"Cara de nana"

 

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 face that looks like you, small, black hair, I am that face with features that make your class-ashamed class uncomfortable.” Her reaction, in turn, sparked yet another debate about classism and racism,  especially since the Lollapalooza festival is marketed to upper class young adults with enough income to become indebted, with tickets that start from Cnd $107.6 for a one day pass, to Cnd $470 for a two-day “VIP pass.” A letter titled “Open Letter to the Boss’s Son” was published in social media by Emmanuel Ortega Villagran, who identified himself as “the son of a maid,” and spoke about the hard work, love, dedication, loyalty that his mother, as well as most maids in urban settings in Chile, has given to their employer's family. He described how other members of his family that had worked as maids had taken care of their employer’s children as their own, only to be treated as a second class human beings who can be showered with paternalistic kindness, but denied basic labor rights such as a pension.   

What do all these comments tell us about power relations and subjectivities in contemporary Chile? Why are “nanas” seen as somewhat at fault, and why does it become so crucial to defend them upon the grounds of their morals and values, to restore their respectability? How did they lose respectability? And what made Anita Tijoux seem so out of place in this site of modernity, status, and cosmopolitanism, as to become the target of verbal aggressions from a middle and upper class audience? As poor, mostly rural and/or indigenous women, "nanas" or maids embody class, race, gender relations that go all the way back to colonial racial hierarchies, to the institution of “derecho a pernada” of the landowners over the women of their fundos. Domestic workers have been historically racialized and sexualized as “easy” and “available.” When I was a teenager many of my male classmates of my very arribista highschool would brag and compare stories of becoming sexually initiated with a young live-in maid. And even though it is possible to trace those narratives and images that have represented poor and racialized female bodies as sexually licentious in many other contexts, such as the Canadian, there seems to be something else here at stake: Anita’s politicized body at the center of this cosmopolitan spectacle becomes an unbearable confrontation for the male audiences members that yelled at her. Her frequent references to the Popular Unity project, the figure of Allende, of Victor Jara, are at the core of her abjection for the sons of the boss. Racialized women’s bodies are acceptable in the context of domestic service, or selling at fresh markets, and that is where Anita’s body belong according to them.