Today, The Grandma has been reading about Violeta Parra, the Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist, who was born on a day like today in 1917.
Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval (4 October 1917-5 February 1967) was a Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist.
She pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena, a renewal and a reinvention of Chilean folk music that would extend its sphere of influence outside Chile.
Her birthdate (4 October) was chosen Chilean Musicians' Day. In 2011, Andrés Wood directed a biopic about her, titled Violeta se fue a los cielos.
There is some uncertainty as to exactly where Violeta Parra was born. The stamp on her birth certificate says she was born in San Carlos, Ñuble Province, a small town in southern Chile on 4 October 1917, as Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval. However, both the Fundación Violeta Parra and the Museo Violeta Parra claim on their websites that she was born in San Fabián de Alico, near San Carlos.
She was one of nine children in the poor, but prolific Parra family. Her father, Nicanor Parra Alarcón, was a music teacher. Her mother, Clarisa Sandoval Navarrete had grown up in the countryside and was a seamstress. She sang and played the guitar, and taught Violeta and her siblings traditional folk songs. Among her brothers were the notable modern poet, better known as the anti-poet, Nicanor Parra (1914–2018), and fellow folklorist Roberto Parra (1921–1995). Her son, Ángel Parra, and her daughter, Isabel Parra, are also important figures in the development of the Nueva Canción Chilena. Their children have also mostly maintained the family's artistic traditions.
The Parras performed in nightclubs, such as El Tordo Azul and El Popular, in the Mapocho district, interpreting boleros, rancheras, Mexican corridos and other styles.
Parra began singing songs of Spanish origin, from the repertoire of the famous Argentinian singers Lolita Torres and Imperio Argentina. She sang in restaurants and, also, in theatres, calling herself Violeta de Mayo.
In 1948, Parra and her sister Hilda began singing together as The Parra Sisters, and they recorded some of their work on RCA VICTOR.
Violeta was invited to the World Festival of Youth and Students, in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1955. She then moved to Paris, France, where she performed at the nightclub L'Escale in the Quartier Latin. Meanwhile, back in Santiago her daughter Rosita Clara died (aged 3).
Violeta made contacts with European artists and intellectuals. Through the intervention of the anthropologist Paul Rivet, she recorded at the National Sound Archive of the Musée de l'Homme La Sorbonne in Paris, where she left a guitarrón and tapes of her collections of Chilean folklore. She travelled to London to make recordings for EMI-Odeon and radio broadcasts from the BBC.
Parra composed Gracias a la Vida in La Paz in 1966. In 1971 the song was popularized throughout Latin America by Mercedes Sosa, and later in Brazil by Elis Regina and in the US by Joan Baez.
In 1967, Parra died by suicide via gunshot. Several memorials were held after her death, both in Chile and abroad. She was an inspiration for several Latin-American artists, such as Victor Jara and the musical movement of the Nueva Cancion Chilena, which renewed interest in Chilean folklore.
The Grandma loves volcanoes, and she has been reading about Chaitén, the Chilean volcano that began erupting on a day like today in 2008.
Chaitén is a volcanic caldera 3kilometres in diametre, 17 kilometres west of the elongated ice-capped Michinmahuida volcano and 10 kilometres northeast of the town of Chaitén, near the Gulf of Corcovado in southern Chile.
The most recent eruptive phase of the volcano erupted on 2008. Originally, radiocarbon dating of older tephra from the volcano suggested that its last previous eruption was in 7420 BC ± 75 years. However, recent studies have found that the volcano is more active than thought. According to the Global Volcanism Program, its last eruption was in 2011.
The caldera rim reaches 1,122 metres above sea level. Before the current eruption, it was mostly filled by a rhyolite obsidian lava dome that reached a height of 962 metres, partly devoid of vegetation. Two small lakes occupied the caldera floor on the west and north sides of the lava dome.
The translucent grey obsidian which had erupted from the volcano was used by pre-Columbian cultures as a raw material for artifacts and has been found as far away as 400 kilometres to the south and north, for example in Chan-Chan.
The Chaitén volcano entered a new eruptive phase for the first time since around 1640 on the morning of May 2, 2008.
The Chilean government began an evacuation of the nearby town of Chaitén, population 4,200, and the surrounding area the same day, the main phase of which was completed by May 3, 2008.
One elderly person died while at sea en route to Puerto Montt. By the afternoon of May 3, the plume of ash from the eruption had spread across Chile and Argentina to the Atlantic Ocean, contaminating water supplies, and reportedly coating the town of Futaleufú located 75 kilometres southeast to a depth of 30 centimetres.
Ash thickness estimates are often exaggerated during volcanic crises; later field investigations suggest that the average ash thickness deposited across Futaleufú was less than 5–10 cm.
A team of scientists from the US was dispatched to the area to assess the air quality and the risks from chemicals in the falling ash.
The initial phase of the actual eruption in 2008 was characterised by ash emissions and seismic activity; local seismic measurements in 2005 registered earthquakes up to magnitude 3.6 MW below the Chaitén volcano.
On May 6, 2008, the force of eruption increased significantly, producing pyroclastic flows and possibly some lava explosions, and raising the eruption column to a height of perhaps 30,000 metres. The remaining personnel and almost all inhabitants of Chaitén and nearby villages were evacuated, as was Futaleufú.
In the early phase of the eruption on May 2, 2008, two separate vents had developed in the old lava dome.
An overflight on May 6, 2008, found that these had fused into one vent roughly 800 metres across. OVDAS warned of possible major pyroclastic incidents, and the likelihood of prolonged activity.
On
May 8, 2008, the government said it would force the last residents from
the danger area, but this was later legally challenged by some
residents and left to no effect by the Supreme Court. Government
personnel later returned to attend to livestock and rescue dogs and
other animals.
Through
the remainder of May and June 2008 the eruption continued as a variable
but gradually decreasing emission of ash, with intermittent seismic
activity and pyroclastic flows.
On May 21, a new lava dome was observed to be forming in the crater, which by May 24 exceeded the height of the old dome.
Initially, the dome extended towards the north side of the caldera, but following the emergence of two new vents in the south of the old dome around June 11 and a later one to the west, the expansion moved to the south, eventually blocking the drainage from the caldera floor.
As of July 3, 2008, Chaitén continued to erupt, with associated seismic activity, an eruptive column of ash up to 3,000 metres, and a growing lava dome. Whether the dome will be stable remains uncertain, and there is an ongoing risk of collapse and explosive pyroclastic eruption.
In August 2008, an expedition reached the summit of Chaiten volcano. The summit crater contained a 120 metres high lava dome. Earthquakes were felt at the summit. The lava dome was loudly degassing, and avalanches of lava boulders fell from the dome side to the crater floor.
On February 19, 2009, a partial dome collapse caused pyroclastic flows to descend through the Chaitén river valley reaching down to approximately 5 kilometres from the town of Chaitén.
The ash once again reached Futaleufú and parts of Chubut province in neighboring Argentina. The approximately 160 people that were in Chaitén were strongly urged to leave, and all but 25 people who refused to leave were evacuated that day.
This eruption is known as the first major explosive eruption of rhyolite magma in nearly a century, since the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, inAlaska.
Although there have been rhyolitic eruptions in the southern section of the Southern Volcanic Zone in the past, these are relatively scarce and there is no historic rhyolitic eruption of the magnitude of Chaitén.
I experienced the California Northridge Earthquake of 1994 and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, and I have thus seen firsthand how terrible and awesomely devastating a force of nature can be.
The Stones and TheGrandma are spending their last days in Tierra delFuego. The family is preparing their next travel to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Before leaving this awesome part of the planet, they have wanted to known more about the ancient inhabitants of these lands, about their culture and language and about the current situation of them.
The family has travelled to PuertoWilliams in the Chilean part of Tierra del Fuego to visit CristinaCalderón, the last living full-blooded Yaghan person.
Every time the last speaker of a language dies, with him/her dies a whole culture and we lose an essential part of us. We must protect languages, we must protect minorities, we must be proud of ancient cultures, we must protect them and their peoples. They are the best heritage we can offer to the future generations -respect the past, to live the present and build the future.
The Yaghan, also called Yagán, Yahgan, Yámana, Yamana or Tequenica, areoneof the indigenous peoples of the Southern Cone, who are regarded as the southernmost peoples in the world. Their traditional territory includes the islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, extending their presence into CapeHorn.
In the 19th century, they were known as Fuegians by the English-speaking world, but the term is now avoided as it can refer to any of the several indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego. For instance, the Selk'nam inhabited the northeastern part of Tierra del Fuego.
Some are reputed to still speak the Yaghan language, also known as Yámana,which is considered to be a language isolate; however, most speak Spanish. As of 2017, Cristina Calderón, who lives in Chile territory, is known as the last full-blooded Yaghan and last native speaker of the Yaghan language.
The Yaghan were traditionally nomads and hunter-gatherers. They traveled by canoes between islands to collect food: the men hunted sea lions, while the women dove to collect shellfish.
Yaghans share a series of similarities with the more northern tribes of Chonos and Alacalufe. These are a traditional canoe-faring hunter-gatherers lifestyle as well as shared physical traits such as being of short stature, being long-headed (dolichocephalic) and having a low face. Despite similarities, their languages were completely different.
In 1871, Anglican missionaries Thomas Bridges and George Lewis established a mission at Tierra del Fuego, where they both raised their families. Bridges hadlearned the language starting when he lived on Keppel Island at the age of 17. Over more than a decade, he compiled a grammar and a 30,000-word dictionary of Yaghan-English.
Bridges' second son, Lucas Bridges, also learned the language and is one of the few Europeans to do so.
In his 1948 book, which was a history of that period, he writes that in Yaghan,their autonym or name for themselves was yamana,meaning person (though modern usage is man only, not woman) -the plural is yamali(m).
The name Yaghan (originally and correctly spelled Yahgan), was first used by his father Thomas Bridges from the name of their territory, Yahgashaga, or Yahga Strait. They called themselves Yahgashagalumoala meaning people from mountain valley channel -lum means from, -oala is a collective term for men, the singular being ua.
It was the name of the inhabitants of the Murray Channel area (Yahgashaga), from whom Thomas Bridges first learned the language.
Yagán (originally Yahgan, but also now spelled Yaghan, Jagan, Iakan), also known as Yámana, Háusi Kúta, and Yagankuta, is one of the indigenouslanguages of Tierra del Fuego, spoken by the Yaghan people. It is regarded as a language isolate, although some linguists have attempted to relate it to Kawésqar and Chono.
Yahgan was also spoken briefly on Keppel Island in the Falkland Islands at a missionary settlement.
Following the death of 84-year-old
Emelinda Acuña (1921-October 12, 2005), only one native speaker remains,
Cristina Calderón of Villa Ukika on Navarino Island, Chile. Calderón,
often referred to as simply Abuela, is the sister-in-law of Acuña.
In 2017, Chile's National Corporation of Indigenous Development convened a workshop to plan an educational curriculum in the Yagán language, and in June 2019 it plans to inaugurate a language nest in the community of Bajia Mejillones. The government is also funding the publication of a concise and illustrated dictionary of the Yagán language.
Despite the cold climate in which they lived, early Yaghan wore little to no clothing until after their extended contact with Europeans. They were able to survive the harsh climate because:
They kept warm by huddling around small fires when they could, including in their boats to stay warm. The name of Tierra del Fuego was based on the many fires seen by passing European explorers.
-They made use of rock formations to shelter from the elements.
-They covered themselves in animal grease.
-Over time, they had evolved significantly higher metabolisms than average humans, allowing them to generate more internal body heat.
-Their natural resting position was a deep squatting position, which reduced their surface area and helped to conserve heat.
The Yaghan may have been driven to this inhospitable area by enemies to the north. They were famed for their complete indifference to the cold weather of Tierradel Fuego. Although they had fire and small domed shelters, they routinely went about completely naked. Women swam in cold waters hunting for shellfish.
They often were observed to sleep in the open, completely unsheltered and unclothed, while Europeans shivered under blankets. A Chilean researcher claimed their average body temperature was warmer than a European's by at least one degree.
Mateo Martinic, in Crónica de las tierras del sur del canal Beagle, asserts that there were five groups under the Yahgan people: Wakimaala on both shores of the Beagle Channel from Yendegaia to Puerto Róbalo and at the Murray Channel; Utumaala from today Puerto Williams to Picton Island; Inalumaala at the Beagle Channel from Punta Divide to Brecknock; Ilalumaala in the south west islands, from Cook Bay to False Cape Horn; and Yeskumaala in the Islands around the Cape Horn.
The Yaghan established many temporary, but often reused, settlements within Tierra del Fuego. A significant Yaghan archaeological site from the Megalithic period has been found at Wulaia Bay
The Yaghan left strong impressions on all who encountered them, including Ferdinand Magellan, Charles Darwin, Francis Drake, James Cook, James Weddell and Julius Popper.
Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães came upon the area around Tierra del Fuego in the early sixteenth century, but it was not until the 19th century that Europeans started to be interested in the zone and its peoples. The Yahgan were estimated to number 3,000 persons in the mid-19th century, when Europeans started colonizing the area.
The British officer Robert FitzRoy was made captain of HMS Beagle in November 1828, and continued her first survey voyage. On the night following 28 January 1830 the ship's whaleboat was stolen by Fuegians, and over a month of fruitless searching to recover the boat he took guides and then prisoners who mostly escaped, eventually taking a man (renamed York Minster, estimated age 26) and a young girl (renamed Fuegia Basket, estimated age 9) hostage. A week later he took another youth hostage (renamed Boat Memory, estimated age 20) and on 11 May captured (estimated to be 14) Jemmy Button.
As it was not possible to easily put them ashore, he decided to civilise the savages. He taught them English... the plainer truths of Christianity... and the use of common tools and took them with the return of the Beagle to England.
Boat Memory died, but the others were considered civilised enough to be presented at court in London in the summer of 1831. On the famous second voyage of HMS Beagle, the three Fuegians were returned to their homeland along with a trainee missionary.
They impressed Charles Darwin with their behaviour, in startling contrast to the primitiveFuegians he met when the ship reached their native lands. He described his first meeting with the native Fuegians in the islands as being without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld: I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is a greater power of improvement.
In contrast, he said of the Yahgan Jemmy Button: It seems yet wonderful to me, when I think over all his many good qualities, that he should have been of the same race, and doubtless partaken of the same character, with the miserable, degraded savages whom we first met here.
The mission was set up for the three Fuegians. When the Beagle returned a year later, its crew found only Jemmy, and he had returned to his tribal ways. He readily still spoke English, assuring them that he had not the least wish to return to England and was happy and contented to live with his wife, in what the English thought a shockingly primitive manner. This encounter with the Fuegians had an important influence on Darwin's later scientific work.
The Yaghan were decimated by the endemic infectious diseases carried by Westerners. The English established missions at Keppel Island in the Falklands, and Ushuaia on Tierra del Fuego, in an effort to teach the natives English, Christianity, and farming.
The Yahgan suffered disruption of their habitat starting in the early-to-mid 19th century when European whalers and sealers depleted their most calorie-rich resources, forcing them to rely on mussels chopped from rocks, which provided many fewer calories for the effort needed to gather and process them, in the late 19th century when waves of immigrants came to the area for the gold rush and a boom in sheep farming.
They did not understand the British concept of property, and were hunted down by ranchers' militias for the offense of poaching sheep in their former territories.
In Sailing Alone Around the World (1900), Joshua Slocum wrote that when he sailed solo to Tierra del Fuego, European-Chileans warned him the Yaghan might rob and possibly kill him if he moored in a particular area, so he sprinkled tacks on the deck of his boat, the Spray.
In the 1920s, some Yahgan were resettled on Keppel Island in the Falkland Islands in an attempt to preserve the tribe, as described by E. Lucas Bridges in Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948), but they continued to die off. The second-to-last full-blooded Yaghan, Emelinda Acuña, died in 2005.
As of 2017, the last full-blooded Yahgan was Abuela (grandmother) CristinaCalderón, who lives in Chilean territory. She is the last native speaker of the Yahgan language.
Cristina Calderón (born May 24, 1928 at Robalo, Puerto Williams on Navarino Island, Chile) is the last living full-blooded Yaghan person after the death of her 84 year-old sister Úrsula in 2005.
By 2004, Calderón (often referred to as simply Abuela, Spanish for grandmother) and her sister-in-law Emelinda Acuña were the only two remaining nativespeakers of the Yaghan language.
With her granddaughter Cristina Zárraga and her sister Úrsula Calderón she published a book of Yaghan stories called Hai Kur Mamashu Shis (I Want toTell You a Story) in 2005. Zárraga, along with her husband Oliver Vogel, published Yagankuta, a dictionary and storybook of the Yaghan language, in 2010, based on interviews with Calderón.
She is still alive and residing in her hometown of PuertoWilliams. She is the mother of ten children and grandmother to 19 as of 2017.
Cristina Calderón has been officially declared Illustrious Daughter of the Magallanes Region and Chilean Antarctica. She also has been recognized by the National Council of Culture and the Arts (Chile) as a Living Human Treasure in the framework of the Convention for the Safeguard of Immaterial Heritage, adopted by UNESCO in 2003. Likewise, she was nominated to be one of the fifty heroines in the celebration of the Bicentennial of Chile.
Today, The Stones and The Grandma are visiting Fagnano Lake, a lake whose lands are shared by Argentina and Chile.
Fagnano Lake, also called Lake Cami, is a lake located on the main island of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, and shared by Argentina and Chile.
The 645 km² lake runs east-west for about 98 kilometres, of which 72.5 km (606 km²) belong to the Argentine Tierra del Fuego Province, and only 13.5 km (39 km²) belong to the Chilean Magallanes y la Antártica Chilena Region. It has a maximum depth of 449 meters.
The southern bank is steep compared to the northern, and expands in a considerably wide and flat piedmont from which both levels of the plateaus can be appreciated.
From its western end, the Azopardo River drains towards the Almirantazgo Fjord. On its eastern end is the town of Tolhuin.
The lake is located in a pull-apart basin developed along the Magallanes-Fagnano Fault zone.
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.
After the events occurred in Catalonia last October, 14, TheGrandma decided to take some days of relax to think about present and future. During these thirty days, she has been reading her favourite author, Salvador Espriu, one of the best writers in Catalan Literature.
Salvador Espriu was a writer who lived the Spanish Civil War and the Post War under the Francoist dictatorship. It was very difficult for him to survive in the middle of a big cultural repression and the continuous loss of civil rights that was that dictatorship. He couldn't exile and he started an internal exilium creating an own world called Sinera (Arenys, his real town, read from right to left) to try to survive and resist those dark years.
The Grandma thinks that those dark times have never disappeared in the Spanish society and nowadays they are clearer than ever. The struggle is hard but the prize is freedom and a society based in respect, tolerance and common effort. This struggle is very important and it is not a time to renounce but to fight, persevere and win.
During this month, The Grandma has been also a direct witness of terrible events occurred in Hong Kong, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Libya, Kurdistan and Bolivia. The reasons are the same -control of power by the upper social classes and slavery and resignation of poor ones-, but the targets are different -lithium in Bolivia, oil in Libya, Kurdistan and Venezuela, copper in Chile, control of population in Hong Kong or economic dependence and lawfare in Brazil and Catalonia.
The Grandma loves diversity and multiculturalism without forgetting the origin of ancient cultures. One of them, the Native American Andean population is a great example of suffering the effects of foreign colonisations and answering to them with a great resilience being proud of their culture and history.
Today, she wants to talk about the Wiphala, an important symbol of some native peoples of the Andes, in homage to all these countries that are suffering the avarice of the US with the hypocritical consent of the EU. At the end, it is only a question of resisting or serving.
Before talking about the Wiphala, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party and Other Stories.
The Wiphala is a square emblem, commonly used as a flag, representing some native peoples of the Andes that include today's Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and parts of Argentina, Chile and Colombia.
The suyu wiphalas are composed of a 7 × 7 square patchwork in seven colours, arranged diagonally. The precise configuration depends on the particular suyu represented by the emblem. The colour of the longest diagonal line (seven squares) determines which of the four suyus (regions) the flag represents: white for Qullasuyu, yellow for Kuntisuyu, red for Chinchaysuyu, and green for Antisuyu. There is also an alternate pattern for the Wiphala for Antinsuyu. Additionally a Wiphala also exists for Tupac Katari and the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army.
Wiphala
Article 6, section II of the 2009 Bolivian constitution establishes the Wiphala as the dual flag of Bolivia, along with the red-yellow-green tricolor.
In modern times the Wiphala has been confused with a rainbow flag which is wrongly associated with the Tawantinsuyu (Incan Empire). There is debate as to whether there was an Inca or Tawantisuyu flag. There are 16th and 17th-century chronicles and references that support the idea of a banner attributable to the Inca. However, it represented the Inca himself, not the empire. Also its origins are from symbols and mural designs found in several civilizations of the Andes with thousands of years of history.
The Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, holds a Wiphala that is dated through a C-14 test to the 11th century. It originates from the Tiwanaku region, and is part of a collection based on a kallawaya medicine man's grave.
The seven colors of the actual Wiphala reflect those of the rainbow. According to the Katarista movement, whose interpretation is promoted by the Bolivian authorities, the significance and meaning for each color are as follows:
Red: The Earth and the Andean man.
Orange: Society and culture.
Yellow: Energy and strength.
White: Time and change.
Green: Natural resources and wealth.
Blue: The Cosmos.
Violet: Andean government and self-determination.
The Aimara wiphala is a square flag divided into 7 × 7 (49) squares. The seven rainbow colors are placed in diagonal squares. The exact arrangement and colors varies with the different versions, corresponding to the suyus or Tupac Katari. It is very prominent in marches of indigenous and peasant movements in Bolivia.
This rainbow squares flag is used as the pan-indigenous flag of Andeanpeoples in Bolivia and has recently occasionally been adopted by Amazonian groups in political alliance.
Bolivian president Evo Morales established the Qullasuyu wiphala as the nation's dual flag, along with the previous red, yellow, and green banner in the newly ratified constitution. The Wiphala is also officially flown on governmental buildings.
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