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). 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.

About the author:

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 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. She is a founding member of SCALAS (Southern California Association of Latin American Studies) and the recipient of the E. Bradford Burns Award for service to the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies.

She is the author of the book Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra. Her interest in Violeta Parra dates back to her early teens in the 1970s when she became friends with a Chilean family of musicians and artists who taught Verba her first Violeta Parra songs and guided her political awakening to the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship and the role of the US government in installing and supporting it. As a musician and founding member of the US-based New Song groups Sabiá and Desborde, she has been performing Parra’s music since 1976. In 1980, she wrote her undergraduate honors senior thesis on Parra’s autobiography in verse. In 1996, she was the musical director and arranger for a tribute concert to Violeta Parra, supported by an Artists in the Community grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and recorded and released as Desborde, Tribute Concert to Violeta Parra. As a professor of Latin American History since 2004, she has welded her research on the history of women in Chile with her interest in Parra to acquire a deeper understanding of the social context and gender dynamics that shaped Parra’s life. Suffice to say, Verba’s book represents the culmination of a decades-long curiosity about Violeta Parra and engagement with her work.