Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

  The French-Chilean female rapper Anita Tijoux was performing at a sunny Fall afternoon of 2014 in Santiago at the Lollapalooza festival, when from the audience she heard male voices yelling at her “ cara de nana ” (“maid’s face”), and calling that she “went back to the fresh market ( la feria ) where she came from.” Known for her politically charged lyrics, Anita Tijoux was born in exile to her Chilean parents, and upon her return to Chile has succeeded in becoming one of the most acclaimed female musicians in Latin America. While she has been received with enthusiasm abroad, she has been rather despised in Chile, much like Violeta Parra before she became fetishized as a consumable folklore product for snobbish middle classers in Chile.  She responded to the Lollapalooza incident in her twitter account the next day stating that far from feeling insulted, she felt honored to be compared to those brave and hard working women, and later, reflected that “I am that maid’s face, that f

Between 1981 and 1982, amidst economic recession, state of siege and repression, before even the first public protests against Pinochet, the successful but short-lived variety show Sabor Latino under the direction of Sergio Riesenberg was broadcast on national television, showcasing performances of a number of vedettes mostly from Argentina and Spain. The show reached record audience ratings (80 points) but lasted only a year on the air and was abruptly cancelled under pressure of the Catholic Church. In 2005 the Chilean series “ExpedienTV” dedicated a whole program to Sabor Latino, in the context of a number of television programs that have begun to make public their archival footage of the last forty years (see for example, “TVN 40 Años” and “Chile. Las Imagenes Prohibidas”). In it, Sabor Latino’s director Sergio Riesenberg admits that the junta, anticipating the economic recession, gave him the order to develop a “high impact” show. Pinochet and his advisors had realized about th