Violeta Parra Museum

This guide to the Violeta Parra Museum in Santiago starts at the dirt-floored circus tent the folk artist pitched on borrowed land past the last bus stop in 1965, calling it, half joking, a national university of folklore where anyone could learn cueca and guitar for free. It follows the daily grind of running that tent alone, cooking, sweeping and performing with no staff and no bus line reaching the mud road outside. Her daughter Carmen Luisa remembered the rain coming through the canvas roof and the bare earth floor underneath it.