Why do American girls always like flaites?

So, I have an issue with the word "flaite." In training, we were led to believe this word conveys the meaning "sketchy" in Chilean Spanish. To me, sketchy means someone who is a little nuts and not to be trusted, or else a gang-banger or a drug dealer...someone you would not want to trust with your money, or bring home for Christmas dinner, that sort of thing. Often, when something or someone is sketchy, your gut tells you that something about the situation/person just isn't right, but you often can't name it. So you say sketchy instead.

After more than five months in Chile, I do not believe the word "flaite" means "sketchy." In fact, when most Chileans say "flaite," what they really mean is "poor." Let me explain.

Our first three weeks in Santiago, the other American volunteers and I called lots of different things "flaite," trying hard to fit in to Chile and feel cool by using the local slang. Chileans get a big kick out of gringos using their slang. The first time I really encountered a Chilean using the word was the night we all went out for my birthday. My friend was in the process of getting to know her future boyfriend, and I was in the process of trying to hook up with this beautiful Chilean boy as a birthday present to myself. As we were all standing outside the club after it had closed, trying to decide who was going home with whom and how this would all be accomplished with as little embarassment as possible, my chosen boy of the evening nodded to my friend and her future boyfriend and asked, "Why do American girls always like flaites?" My unenlightened response at the time is that we couldn't tell who is flaite and who isn't. Chileans can look at someone and know if they are flaite, but we can't. Even now that I understand how the word is used, I still can't spot someone and know if a Chilean would call them flaite.

Since my friend has been with her boyfriend, in some manner of speaking, for at least three months now, we have all gotten to know him and his friends, and we generally see them at least once a weekend, either separately or in some sort of group. And usually when we are with these boys, something happens to us that reveals the distaste the greater population of Chilean disco-goers feel toward our "flaite" friends. Sometimes it is a glance of disgust, or other times it is much more direct, like the first time my host brother met the boyfriend in question and told me that he is flaite. Friday night, it happened again, and for some reason it finally hit a nerve and I have had enough. Watch out, because I am all fired up now.

We were at a disco called Bronco, on the edge of town, at the invitation of my cousin Nacho, who was hosting some sort of fund-raising event there. I rolled out with a couple of our "flaites," my host brother, and the other four gringos, and was delighted to find upon our arrival that this boy I have been trying to sink my claws into on and off for two months was in attendance. I chatted with him for awhile, then we went our separate ways until I ran into him again in the beverage line. The problem with this particular boy is that he is by far the most attractive Chilean I have met in the last five months, but for the life of me I cannot understand what he is saying. I blame in part the loud music of the places I always see him at, but I will be damned if he doesn't talk so fast that all his words bleed together and resemble nothing of the Spanish I have managed to pick up here. We are a pretty comical pair, because he cannot ever understand my American accented Spanish either, so I am pretty sure our conversations are him saying something, and me responding to what I think he said, and we are probably never on the same topic or having any sort of exchange. I am always telling him to slow down, and then he repeats exactly what he said at the same speed; it is infuriating! Then I say something, and he stares at me blankly. After gathering that he was going snowboarding this weekend, the conversation moved on and he said something to me that I couldn't recognize. I told him I didn't understand, so he repeated it, and I still didn't get it, so I just grinned at him for an awkward minute and then changed the subject. We parted ways again, and I turned around to find my friend, one of the flaites, standing behind me. This particular flaite speaks English well, and he informed me with dead eyes and voice that my love interest had just asked me why all my friends are losers. I was so ashamed, first, that he would ask me something like that, second, that I didn't understand enough of what he said to counter him, third, that my friend had heard and obviously had his feelings hurt, and fourth, that after such a comment I was still attracted to such a creature.

This comment pissed me off on so many levels. To begin with, skipping over all the obvious injustices and highlighting how it affects me, this moment reinforced for me how difficult it is to make friends in Chile. The society operates on social rules that none of us clearly understand. People are curious about us but in general not really interested in getting to know us on a personal level; we are more collected as an oddity than befriended. We don't have a lot of options when it comes to friendship. And to be honest, the flaites are the only ones that seem interested in moving past the one-night hookup, or not even going there in the first place, and just hanging out, or dancing, or having asados or coming to game nights. Whatever their motivations are, I can't know, but it feels much more genuine than it does with the non-flaites. They make a concerted effort, and we have inside jokes, and ultimately, we have fun together. Meanwhile, these boys that seem to think they are above the flaites are the ones that don't call us back, or hook up with us while they have girlfriends, or steal money from us, or want us to walk all the way across town to their houses because they don't want to pay for a collectivo to the centro--which is way different than not being able to. Why is it always that the people who actually have money are the cheapest, while those who don't are sometimes more generous?

So yes, as I said, this whole confict is really about money. Which is a pretty obvious conclusion, but ashamedly one that I hadn't really come to because I hadn't really closely thought about it. I demanded answers from Felipe this evening as to why the hottest boy ever would say something like that about people that are obviously my friends. Felipe kept evading my questions, and I knew I was making him uncomfortable, probably because I was exposing his snobbery--after his initial comment about my friend's boyfriend, the two have become pretty good pals. Finally, he told me the way they can all tell who is flaite is by sight--how they dress--and by speech--how much slang they use and swearing they do. This is similar in the U.S.--think about your reactions to girls scandalously and cheaply dressed, baggy jeans and wife-beater tank tops, or a white boy that mimicks ebonics, for example. However, I feel like in the U.S., people of good upbringing at least know it is rude and politically incorrect to stereotype, and thus try to hide their reacitons and comments. Not so here. It's all out there--at least if you are a gringa trying to meet new people.

So then I get upset about the injustice of it all, about how my friends who have no control over who they are born to and their economic situation are socially punished because their parents aren't educated enough to demand that they speak properly and cannot afford to buy them expensive clothes. And about how my attractive Chilean acquaintances will never know how hard our "flaites" actually work, that some of them go to school and have jobs and will one day live better economically than their families do now. I feel like in the United States we have similar reactions and judgements of poor folk, but everyone loves a good "pulled yourself up by your bootstraps" story, and I feel in general hard work is more respected and appreciated in the U.S. in the climb from poverty. From what I see, my middle class Chilean "friends" have never had jobs and don't generally enter the workforce until after graduation. They drink and party and snowboard and shop. And afterward, they never seem to have enough money on their phones to call me back.

The worst part, as my friend pointed out tonight, is that the social strata pervades how the "flaites" see themselves. My friend's boyfriend is always saying that she deserves better, she deserves someone who can buy her things, or that they should be able to afford taxis so she doesn't have to walk. I read it on my friend's face when he overheard the comment at Bronco. It kills me because I love these guys, and they don't deserve the pressure and judgement of poverty! No one does, for that matter, but to actually see it pain your friend is unbearable. One night in a downpour, we were all at a bar, four Americans and five "flaites," and we decided to go to our favorite trashy club to dance. We passed several awkward minutes cowering under the eaves outside the club, staring at each other. They didn't want to take a cab, because if they did they wouldn't be able to afford drinks. But they couldn't say it out loud. So it took those of us that don't have to worry about those kinds of decisions five full minutes to figure out the situation, and suggest that we wanted to walk, and convince them that we actually like walking in the cold rain, because it reminds us of home. And them not believing us anyway, but appreciating the effort.

What is equally interesting is when our "flaite" friends warn us about other flaites we encounter out and about. It's like that part in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when the younger poor kids get bullied and insulted because they are poor, and then grow up and in turn become the bullies, making the same economically-based taunts that were directed at them. It's also interesting to me how kids learn to recognize class distinctions, even before they can really name them. I remember hating this girl in fifth and sixth grade. She really annoyed me for a number of reasons, but mostly I picked on her because she didn't have clean, nice clothes, she was always messy and kind of smelled, and seemed really needy of attention. I think about her all the time now, as I realized after I grew up that she was just poorer than the rest of us.

Another of the gringos reacts to this injustice in a different way, which seems rather inappropriate and yet kind of true. He said something to the effect of he doesn't really understand the attitude the middle class kids take with us or why they even mention "flaites" to us, because since we are Americans, the whole country is "flaite" to us--which I fully acknowledge is a misleading, simplistic, untrue and potentially harmful statement. However, I know what he was trying to get at. What he meant was that economically, all five of us volunteers here are better off than the middle class kids who complain to us when we hang out with poor people. Obviously, this is not true in every case, and it feeds into the stereotypes that I try to avoid. But he does have a point.

I get really pissed at the power money has over our lives and over the shape of our destinies. It always fascinates me how money is essentially an idea rather than something real. I will probably be exposing my ignorance of economics here (sad after several economics classes in college--oopsey!), but it seems to me that since we went off the gold standard, money has value because we say it does. And therefore, we are allowing something that has no intrinsic worth, and is only good and valuable because we say it is, control so many aspects of our life. We let it hurt people's feelings and we let it control standards of living, so that some of us have to struggle and others enjoy haute couture and expensive holidays and mansion homes. And it doesn't even mean anything! What seems even more ridiculous is that there are jobs out there where people trade curriencies back and forth between countries, and somehow fortunes are created by this! How does this happen? And how do these traders live with their meaningless contributions to society? (The answer: quite comfortably, on private yachts.)

I think I am extra sensitive about poverty-based prejudice because, although I can say I had a comfortable existence growing up and enjoy more than my share of prosperity, there were uncomfortable moments in my life because of money. When my parents got divorced as I entered junior high, and one household was split into two, and thus two budgets had to be supported by single parents, things were pretty tight. I am so obsessed with fashion now because in 7th grade I only had one pair of pants, and some of the other kids at school used to make nasty remarks to me about it. I remember always being nervous and feeling guilty about asking my parents to buy me school supplies, and I would mentally prepare for the discussion, like what I needed it for, why it was necessary, where we could find the cheapest one, how I would make a return on the investment, how I would pass it on to my brother when he entered Mr. Slevett's class in four years--even if it was just a set of pens or a calculator! That sort of stress is created by us, by placing value on coins and paper--we create the value, and then as an extension we create the stress! It sounds pretty rediculous to me, but when the whole world buys into the system, how do you make it stop?

I will start my resistance by refusing to use the word "flaite." Now, I will only use the word "friend."