Violeta Parra

This article explores Violeta Parra’s artistic output through the perspective of hybrid space, a third space, which she herself inhabited. It concentrates on her ethnomusicological research, which resulted in her Cantos folklóricos chilenos , as well as her authorial songs. It also reinforces Parra as the originator of the Nueva Canción Chilena [New Chilean Song]. She preserved and reproduced cultural traditions that were in decline in twentieth-century Chile and Latin America. The ethnomusicologist compiled a repertoire that took her to different parts of Chile and to peripheral urban areas of Santiago, where she sought out the folklore of rural immigrants who had acclimatized to the urban space. Compilation went along with creative activity that juxtaposed the old and the new, the traditional and the experimental, handiwork and technology, and so on. She transformed folkloric expression in Chile and thus inaugurated an ideological musical thirdspace that would later be known as the Nueva Canción Chilena.