Violeta Parra, By the Whim of the Wind

(ABQ Press, Albuquerque, 2010)

By Karen Kerschen

July 27, 2010

Karen Kerschen’s biography of Chilean musician and visual artist Violeta Parra is, like the artist herself was at times, controversial and unwelcome in some quarters. The unauthorized bio documents the life and times of an important artist whose work became her signature in the face of a tragic personal life, one that her children would like to homogenize in memory.

Born in the desolate Chilean province of Nuble, Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval sought the heart of Chile, first through its folk music, then through its imagery. She harvested the music of the country people, cataloging more than 3,000 songs by traveling from village to village for more than 15 years. No one else of peasant origins had collected the largely hidden music of rural campesinos. To her, the folk music of Chile was not to be confined to the rustic areas, only to wind up in a museum or archive or to be heard only on a single holiday, it was something to be lived, performed and sustained. She also created tapestries and masks depicting the stories and myths of her people.

An award won by Parra for her music eventually took her to Europe. She spent many years living and working in Paris and Geneva, where she resumed a long-term romantic relationship with musician Gilbert Favre, who was Swiss and 19 years her junior.
Kerschen’s well-researched book is a page-turner. It documents the life, work and travels of an intriguing artist who paid a great price for the success and recognition she received. As one example of an event that stamped Parra, in 1954 she was invited to participate in a prestigious European concert tour. She made a decision to leave her children with family members in Chile, including newborn daughter Rosa, who was just a few months old. Parra then traveled abroad to join the tour. The choice made her realize that art took precedence over family.

Tragically, her infant baby died a short time after Parra left home. She received news of the death in a letter from Chile shortly after she arrived in Paris. Emotionally devastated and almost suicidal, Parra stayed in Europe, unable to face Chile and her other children for more than a year.

In the book, Parra becomes her own soap opera: The reader finds that there never seemed to be a dull or predictable moment in her sometimes joyful, many times manic and depressed existence. But, in spite of heartbreak, Parra’s performances and art brought Chilean culture to the world-stage, and the time she spent in Europe eventually paid off. A show at the Louvre in Paris was the pinnacle of her career as a creator of tapestries and a mask maker. She was the first Latin American artist to be accorded a show in the world-renowned museum.

In due course, she returned to Chile to a cultural hero’s welcome and began performing in a venue of her own creation, a huge circus-like tent that she called Carpa de le Reina. It was near Santiago, where she could stage regular performances.

Ultimately, the events of her life took their toll on her always-fragile emotional state. The loss of boyfriend Favre—who left her—with whom she had sustained an on-again off-again relationship for years, played a large part in her decline.
In 1967, in her tent near Santiago, Violeta Parra took her own life. She was just 49.

Kerschen first became aware of Parra in 1973 when, as a free-lance photographer, the author visited Chile to cover events leading to the downfall of the ill-fated Allende regime. Arrested and detained, Kerschen and her late ex-husband narrowly escaped being “sent to the stadium� where dissidents were held and thousands were last seen before their ultimate disappearance.

Two of Parra’s children, daughter Isabel and son Angel, followed in their mother’s footsteps as folk musicians and still perform professionally in Chile. However, when biographer Kerschen dug into published records of Parra’s life and began constructing her book, the two children attempted to block its publication. As follow up to her work, Kerschen traveled back to Chile in 1995 and tried to meet with Isabel and Angel to establish a relationship and do further research, but when the author visited the two at a public performance, they not only refused to talk to her but had her ejected from the concert. Kerschen has had no further contact with Parra family members but has now released the book without their approval.

Karen Kerschen has done her homework, which she documents in her well-developed bibliography, glossary, notes and index. Most of her research material was printed in Spanish, so the author’s book is the first major work about Parra to be released in English. Teachers and students of Chilean and Latin American culture—and any folklorist—should consider the book a worthy read.
The book is available locally at Las Comadres gallery, as well as Moby Dickens and the Taos Writers’ Conference.

Karen Kerschen and her husband live in Ojo Caliente. She is also a visual artist and her work is exhibited at Las Comadres Gallery in Taos.