span><\/sup> In effect, although Violeta\u2019s paternal grandfather would not have been considered rich in Santiago where the Chilean upper-class was centralized, he was \u201crich\u201d by the standards of Chill\u00e1n. \u201cAn elegant man\u201d with a \u201ccertain provincial prestige\u201d was how Nicanor characterized him.<\/span>28<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Violeta\u2019s depiction of her maternal grandfather was far more inventive. She wrote that \u201cthe rich man, in all of his grace,\u201d held her grandfather as a \u201cbonded laborer\u201d (<\/span>obliga\u2019o<\/span><\/i>).<\/span>29<\/span><\/sup> In her 1960\u00a0 radio interview, she clarified that this meant he was an <\/span>inquilino<\/span><\/i> (tenant farmer) and <\/span>explotado<\/span><\/i> (someone who is exploited).\u201d In fact, her maternal grandfather was a small landowner, of which there were many in the \u00d1uble province, who also worked as the administrator of a nearby landed estate. Nicanor described him as \u201cpretty well off,\u201d from the \u201ccampesino middle class.\u201d<\/span>30<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Violeta\u2019s 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 \u201csocial descender\u201d (<\/span>abajista<\/span><\/i>), his play on words for a person who exaggerated their social status downward as opposed to a social climber or <\/span>arribista<\/span><\/i>.<\/span>31<\/span><\/sup> 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\u2019s provincial-scale privilege and double down on casting her maternal grandfather as poor and exploited. Her accentuation of her and her family\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s cultural commission in hopes that they would publish it.<\/span>32<\/span><\/sup> The encounter took place in Pablo Neruda\u2019s 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\u2019s work, the literary critic of the communist daily <\/span>El Siglo<\/span><\/i> pronounced it extraordinary and compared it to the well-known epic poem \u201cMart\u00edn Fierro\u201d by the late nineteenth-century Argentine author Jos\u00e9 Hern\u00e1ndez.<\/span>33 <\/span><\/sup>Their praise notwithstanding, party officials were unable to reach a consensus in support of the manuscript\u2019s publication.<\/span>34<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n In the end, Parra\u2019s 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 <\/span>Pomaire<\/span><\/i>.<\/span>35<\/span><\/sup> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>cent\u00e9sima<\/span><\/i>. Parra introduced the cent\u00e9sima during the January 1960 radio interview in which she premiered her autobiography in d\u00e9cimas. After reading a few examples of the traditional ten-line verse, Parra went on to explain that she had since moved on from the d\u00e9cima to the cent\u00e9sima, a new form of folk poetry that she had invented with verses of one hundred lines. She proceeded to read her cent\u00e9sima in its entirety on the air. In an animated voice, she then informed her listeners that she was working on a <\/span>mil\u00e9sima<\/span><\/i> 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, \u201c[the possibilities] are infinite.\u201d<\/span>36<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n<\/span>I say this sad and aggrieved,
\n<\/span>They mock me by calling me \u201cweed\u201d
\n<\/span>Because my appearance is frightening.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/i>lo digo con gran tristeza,
\n<\/span><\/i>me sobrenombran \u201cmaleza\u201d
\n<\/span><\/i>porque parezco un espanto.<\/span><\/i>5<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n
\nVioleta Volc\u00e1nica I<\/b><\/p>\n
\nAn Autobiography in D\u00e9cimas and Other Unpublished Works<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>I thought about the matter,
\n<\/span>And then I took pen in hand
\n<\/span>And began to fill the pages.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/i>y haciendo juicio a mi hermano,
\n<\/span><\/i>tom\u00e9 la pluma en la mano
\n<\/span><\/i>y fui llenando el papel.<\/span><\/i>25<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n1<\/span> D\u2019Albuquerque \u201cLa Parra madre y los otros Parra,\u201d 6. Although she does not specify the year, Clarisa\u2019s recollection that \u201cthings got real bad for people from one moment to the next\u201d suggests that Violeta\u2019s maternal grandparents\u2019 economic downturn was linked to the worldwide economic crisis of 1929 and the 1930s.
\n<\/span>2 Ferrero, Escritores a trasluz<\/em>, 88.
\n3 V. Parra, D\u00e9cimas<\/em>, 99.
\n<\/span>4<\/span> \u201cEpidemias,\u201d Memoria Chilena, BNdeCh, www.memoriachilena.gob.cl\/602\/w3-articl-93708.html.
\n<\/span>5 V. Parra, D\u00e9cimas<\/em>, 49.
\n<\/span>6 The title of the 1999\u20132001 telenovela<\/em> (soap opera) Yo soy Betty, la fea<\/em> (I Am Betty, the Ugly One) provides a more recent example of this phenomenon; \u201cYo soy Betty, la fea,\u201d IMDb, www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0233127\/?ref=fn_al_tt_1. The show was adapted in the United States as the 2006\u201310 television series Ugly Betty<\/em>; \u201cUgly Betty,\u201d IMDb, www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0805669\/?ref=fn_al_tt_1.
\n<\/span>7 R. Parra, \u201cHablan de ella los que no tienen idea c\u00f3mo fue,\u201d Fort\u00edn Mapocho<\/em> (February 5, 1989).
\n8 C\u00e1mara de Diputados de Chile, \u201cSesi\u00f3n 48 (February 9, 1967),\u201d Sesiones de la C\u00e1mara de Diputados<\/em> (Santiago, Chile: La C\u00e1mara, 1967), 4686.\u00a0
\n<\/span><\/i>9<\/span>