Ericka Verba has written a masterful biography of one of Latin America’s most important artists, poets, and musical figures of the twentieth century—Chile’s Violeta Parra. The author compellingly places the details of her subject’s tumultuous life in the social, cultural, and political contexts of her times. In doing so, she critically examines Parra’s uncanny ability to invent and reinvent herself as an “authentic” representative of the downtrodden of her country, without ever minimizing the enormous personal challenges she faced as a convention-defying woman in a misogynistic society.

The author is uniquely qualified to be Parra’s English-language biographer. In the 1980s, she was a member of the innovative women’s Nueva Canción (New Song) band, Sabiá, and then in the 1990s, a member of another US New Song ensemble, Desborde. Verba regularly performed songs from Parra’s vast repertoire. Her study of Parra’s life and work dates from her undergraduate years at Brown University and has continued throughout her scholarly career as an historian of Latin America. Verba’s lifelong engagement with Parra’s songs and poetry enables her to deftly integrate the artist’s verses into the telling of her life story. She does so in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and interpretively insightful, giving readers the opportunity to more deeply understand Parra’s life by including well-chosen excerpts of her poems and lyrics.

The book’s examination of Parra’s life is both exhaustive and incisive. Over the course of decades working as an historian, the author has consulted a wealth of primary materials and engaged in a close reading of other authors’ writings about Parra’s personal life and creative genius, allowing her to investigate and interpret her subject in greater depth and breadth than previous biographers. Because there are too many examples of Verba’s achievements to address in a short review, I limit myself to two in which I believe she has surpassed the work of other biographers.

The first has to do with Parra’s lifelong relationship with the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh), beginning with her marriage to party member Luis Cereceda as a young adult. While other writers have discussed Parra’s conflictive first marriage, few have described in detail Parra’s significant political engagements with the PCCh in the 1930s and early 1940s. In doing so, Verba makes plain that Cereceda’s—and the party’s—concern with justice for the working class did not extend to liberating working-class women from exploitation in the domestic sphere. Although Parra served the party as an artist and a performer, she never became a member and, indeed, was never invited to join, given its leaders’ lack of confidence in her ability to respect party discipline. As Verba perceptively notes, Parra benefited from the PCCh’s network of contacts in the cultural realm, both in Chile and abroad, but never rose to “the party’s A-list of performers” (172), with the level of financial and institutional support that might have entailed. Parra’s death by her own hand at the height of her artistic powers raises the question of what might have transpired had the PCCh been more supportive of her work, both financially and in terms of promoting it to a wider audience. Shortly after her death, the party began to support younger musicians through the Discoteca del Cantar Popular (DICAP) recording label run by the Juventudes Comunistas (Communist Youth). One of the reasons that the Chilean New Song gained a mass following was due to its promotion by the party in the late 1960s and then by the state during the Allende years. One wonders how Parra might have fared had she lived to benefit from the same kind of support received by other, younger artists that had been inspired by her work.

The second achievement of Verba’s biography is her insightful discussion of Parra’s mental illness leading up to her suicide in February 1967. Examining the evidence through a feminist lens, the author rejects the notion that Parra’s tragic decline and death owed mainly to the fact that mental illnesses at the time were inadequately diagnosed and improperly treated. Instead, Verba insists that “Parra’s mental illness cannot be understood without an accounting of the social inequities of her era” (290). These involved the unabashed sexism that existed with both the Chilean political left and right (which included the rejection of women, such as Parra, who failed to live up to the standards of feminine beauty of the time), as well as the superiority complex of Chile’s middle and upper classes, who regarded members of the country’s lower classes as both dirty and vulgar. As the author poignantly puts it, Parra found there was no place she belonged in Chile, as someone who was always “too poor, too uneducated, too unrefined, too old, too folkloric, too communist, not communist enough, too womanly” or “not womanly enough” (309).

In summary, Verba convincingly answers the question of how a woman like Violeta Parra, “of undistinguished origins and anticonventional beauty,” who hailed from a small town in southern Chile, a tiny country “at the end of the earth,” became an internationally “renowned artist whose impact continues to reverberate across the decades” (315). All in all, this biography is a must read for any student of Parra’s life and work.