Violeta Parra’s 100th Birthday

Today [ 04.10.2017 ] we celebrate the 100th birthday of Violeta Parra, the Chilean composer, folk singer, social activist, author, and artist.

Born in the small, southern Chilean town of San Fabián de Alico, Parra picked up the guitar at an early age and began writing songs with her siblings. She started her career performing in small venues, later traveling across Chile to record a large breadth of traditional Chilean folk music. Her increasing popularity eventually earned her her own radio show and an invitation to perform at a youth festival in Poland. While in Europe, she also explored the visual arts, creating oil paintings, wire sculptures, ceramics, and burlap tapestries called arpilleras which were exhibited in the Louvre Palace in Paris in 1964.

She is perhaps best remembered as the “Mother of Latin American folk,” pioneering the Nueva canción chilena, a renewal of Chilean folk traditions that blossomed into a movement which celebrated the fight for social justice throughout Latin America. Upon her return to Chile in 1965, she established Centro Cultural La Carpa de La Reina, a community center for the arts and political activism.

Violeta’s artistic legacy shines through in this selection from “Gracias a la vida”:

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me dio dos luceros que cuando los abro
Perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco
Y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado
Y en las multitudes el hombre que yo amo

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me two stars, which when I open them,
Perfectly distinguish black from white
And in the tall sky its starry backdrop,
And within the multitudes the one that I love.

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