On Writing the Biography of Chilean artist Violeta Parra

On Writing the Biography of Chilean artist Violeta Parra

I am the author of Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra. Born in the early-twentieth century in a small town in southern Chile, Parra invented and reinvented herself to become a world-renown songwriter, composer, and visual artist whose work continues to resonate today. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been covered by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, Kacey Musgraves, and countless other musicians. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1964. Three pieces from the original show were featured in the 1922 Venice Biennial. In brief, Parra was an extraordinary artist whose story deserves to be told and retold. 

My own relationship with Violeta Parra began five decades ago during my high school years, when I befriended a Chilean family of artists and musicians. They taught me my first Violeta Parra songs and guided my political awakening to the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship and the role of the US government in installing and supporting it. My admiration for Parra’s work and interest in her life have shaped my own life and work as both a musician and scholar ever since. 

As a self-professed “Violetamaniac,” I had long planned to write Parra’s biography but wasn’t clear how to proceed. Then Parra provided me with my book’s guiding question. She posed it in a letter written during a prolonged stay in Paris. Determined to have her artwork exhibited there, she proposed to have a solo show at the Museum of Decorative Arts, which occupies a wing of the Louvre Palace. The selection committee at first rejected her proposal, and the project went forward only after a sympathetic museum official intervened. Filled with self-doubt upon learning of the committee’s initial rejection, Parra wrote a letter to a friend in which she asked, “How could I have an exhibit at the Louvre, I, who am the ugliest woman on the planet, who come from a tiny country, from Chillán, at the end of the earth?” 

How does a woman of undistinguished origins and anticonventional beauty (“the ugliest woman on the planet”) from a small town (“from Chillán) in Chile (“a tiny country…at the end of the earth”) become a world-renowned artist whose impact continues to reverberate across the decades? In researching the answer I traveled physically and virtually to archives in the US, Chile, Argentina, France, Switzerland, Finland, and Poland. I also drew on previous Parra biographies – all published in Chile and aimed primarily at a Chilean audience — and on the resources shared by my fellow Violetamaniacs, either online or in correspondence. I liken my process of piecing together Parra’s biography from the materials I gathered to that of making a massive quilt. I would work out one small piece of the puzzle, then another. Clusters would appear and then orders to the clusters until I had mapped out a ten-chapter book down to the level of its paragraphs. I received generous support from friends and colleagues, whose careful reading and commentary enriches every aspect of my work. They turned what could have been the solitary activity of one woman writing another woman’s story into a collective effort. 

My book endeavors to answer Parra’s rhetorical question. That she posed the question in the first place is proof of her indomitable spirit, for in order to lament that she was wrong to think that she could have an exhibit at the Louvre she first had to think that she could. The fact that Parra’s proposed exhibit actually took place is a prime example of how she surmounted unsurmountable obstacles in her effort to be seen and heard as an artist. As the author of the first English-language biography of Violeta Parra, I am happy to have contributed to her quest. You can find out more about it at my website erickaverba.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ericka.verba/, and on Instagram at www.instagram.com/ericka_verba/.

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Ericka Verba is Director and Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and the author of Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Her research interests include the cultural Cold War, the role of music in social movements, and the intersection of gender and class politics in twentieth-century Latin America. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and was the recipient of the E. Bradford Burns Award for service to the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies. She is also an accomplished musician and was a founding member of the Los Angeles-based new song groups Sabiá and Desborde.

Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra

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 Canción (New Song). 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. In this remarkable biography, Ericka Verba traces Parra’s radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Drawing on decades of research, Verba 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.

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Category: On Writing