4 - Back in the Days When She Sang Mexican Songs on the Radio … Before Violeta Parra was Violeta Parra

Summary

As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, Violeta Parra has left us a formidable legacy, in the materials she collected as a folklorist, and in her own creative activity as a composer, songwriter and visual artist. It is noteworthy that Violeta undertook the artistic endeavours that are the foci of other chapters relatively late in life, when she was already in her mid-thirties. This does not mean that the two decades between her arrival in Santiago in 1932 at the age of 15 and her emergence as a folklorist in the early 1950s were unproductive ones. Quite the contrary. Violeta devoted much of the period in question to varied artistic pursuits. She sang música criolla in working-class bars and taverns and, eventually, in some of Santiago's upscale downtown venues. She pursued a successful if more short-lived career as a flamenco artist. Towards the tail end of the period, she made her entry into the mass entertainment industry via radio appearances and several recordings with the duo she formed with her sister Hilda, Las Hermanas Parra (The Parra Sisters).

Yet despite its relative longevity and accomplishments, this stage in Violeta's artistic trajectory remains un- or under-explored. This situation results at least in part from a paucity of sources, since much of Violeta's musical production from the period was ephemeral. It stems as well from a certain biographical dissonance and consequent erasure. When Violeta became a folklorist, the more ideal-laden and didactic labours of her newfound career clashed with her earlier, more urban and commercially oriented activities; they were, as Leónidas Morales puts it, ‘two irreconcilable worlds’. Then in her mid-thirties, Violeta would trace her folklorista passion directly back to her childhood years spent near and within rural communities learning the folkore of Chile. The twenty-odd years that she had devoted to less-than-authentic artistic endeavours now seemed to interrupt or even run counter to what was an otherwise coherent narrative. Violeta dealt with this contradiction by summarily dismissing her past artistic pursuits as ‘trivial’ and ‘so much nonsense’. Her many admirers, both contemporary and posthumous, would prove similarly dismissive; for them, Violeta's mid-thirties embrace of Chilean folklore marks the moment when she finally discovered her true vocation and, by extension, her authentic self.