Las Chilenas

**This is the second in a series of posts in which various bloggers around Chile write on the same topic. The previous topic was Chilean men; the current one is Chilean women. Check out "Just Married Chilean Style" for links to the other blog posts.**

This topic was set for Friday. I've been dragging my feet about it because, frankly, there's a lot of animosity amongst gringas towards chilenas and I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to participate in this topic. After thinking a bit, though, I do think I'd like to throw in my two cents on precisely that aspect of things.

Gringas in Chile tend to paint the following image of chilenas: catty, cloistered, competitive, fashion-challenged, and unfriendly. I don't agree, but I do understand where this perspective comes from, and why it's so universally held. I have had a few run-ins with the type of behavior that inspires this stereotype, and it can be excessive. In the incident that first comes to mind, I was at a bar with a chileno friend, two of his male friends, and their two girlfriends. We were all sitting around the table talking, and although the girls weren't being super friendly towards me, they were behaving pretty normally. Then the guys got up to get another round of drinks. Immediately, I became invisible. The girls pointedly stopped talking to me, to the point where they didn't respond when I tried to speak to them. When the guys reappeared, they went back to normal. It was the most outrageous thing that has happened to me in a social setting since puberty (and its accompanying insanity) passed. I bawled my eyes out about it when I got home that night. It was petty, it was mean, and it made me feel like I would never make friends in this country.

Incidents like this are the fuel for the anti-chilena machine. Are they ridiculous? Yes. Do they happen to me here more than at home? Yes. Are they the province of chilenas alone? No.

The thing is, chilenas are just like women everywhere in the sense that at their best, they are warm, caring, and nurturing. At their worst they are territorial and barbed towards other women. The problem is that as extranjeras, we gringas are more likely to encounter the latter behavior.

Why? Because women everywhere can be suspicious of other women. There are various situations and instances which make this more likely to happen, and the gringa-chilena relationship often stumbles onto a few of them.

The first factor, shall we call it, is that both men and women are often less open when they are with their closest friends. If I'm hanging around with my favorite people, you just don't seem as cool. Nor do I feel particularly obliged to hang out with you, because I'm already having a fine time. In Chile, this situation is far more likely to happen than in the United States, because people here are almost always in the company of their nearest and dearest. The itinerant, transitory north american lifestyle is just not the norm here. People do not move away from home for university; they are less likely to move to a new city for a job; they are more emotionally tied to their families and so tend to stay close; and they just plain don't have as many places to go. In the US, when we hit maturity there is the expectation that we will go out into the world and find our own unique place. This is facilitated by the fact that we can move to any one of dozens and dozens of cities, across an astonishingly large territory, without so much as getting a new form of identification. Here, the economy is very much centralized based on sector. Fishing? Head south. Mining? Head north. Office work? Santiago. All of these things combine to create a society where people grow up with the same friends throughout their lives. So when you meet a chilena, the people she is with most likely remember how she wore her hair as an eight year old. That's a lot of history to compete with; I hope you've got a good opening joke. Santaguinos (both men and women) who have moved to the coast have told me that they have the same problem breaking into friend circles.

The second factor is that both men and women are more threatened by people who are different from them. Period. Sad but true, worldwide. Ask any immigrant, anywhere. Add to this that Chile is known for its racism, isolationism, and distrust, and you have a culture that is going to be even less receptive towards outsiders. This is a cultural trait, but it is not restricted to the women.

The third is that foreigners take more work to hang out with. Cross-cultural friendships involve incorporating different perspectives on major issues, behaviors that may strike you as odd, different attitudes towards friendships, and a host of other complications. This is worth it a) if you are interested in international perspectives or b) if you are particularly interested in the person, or both. However, for a lot of people, I could see why it might just be easier to stick to people who think like you do, laugh at the same things, and have experienced similar things. It's not my style, but I understand it.

Finally, a lot of gringas in Chile are dating chilenos. Some came here for their chileno; some came alone and ended up involved in a relationship. This is normal, fun, and wonderful for those who have found love. However, this is factor number four. You will notice that the story I told about my own bad experience happened when I was in the company of a chileno. The thing is that women, in any culture, are far more likely to be awful to one another when there are men in the picture. This is something that I find incredibly sad about my gender, but it's not unique to Chile. We women are territorial about our male friends, about our boyfriends, about our brothers. When a new woman enters a mixed-gender group of friends, she is going to have a much harder time winning over the girls than the guys. They are going to want to know what her intentions are. They are going to make snap judgements about whether she is "worth" their friend's time. If they are single, they might see her as a threat or an interloper.

This is something that makes me incredibly sad every time that I see it. For instance, consider the classic example: a woman's boyfriend cheats on her. What does she do? She finds the other girl, calls her a slut, denounces her to everyone within earshot, cries a lot, forces her boyfriend to denounce the other girl as well, and then slowly rebuilds her relationship with him. The boyfriend is the one who broke a promise and a confidence, but he is absolved because the two women take it out on one another.

It's depressing, and it's a trait that we need to abandon as a gender if we ever want to fully rise to equality.

But is it something that chilenas have a monopoly on? No.

I'm not saying that it's easy to make friends with chilenas. This is a very closed society. However, it's not easy to make friends with chilenos, either. In six months I have been approached by far more chilenos than chilenas, sure. But they're not interested in being my friend, they want something from me. Specifically, either to become attached to my hip, or to take me home for the night. That hardly qualifies as friendly in my book. Meanwhile, the few chilenas who have made an effort towards me do so out of honest friendliness. With my Spanish, anyone who's willing to beast their way through a conversation with me with no specific benefit in mind has got to be a genuinely nice person.

Basically, this reminds me of something a professor told me when I lived in France. France, also, is a closed society, and my language classmates and I were complaining about not being able to make friends with the other students.

"I lived in the United States for one year," she said, roughly, "and at first I thought everyone was so nice. Everyone invited me out, took me places, talked to me...it was great. Except that was it. They weren't really my friends. It was all superficial. At the end of the year, after all of that, I had two real friends, people I could really count on. Here, no one will initiate a friendship with you like in the US. But when they do, it's because they mean it. So, at the end of the year, you'll probably have two friends, and they'll be real friends. It's a different style, but in the end, people are people, and you'll make connections with the same amount of people no matter where you live."