New Biography Details The Life Of Chilean Musician, Rebel, And Cultural Icon Violetta Parra

Photo of Violeta Parra. Image by Jorge Aguirre.

Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967) is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Cancion (New Song). She is considered a rebel and a ’60s cultural icon whose work still resonates deeply today

Her renowned song “Gracias a la vida” has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. And now in a remarkable new biography, author Ericka Verba, Director and Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, traces Parra’s radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain in ‘Thanks to Life’ (The University of North Carolina Press, January 2025).

Drawing on decades of research, Ericka paints a vivid and nuanced picture of Parra’s life. From her modest beginnings in southern Chile to her untimely death, Parra was an exceptionally complex and
talented woman who exposed social injustice in Latin America to the world through her powerful and poignant songwriting. This examination of her creative, political, and personal life, flaws and all, illuminates the depth and agency of Parra’s journey as she invented and reinvented herself in her struggle to be recognized as an artist on her own terms.

‘Thanks to Life’ is an exploration of the creative and deeply personal life of this trailblazer, flaws and all, while examining her lasting impact on global cultural and political movements from the height of the Cold War to today. The book is both a study of the sexism and exclusions Parra overcame and a tribute to women facing the same struggles everywhere.

In anticipation of the book’s release, and as we prepare for another four years under a U.S. president whose policies are the antithesis of female empowerment, we are fortunate to share an excerpt from Ericka’s book below to inspire readers and send a reminder of what it means to defy the status quo and be the resistance.


“Mixed-blood Indian” and “Poor among the Poor”

As Parra assumed new creative roles, she found new ways of understanding and explaining who she was and why she did what she did. Back in the early 1950s when she reinvented herself as a folklorista, she had constructed a foundational narrative of authenticity based on her provincial origins, her campesina mother, her musician schoolteacher father, and a childhood spent imbibing the folklore of Chile.

Around the time of her second European stay, she revised this narrative in two ways: first, she added the new component of her Indigeneity, and second, she consolidated her identity as a poor person. These revisions frequently went hand in hand, as illustrated by a 1963 piece in the Tribune de Genève that described Parra as a “mixed-blood Indian, from the south of Chile, poor among the poor, too ragged to have ever gone to school.”¹

The claim that Parra had Indigenous ancestry was most likely valid, given Chile’s history of race relations. It was first made in Buenos Aires, from where Parra carried it to the cultural capitals of Europe. Her Indigenous ancestry was an asset in all of these sites, as it linked Parra to a pristine and noble past in the cosmopolitan imaginary. It was also oddly measurable.

Her 1962 interview with Eduardo Guibourg for the Argentine magazine Claudia made reference to Parra’s great-grandmother. Over the course of her second stay in Europe, reporters would continue to note her Indigenous ancestry, only now with ascending proximity. The generational distance was first shortened from great-grandmother to grandmother, then to mother.² And at least one of Parra’s admirers became convinced that Parra herself was Indigenous.³

How much of Parra’s incremental Indigenous heritage was attributable to how others perceived her and how much of it was an attempt on her part to shape their perception escape precise gauge. What is certain is that Europeans more often than not assumed that Parra had Indigenous ancestry or, in the parlance of the day, “Indian blood.” Several reviewers who attended her public appearances made note of her “Indian-ness.”

One reporter from the literary review Les Lettres Françaises wrote of her “strange face of an Indian with strong traits,” for example, while a columnist for the Glasgow Times described her as “a little, dark, eager woman, very Indian-looking with a mane of black hair streaming down her back to well below the waist.”⁴ And when Swiss art critic and documentary filmmaker Marie-Magdeleine Brumagne asked Parra point blank whether or not she was Indian, Parra’s reply that she had “a little bit of Indian blood” led Brumagne to enthusiastically exclaim, “It shows!”⁵

Without necessarily any effort on her part, then, Parra became a sort of screen upon which her European audience projected their romantic notions of how Indigenous people from South America looked and behaved. Perhaps the most vivid examples of how instantaneously and thoroughly Parra could become Indigenized in the European imagination are found in the writings of two Swiss women who befriended her and supported her artistic endeavors: Brumagne and the artist and theater director Raymonde Gampert. Both shared their impressions of their initial encounter with Parra in their memoirs.

For Brumagne, it occurred in an art gallery in Geneva, most likely in late 1964.⁶ Brumagne walked into the room where Parra was showing her tapestries and found herself at a loss for words. Noting how moved Brumagne was by her artwork, Parra offered to tell her all about it through her songs. She took out her guitar, went to the first tapestry, and began to sing.

Brumagne recalls, “I could no longer tell where I was on that rainy winter 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 come and go in this setting that Violeta has created for us, at 10:00 o’clock in the morning, in this place beyond history, thousands of kilometers from her native Chile!”⁷

Like Brumagne, Gampert first met Parra at an exhibit in a small gallery in Geneva, probably in early 1963.⁸ She spied Parra working on a mask in the corner and struck up a conversation with this “fiery slip of a woman” who was “as strange as her masks.” Parra invited Gampert to visit the apartment that she and her children shared with Favre in Geneva.

When Gampert arrived, she was met with the “marvelous vision” of Parra and her children, who greeted her with dance and song. Parra then taught her how to make her own masks, all the while talking to her in a rudimentary French that, according to Gampert’s transcription, resembled the broken style of “Indians” speaking English in 1950s Hollywood Westerns: “Me, Indian from Chile. Me have five children. Me like to dance and sing. Me have been in Indian desert with very old people. Me learn old songs from Chile.”⁹

Brumagne and Rampert’s similarly over-the-top exoticizations provide a sense of the very real cultural prejudices that Parra had to contend with, even or especially in the case of her most ardent fans, as she struggled to define herself as an artist in Europe. At the same time, this kind of stereotyping seemed to work in her favor in terms of inspiring interest in her person and artistry.

For these and other reasons, Parra’s response to the generalized propensity of Europeans to cast her in the role of “Indian” was complex. The rising levels of her Indigenous ancestry recorded across this period suggest that she encouraged her European beholders to Indigenize her, or at least did not object when they did.

One can also hope, given her ironic sense of humor, that she at times discretely mocked her European admirers, especially when their behaviors became too outlandish. For while I do not for an instant believe that the gallery walls gave way to the Andes mountains at the sound of her singing, I can certainly imagine a scenario where Parra would have deliberately communicated in a “broken” French as a sort of inside-joke rejoinder to Gampert’s preconception about her lack of fluency in the language.

The very plausibility of Gampert’s anecdote indicates that Parra’s seeming acquiescence or willingness to play the part of an Indigenous woman from South America in order to fulfill the exoticizing fantasies of her entitled European public may have had a subversive edge to it.



 ¹A.A.K., “A la Galerie Connaitre, Violeta Parra ou l’art spontané,” Tribune de Genève, February 5, 1963.

²J. Lz., “Violeta Parra,”in García, Violeta Parra en sus palabras, 79.

³Gampert, A la découverte du théâtre, 79.

⁴Charles Dobzynski, “Poésie d’Amérique Latine,” Les Letters Françaises, February 27–March 4, 1964, 9; Phyllis Jenkins, “Paris Letter,” Glasgow Herald, April 24, 1964; quoted in Fugellie, “Les tapisseries chiliennes.” My heartfelt thanks to Chilean musicologist Daniela Fugellie for generously sharing this and other reviews found in the MAD archives with me.

⁵Diserens and Brumagne, Violeta Parra, brodeuse chilienne, 4:35-4:51.

⁶The art gallery was most likely the Galerie d’Arts des Nouveaux Grands Magasins, where Parra was part of a joint show in November, 1965; M. M. Brumagne, “Cronique Artistique—Violeta Parra—Colette Rodde,” Tribune de Lausanne, n.p., November 5, 1964.

⁷Brumagne, Qui se souvient de sa vie?, 135.

⁸Gampert, A la découverte du théâtre, 77. Although Gampert does not name the gallery, the location she gives in her ⁷memoir identifies it as the Galerie Connaitre, where Parra exhibited her masks, tapestries, and ceramics in late January and early February of 1963.

⁹Gampert, A la découverte du théâtre, 77–79.

Ericka Verba is Director and Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research interests include the cultural Cold War, the role of music in social movements, and the intersection of gender and class politics in Latin America. She is also an accomplished musician and was a founding member of the LA-based new song groups Sabiá and Desborde.