Mapping Violeta Parra S Cultural Landscapes

One of the leading figures in Latin American folk music and art during her lifetime, Violeta Parra was a vital force in the artistic, musical, visual, cultural, and social cultural production of the Chilean 1960s. Fifty years after her death, she continues to deeply influence artists of the present day. This book revisits Parra’s work and legacy to illustrate her global impact across artistic and political boundaries. Contributors offer multi-disciplinary perspectives that delineate how Parra contributed to shaping and—at the same time—antagonizing, societal processes in mid-20th century Chile.

In Negotiating Space in Latin America, edited by Patricia Vilches, contributors approach spatial practices from multidisciplinary angles. The volume advances innovative conceptualizations on spatiality and treats subjects that range from nineteenth century-nation formation to twenty-first century social movements.

This book explores Violeta Parra’s visual art, focusing on her embroideries (arpilleras), paintings, papier-mâché collages and sculptures. Parra is one of Chile’s great artists and musicians, yet her visual art is relatively unknown. Her fusion of complex imagery from Chilean folk music and culture with archetypes in Western art results in a hybrid body of work. Parra’s hybridism is the story of this book, in which Dillon explores Parra’s ‘painted songs’, the ekphrastic nature of her creations and the way ideas translate from her music and poetry into her visual art. The book identifies three intellectual currents in Parra’s art: its relationship to motifs from Chilean popular and oral culture; its relationship to the work of other modern artists; and its relationship to the themes of her protest music. It argues that Parra’s commentaries on inequality and injustice have as much resonance today as they did fifty years ago. Dillon also explores the convergence between Parra’s art and the work of other modern twentieth-century artists, considering its links to Surrealism, Pop Art and the Mexican Muralism Movement. Parra exhibited in open-air art fairs, museums and cultural centres as well as in prestigious venues such as Museu de Arte Moderna do Brasil (the Museum of Modern Art in Brazil) and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Paris. This book reflects on Parra’s socially-engaged work as it was expressed through her exhibitions in these centres as well as in through own cultural centre La carpa de la reina.

Through the history of this housing complex, this book illuminates Salvador Allende’s dedication to the imperative of the right to the city for Chile’s marginalized people. Built in affluent Las Condes in Santiago, on what is arguably the most expensive parcel of land in Chile, the Villa San Luis was one of Salvador Allende’s most visible and dramatic social projects. Allende’s six-year term was ended in the middle by a military coup d’état on 11th September 1973. Yet, material culture from Villa San Luis remains to convey the legacy of his commitment to providing disadvantaged families with dignified housing. It is a national lieu de mémoire and an iconic space, a reminder of a truly remarkable innovation in social housing and of Allende’s personal and political commitment to making Santiago a just city. Postcoup, the remains of the complex also relate the wider injustice of the Pinochet regime. Many of its families were violently evicted during the dictatorship. Some were dispossessed, taken away from Las Condes in garbage trucks, and dumped in poor communities around Santiago. The land was usurped by Pinochet on behalf of the army and later sold to developers to construct high-rise symbols of a new, neoliberal Chile. Over the decades, however, former residents fought back and, in 2020, they succeeded in making its one remaining structure, remnants of Block 14, a memorialized place of justice and reconciliation. It now a national monument and museum.

This book covers the heterogeneity of Chilean literary production from the times of the Spanish conquest to the present. It shifts critical focus from national identity and issues to a more multifaceted transnational, hemispheric, and global approach. Its emphasis is on the paradigm transition from the purportedly homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

Extends the field of improvisation studies in a more global, transcultural direction

In Negotiating Space in Latin America, edited by Patricia Vilches, contributors approach spatial practices from multidisciplinary angles. The volume advances innovative conceptualizations on spatiality and treats subjects that range from nineteenth century-nation formation to twenty-first century social movements.

For many, a map is nothing more than a tool used to determine the location or distribution of something—a country, a city, or a natural resource. But maps reveal much more: to really read a map means to examine what it shows and what it doesn’t, and to ask who made it, why, and for whom. The contributors to this new volume ask these sorts of questions about maps of Latin America, and in doing so illuminate the ways cartography has helped to shape this region from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. In Mapping Latin America,Jordana Dym and Karl Offen bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine and interpret more than five centuries of Latin American maps.Individual chapters take on maps of every size and scale and from a wide variety of mapmakers—from the hand-drawn maps of Native Americans, to those by famed explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, to those produced in today’s newspapers and magazines for the general public. The maps collected here, and the interpretations that accompany them, provide an excellent source to help readers better understand how Latin American countries, regions, provinces, and municipalities came to be defined, measured, organized, occupied, settled, disputed, and understood—that is, how they came to have specific meanings to specific people at specific moments in time. The first book to deal with the broad sweep of mapping activities across Latin America, this lavishly illustrated volume will be required reading for students and scholars of geography and Latin American history, and anyone interested in understanding the significance of maps in human cultures and societies.