SUÉLTALA PERRO DE MIERDA, ALEMÁN DE MIERDA, NAZI DE MIERDA, Quiltras's foreword by Gabriela Wiener

Cómo no me va a caer bien, si de los escritores chilenos sólo me gustan los quiltros, los sin raza, como esos perros desclasados, degenerados, sin poder, sin pedigrí, que no saben de dónde vienen ni a dónde van. Lo único que sabemos es que descienden de criaturas salvajes y callejeras: Violeta, Bolaño antes de ser Bolaño, Lemebel. Y Arelis. Ella es como una aparición marciana en medio de la burguesía literaria chilena, tan cuica, pituca, cheta, pija, tan blanca, macha y nerudiana, tan donosiana, es decir, tan cretina. Ella, en cambio, llegó envuelta en el pelaje de las nuestras: «toda mujer tiene un recuerdo asqueroso», escribió un día Arelis y es exactamente así.

Con un oído prodigioso para decir, para captar los ritmos nativos, naturales, y las tensiones sutiles de lo que nos rodea, ella hace escribir por primera vez a quienes nunca habían escrito, de hecho, a las que ni siquiera habían hablado. La voz no es algo que alguien te da o te devuelve, la voz un día brota y grita, y por fin el resto escucha. Entonces se entona, se eleva, se proyecta y alcanza y contagia a las demás, como las de ese puñado de chicas que hablan en Quiltras, sólo mujeres de la clase media baja y bajísima, cuando el internet iba lento, los buses eran viejos como los televisores y en los botellones se bebía ron con naranja en vasos de plástico.

La experiencia de crecer para ellas será mirar por primera vez a la cara el fondo y retorcer el silencio hasta que salga un ruido, emanciparse de eso sin nombre que, pronto sabrán, las atraviesa como mujeres, como personas, y que es ya memoria colectiva. Aprenderán, entonces, «por qué vivíamos tan diferente si éramos de la misma familia», como dice una de las primas de su primer cuento.

Las chicas de Quiltras tendrán que soportar que las encajonen en periferias, resentimiento social y rollos generacionales, referentes pop femeninos noventeros e imaginismo urbano marginal mediante. Pero su rebelión real habrá sido poner en marcha esta lengua de bestia, esa cadencia rota e irrecuperable del argot cotidiano del barrio empobrecido, que nombra y renombra, desde una falsa nostalgia, para dejar bien nítida la brecha de nuestros desencuentros. Son el tipo de cosas que sólo se aprenden en los bordes: saber cortar con filo las palabras cuando se ponen inútiles. O lo que hace Arelis con la realidad, dejar que esta la acompañe como una perra en el camino de regreso a casa hasta el paradero 20, como si fueran dos obreras amigas proletarias.

Antes de que este libro llegara a España, miles de jóvenes de los barrios populares chilenos se sintieron identificadas con esta emergente subjetividad, con las historias de extrarradio de chicas mestizas, precarias, urbanas, indígenas, bisexuales, de las que Arelis es su cronista extraoficial. Allí se vieron por primera vez, por fin estaban sus deseos y tormentos, todo eso que no recogió la literatura intramuros del masculino universal, anclado entre Las Condes y Providencia. Tampoco la del realismo sucio urbano de chicos malditos, donde ellas eran las novias, perritas, culitos, las musas flacas y perversas de sus delirios bukowskianos.

Es curioso cómo Quiltras cubre una época en que las chicas no están nada politizadas y, sin embargo, sabemos perfectamente mientras las seguimos en sus peripecias que ellas serán las próximas feministas, que están a punto de romper, de explotar, de despertar: la chica que revienta el globo del amor idealizado porque su novio le manda fotos de su pene a la vez que le promete un futuro a ella y a sus hijos; la joven asistenta social recién graduada que visita por primera vez un colegio público y encuentra en sus instalaciones cochambrosas la representación fidedigna de la educación de su país; las primas que se tocan las tetas pero a las que separan los conflictos y abismos sociales del interior de sus propias familias; la joven que vuelve de una fiesta y comprende que si ama la noche debe sortear los mismos peligros que enfrenta cualquier perra callejera, alejándose lo más posible del pastor alemán. 

Es raro que ahora que quiero hablar de Arelis, de las cholas, de todas las sangres, de nuestros cuerpos mezclados e identidades cruzadas, me venga de repente la palabra pureza a la mente. Hablar de su sencillez expresiva, de la limpia intimidad de sus descripciones para la comprensión de los mundos. La escritora no busca los símbolos ni las ideas, va detrás de las propias cosas, que son lo que son; la realidad objetiva y ruinosa despierta la vida de la imaginación. Ya saben lo que se dice de la inteligencia de los perros chuscos, esa extraña facilidad para entrar en nosotros, tan pura, simplemente sin pretenderlo. Lo impuro en Arelis es lo puro. La historia del miedo, de lo invisible, de las que no contaban y ahora cuentan, hacen de este libro el retrato más vivo de nuestra intensidad y desmesura, y deja, sin proponérselo, el germen para la siguiente revolución. 

Línea de tiempo contratos editoriales

Quiltras
Planeta (Chile): 23 de septiembre de 2025 / vence en 2030
Rey Naranjo (Colombia): 18 de noviembre de 2021 / vence en 2026
Bazar do Tempo (Brasil): febrero de 2023 / vence en 2028
Tránsito (España): 4 de diciembre de 2018 / renovado hasta 2028
Paraíso Pérdido (México): diciembre de 2019 / renovado hasta 12 de dic. 2027
Quidam (Francia): 17 de sept 2019 / vence en 2027
Forma (Uruguay): 22 de julio de 2025 / 2030
Audible: 2022 / 2029

QET
Audible: 2020 / 2028
Conejo: Feminismo polifónico / 2032

Telepunga
Chile: mayo 2025 / 2030
España: septiembre 2025 / 2030

About Quiltras

Quiltras is a collection of incisive, bitter and amusing stories at the same time. A brief powerful book that brings together critical stories of subversive significance that are narrated in first person by women that interact –sometimes with mongrel dogs, also used as a metaphor– in peripheral areas of Santiago in Chile, places where opportunities seem twice difficult. How is love and friendship in this narrative space? Arelis´ answers reflects a world of inequality, abuse and machismo in which Quiltras can be read as a manifesto –that could be written from any dusty neighborhood of the world– of common women that have a good reason to rise their voices.

Quiltras also tackles issues like sexuality among women, care and love for animals, travels to Chilean villages, virtual love, adolescence and education in Chile from author´s critical and sharp point of view.

https://1804books.com/products/quiltras
 

Quiltras' worldwide synonyms / Sinónimos de "quiltrx" alrededor del mundo

Quiltra, quiltro: Chile
Vira lata: Brasil
Embwa: Uganda
Cane randagio / Cani randagi: Italy
Stray dog: USA
Chusco or Chusca: Perú
Chandas: Colombia

BOOK LAUNCH: Quiltras (reading and discussion of Arelis Uribe's Latin American fiction debut)

"Quiltro" is the Chilean slang word to name stray, mixed-breed dogs. Arelis Uribe uses the expression as a metaphor to shape tender female characters that wander in lower-class landscapes, and have nothing to lose but their rebelliousness.

Uribe's debut in fiction has been highly praised in every country is has landed in, including Mexico, Spain, and France. It was listed "one of the best Latin American books of the year" by The New York Times, and has been translated into English by Allison Braden.

Thus, the cultural and community incubator The People's Forum is pleased to host a bilingual reading and discussion of "Quiltras". Uribe will be seconded by New York City writer and educator JP Infante, and Mexican writer and translator Mayte López.

Copio esta info acá para no olvidarla, y porque es la primera vez que escribo tres párrafos en inglés sin que me hagan ninguna correción gramatical *proud*

City Unknown, shortstory by Arelis Uribe, translated into English by Allison Braden

When I was little, my cousin and I used to kiss each other. We dressed up our Barbies, built houses in the dirt, and played hand games. I stayed at her house every other weekend. We slept in her bed. Sometimes we’d take off our pajama tops and play around, touching our nipples to each other. At the time, they were barely two pink stains on a flat torso. My cousin and I had been together since forever: Our moms got pregnant two months apart. They breastfed us together and changed our diapers together. We got chicken pox together. It almost went without saying that when we grew up, we would live together and play house with dolls, but in real life. I thought it would be me and her, always. But adults mess things up.

There were seven siblings in my mom’s family. Three men and four women. The men lived like the brothers they were. They had studied engineering at the same university, liked the same soccer team, and got together to talk about wine and watches. The four women were a disaster. One left to work in Puerto Montt. We were lucky to see her at Christmas. Another followed a boyfriend and had a bunch of kids and lives in Australia now. She barely existed. The two that stayed—my mom and my cousin’s mom, my Aunt Nena—married brutish men. My dad was an animal and so was my cousin’s dad. Like those people who get drunk on New Year’s and make everyone else cry. I never saw the seven siblings reunited. Sometimes we’d run into each other at funerals or when our grandparents celebrated an anniversary. Once, we went to one of our uncles’ plots of land, and there were peacocks in the yard. Pandora, an enormous mutt who killed our neighbors’ cats, barely fit in our house. I never understood why we lived so differently if we were from the same family.

My mom and my Aunt Nena were similar, which is why they were friends. People tend to group themselves by type, in a voluntary segregation, like blood donations or the recycling. Until one day, I don’t remember why, they got mad at each other. Maybe because my mom asked Aunt Nena for money and never paid it back. Maybe because my aunt came to lunch and criticized the food. I don’t know, but they got mad at each other, and what always happens in a family like mine happened: instead of resolving their problems, they quit speaking. I suppose it was a truce, an act of faith. They trusted that silence would dissolve the problems and that by not naming them, they would cease to exist.

For my cousin and I, the distance happened by extension. The last important thing we shared was that our periods came around the same time. She had taken out a book from I-don’t-know-where that explained everything. It had drawings of a man and a woman without clothes on. We read it. That was the first time we touched like that. We checked to see if we had hair. We were alone in her house. That afternoon, my mom came to get me. She yelled at my Aunt Nena about something I didn’t understand, and we never went back.

At first, I kept going to my cousin’s birthdays. I’d go by myself on the bus because my mom didn’t even want to go near Aunt Nena’s house. I’d call her on the phone too, or we’d send each other letters in the mail. The distance grew little by little. Important things happened to me and I didn’t tell her about them. I had a boyfriend, I got involved with his friend, I kept repeating classes, they hospitalized my little brother, I went to night school for senior year. Maybe she found out anyway, because those kinds of screw-ups get around in families. I heard that she won a literary contest, that her parents separated, that she had a cast on one leg, that she left the scouts because a leader touched her. I also found out when she got into the University of Chile to study journalism. She was the oldest cousin and the news spread fast. My uncles were proud that Nena’s daughter had gotten into their university. My grandfather boasted that there would finally be a true intellectual in the family. He imagined her as a reporter at the Supreme Court or something.

I graduated after senior year and started university prep classes. I worked at a candy shop to pay for it. People cheered me on, as if I’d lost an arm and, with hard work, could recover. As if my disability was being too stupid. I didn’t tell anyone and paid my high school math and language teachers to tutor me. The only thing I wanted was to get into the University of Chile, I didn’t care which major. I wanted to prove I could do it. And I did: I got in to study philosophy. At twenty, I was the oldest student. I had to read a ton. I didn’t like it, but I resolved not to drop classes and to finish however I could.

I knew my cousin and I were on the same campus. Sometimes I wanted to run into her. Other times, I was terrified just thinking about it. One Friday, we were drinking out in the grass, and I saw her pass by. She was gorgeous. Shiny black hair down to her waist; her smooth, dark face; a hippie outfit that showed her midriff. I talked to her, and we hugged each other tight. Our chests touched like when we were kids. She invited me to hang out with her group, and I followed her. We smoked weed and told people about the dumb stuff we did when we were ten: The time we choreographed a whole Michael Jackson routine for her dad’s birthday. The year we sold copies of Sailor Moon books in catechism. The summer we founded an ecology club that cut down live trees to preserve their branches for future generations. I watched her laugh, her teeth, the knowing look in her eyes, like when you go to a club and look at a guy who looks back at you and you know and he knows that you’re looking at each other and why.

After that night, it was as if we were chasing each other. I ran into her a lot. In the humanities library, in the dining hall, on the quad. It was always the same. We talked about when we were kids and a little about the university. We didn’t talk about our moms or our soccer fan uncles or our grandfather’s illness at the time. As if our family was only what happened until the day Aunt Nena yelled at my mom, a breakup that marked a before and an after, as irreversible as the birth of Christ or the invention of writing.

The second semester, we happened to take the same seminar. It was eight classes and I saw her in the first one. She was sitting with a tall, blonde guy who had his arm around her. I sat next to her, because I didn’t know anyone else and to mark my territory, like a dog. Like Pandora, who growled at the people who passed my house. The seminar was about Latin America. Each week an expert on a different country would come and talk. The best part was that after the last class we were going to Bolivia. The coordinating professor wanted the experience to be practical. We were going to confirm that the Bolivians were real people and not details from a book or a deranged mass that allied with Peru in 1800 to force its most unpleasant neighbor into submission.

From the workshop, I concluded that if South America was a neighborhood, Chile would be the upstart neighbor that buys a big car and a tiny dog and always uses a checkbook and credit card. My cousin compared it to the TV show El Chavo and said that Chile was the Quico of the Southern Cone. I didn’t say it, but I thought about our family and felt like my uncles were Chile and her mom and my mom were the loser countries, or a mix between Doña Florinda and Don Ramón: miserable housewives, never able to pay the rent.

I talked with my cousin about the trip to Bolivia. She proposed that we go a week early and stay with a friend she’d met at a poetry reading. We got some money from our grandparents, the university gave us a small travel allowance, and we contributed all our savings. My cousin had been to Peru, but for me, it was the first time outside of Chile. We traveled by bus and got to La Paz at dawn. I pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. I noticed the advertising most. There were posters selling cell phones with company names I’d never seen. Obviously every country has businesses with different names—you even see it in the commercials on cable TV, Omo detergent is called Ala in Argentina—but confirming it affected me. I noticed how I felt like a strange body, discovering that my codes weren’t valid there, even though we shared the same language and the same corner of the continent.

We arrived at the Bolivian friend’s house. It was an old building, next to the United States embassy. The apartment was on the fourth floor and had a parquet floor, three big bedrooms, and some sort of yard. There was an enormous bookcase full of titles by authors I didn’t know. The furniture looked like it was from the last century, like the kind they sell at Persa Biobío: fancy, flashy, inherited. The friend showed us to our room and we threw our sleeping bags on the floor. I was exhausted. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow I’d made, stuffed with a jacket and a pair of pants.

The next day we woke up late. Jessica—that was the friend’s name—had already gone to work. We went out to explore. The neighborhood was very green, with enormous mansions. Kind of like Ñuñoa, around the Juan Gómez Millas campus. I never imagined that there would be places like this in Bolivia. We walked toward downtown and that’s when we started seeing the other houses, the ones we would have lived in if we were born Bolivian. They looked like Brazilian favelas: a bunch of little boxes made of bare bricks, piled one on top of the other, covering the mountain. I thought it was just like Valparaíso, but there the misery goes unnoticed behind colorful paint.

We walked to a cyber café. We called our moms but didn’t say we were together. After checking our email, we read the newspaper a little. Later, my cousin called our grandfather, told him we were doing well, and reminded him to please not say anything. My grandfather—so loving when he was alive—said yes, he was on our side. Daughters, he said, had no reason to interfere in the affairs of granddaughters.

We kept exploring and went to the market. We ate some kind of stew, which cost about 500 Chilean pesos. Not even at university had we eaten food so cheap. We walked off our lunch. On the street we saw boys with hoods over their faces who shined shoes. We saw indigenous women carrying their children on their shoulders, like mother kangaroos, who evolved to carry and protect their young longer. We saw bare feet, police chatting and relaxing, and girls with slanted eyes and the reddest, most weather-beaten cheeks in this impossible place.

That night, Jessica made us coca tea and we sat on her terrace to smoke. I knew she worked as a language teacher in a private Montessori school. I knew what the Montessori method was. I knew that Jessica was one of those Jessicas who had English last names. I knew that in her family, she had a senator uncle and a cousin who had been Miss Bolivia.

Jessica invited us to her boyfriend’s house. We arrived at some kind of party full of white people in an apartment as big as Jessica’s. The people there studied at or used to study at the Catholic University of Bolivia. There was wine and slices of raw squash smeared in sour cream. I tried Paceña and a sweet fruit stuffed with cheese. Things I’d never even eaten at my uncle’s house. Some guy heard that we were Chilean and said we had to hear this story. He said: This happened to two Chilean friends in some kind of whorehouse, one of the ones in the center of Santiago, with the windows painted black. They ordered two cheap drinks. One looked at tits, and the other, asses. Then it was “happy hour”—he made air quotes—and this asshole Chilean, who was obsessed with enormous tits, buried his nose in the server’s cleavage. When he pulled away, he had a mouth full of cracker crumbs.

We laughed. It was a filthy anecdote and repulsive stories are always funny.

Everyone got excited and started telling vulgar stories. I didn’t have any, but my cousin did. She said: One time I went to Machu Picchu with the scouts. A lot of dirty things happened on that trip—she ended the sentence with a long, worried sigh, then continued—I’ll tell you what happened on the bus. From Cuzco to the ruins you have to go up the mountains. It’s a dirt road, full of sharp curves, along a cliff. We paid for the cheapest transportation, some trucks that smelled like the projects, with the seats losing their stuffing. The service came to pick you up at 6:30 on the morning of the camping trip. The night before, the leaders had gone out to eat and, even though it was off limits, to drink. The leader in charge of my group was Carlos, too fat and too much of a pisco lover to be a scout. We got in the van and since it was so early, I fell asleep immediately. I took my shoes off so my feet wouldn’t swell up. I left them on the floor, next to the backpack with my lunch, and I curled up on the seat. I had a dream about the rabid breath of a puma chasing me on Huayna Picchu. He roared so loudly that I woke up. I smelled a bitter odor, like something decomposing. An orange liquid ran under my feet, and it had reached my shoes and backpack. I grabbed my shoes. The laces dripped. I looked back and discovered the roaring was real. It wasn’t the puma, but the leader Carlos. He had drunk so much the night before that when the truck began to zigzag up the hills, his body regurgitated everything. It was disgusting, the scout leader Carlos was disgusting.

When my cousin finished her story, the laughs of the audience were awkward and concerned more than happy. My cousin’s face darkened, too. It made me want to hug her, want to have been with her on that trip. I looked at her clavicle and wanted to smell it. To touch her abdomen with the tip of my nose. I looked at her with eyes like a player in the club, and she winked in return. I wished that house where we were going to live existed. I wanted to fall asleep with our bodies together that night. I wanted her to tell me her secrets, to feel her sweet breath on my face.

By that time of night, Jessica was super drunk. She asked all of us if we wanted to hear something really nasty? She didn’t wait for us to respond (I wanted to say no) and started talking. Her grandfather had been an important Bolivian military man, decorated with medals, his name memorialized in history books. His proudest accomplishment, said Jessica, is that he’s the one who gave the order to kill Che. I can’t remember if she said “El Che” or “Ernesto Che Guevara” or “El Comandante Che Guevara,” but I do remember the awful silence that came after. I never found out if it was the first time she’d told her friends or not. After a few seconds, which were as intense as when you hear a song for the first time, Jessica broke the silence and said: But the really disgusting thing is that we never talk about it in my family.

That sentence killed me. The most disgusting thing is that in my family we never talk about it. I took in the words and looked at my cousin. We were both thinking the same thing, about everything vicious and rotten in silenced family secrets.

After Jessica’s story, the get-together started deflating and people began to say goodbye. Jessica said she wanted to stay at her boyfriend’s place and gave us the keys to her apartment. We walked in the dawn, alone and holding hands, through the streets of a city unknown. Dizzy but strangely happy, we laughed at every stupid thing that crossed our path. A poster for Chinese food with a printed photo of the owner, a pay phone that was too small, the top of a tree that looked like my dad’s head.

We got to the apartment and lay together in the sleeping bags on the floor. My cousin snuggled up next to me and began to shake. Gently at first, more violent later. I touched her face, and it was wet with tears. “He came into my tent, and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to,” she started, repeating those words endlessly, like the soft tap of a hammer. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to.” I brought my nose to her mouth and smelled her breath, as sweet as when we were ten. “I didn’t want to either,” I told her. I took her face in my hands, dried her cheeks, and gave her a kiss, deep and slow. “Me either,” I said again, before hugging her and beginning to cry.


This story first appeared in Arelis Uribe’s collection Quiltras, published in Chile in 2016 by Los Libros de la Mujer Rota and in Spain in 2019 under the Editorial Tránsito imprint.

Caracteres, palabras, libros

Las Heridas tiene 65 páginas de word, 18.287 palabras, 101.055 caracteres.
Quiltras CL tiene 52 páginas de word, 17.815 palabras, 96.845 caracteres.
Quiltras SP (sin Gaby) tiene 23.540 palabras y 127.644 caracteres.
Telepunga: 21.384 palabras, 117.710 caracteres con espacios.

City Unknown, by Arelis Uribe, translated by Allison Braden

 When I was little, my cousin and I used to kiss each other. We dressed up our Barbies, built houses in the dirt, and played hand games. I stayed at her house every other weekend. We slept in her bed. Sometimes we’d take off our pajama tops and play around, touching our nipples to each other. At the time, they were barely two pink stains on a flat torso. My cousin and I had been together since forever: Our moms got pregnant two months apart. They breastfed us together and changed our diapers together. We got chicken pox together. It almost went without saying that when we grew up, we would live together and play house with dolls, but in real life. I thought it would be me and her, always. But adults mess things up.

There were seven siblings in my mom’s family. Three men and four women. The men lived like the brothers they were. They had studied engineering at the same university, liked the same soccer team, and got together to talk about wine and watches. The four women were a disaster. One left to work in Puerto Montt. We were lucky to see her at Christmas. Another followed a boyfriend and had a bunch of kids and lives in Australia now. She barely existed. The two that stayed—my mom and my cousin’s mom, my Aunt Nena—married brutish men. My dad was an animal and so was my cousin’s dad. Like those people who get drunk on New Year’s and make everyone else cry. I never saw the seven siblings reunited. Sometimes we’d run into each other at funerals or when our grandparents celebrated an anniversary. Once, we went to one of our uncles’ plots of land, and there were peacocks in the yard. Pandora, an enormous mutt who killed our neighbors’ cats, barely fit in our house. I never understood why we lived so differently if we were from the same family.

My mom and my Aunt Nena were similar, which is why they were friends. People tend to group themselves by type, in a voluntary segregation, like blood donations or the recycling. Until one day, I don’t remember why, they got mad at each other. Maybe because my mom asked Aunt Nena for money and never paid it back. Maybe because my aunt came to lunch and criticized the food. I don’t know, but they got mad at each other, and what always happens in a family like mine happened: instead of resolving their problems, they quit speaking. I suppose it was a truce, an act of faith. They trusted that silence would dissolve the problems and that by not naming them, they would cease to exist.

For my cousin and I, the distance happened by extension. The last important thing we shared was that our periods came around the same time. She had taken out a book from I-don’t-know-where that explained everything. It had drawings of a man and a woman without clothes on. We read it. That was the first time we touched like that. We checked to see if we had hair. We were alone in her house. That afternoon, my mom came to get me. She yelled at my Aunt Nena about something I didn’t understand, and we never went back.

At first, I kept going to my cousin’s birthdays. I’d go by myself on the bus because my mom didn’t even want to go near Aunt Nena’s house. I’d call her on the phone too, or we’d send each other letters in the mail. The distance grew little by little. Important things happened to me and I didn’t tell her about them. I had a boyfriend, I got involved with his friend, I kept repeating classes, they hospitalized my little brother, I went to night school for senior year. Maybe she found out anyway, because those kinds of screw-ups get around in families. I heard that she won a literary contest, that her parents separated, that she had a cast on one leg, that she left the scouts because a leader touched her. I also found out when she got into the University of Chile to study journalism. She was the oldest cousin and the news spread fast. My uncles were proud that Nena’s daughter had gotten into their university. My grandfather boasted that there would finally be a true intellectual in the family. He imagined her as a reporter at the Supreme Court or something.

I graduated after senior year and started university prep classes. I worked at a candy shop to pay for it. People cheered me on, as if I’d lost an arm and, with hard work, could recover. As if my disability was being too stupid. I didn’t tell anyone and paid my high school math and language teachers to tutor me. The only thing I wanted was to get into the University of Chile, I didn’t care which major. I wanted to prove I could do it. And I did: I got in to study philosophy. At twenty, I was the oldest student. I had to read a ton. I didn’t like it, but I resolved not to drop classes and to finish however I could.

I knew my cousin and I were on the same campus. Sometimes I wanted to run into her. Other times, I was terrified just thinking about it. One Friday, we were drinking out in the grass, and I saw her pass by. She was gorgeous. Shiny black hair down to her waist; her smooth, dark face; a hippie outfit that showed her midriff. I talked to her, and we hugged each other tight. Our chests touched like when we were kids. She invited me to hang out with her group, and I followed her. We smoked weed and told people about the dumb stuff we did when we were ten: The time we choreographed a whole Michael Jackson routine for her dad’s birthday. The year we sold copies of Sailor Moon books in catechism. The summer we founded an ecology club that cut down live trees to preserve their branches for future generations. I watched her laugh, her teeth, the knowing look in her eyes, like when you go to a club and look at a guy who looks back at you and you know and he knows that you’re looking at each other and why.

After that night, it was as if we were chasing each other. I ran into her a lot. In the humanities library, in the dining hall, on the quad. It was always the same. We talked about when we were kids and a little about the university. We didn’t talk about our moms or our soccer fan uncles or our grandfather’s illness at the time. As if our family was only what happened until the day Aunt Nena yelled at my mom, a breakup that marked a before and an after, as irreversible as the birth of Christ or the invention of writing.

The second semester, we happened to take the same seminar. It was eight classes and I saw her in the first one. She was sitting with a tall, blonde guy who had his arm around her. I sat next to her, because I didn’t know anyone else and to mark my territory, like a dog. Like Pandora, who growled at the people who passed my house. The seminar was about Latin America. Each week an expert on a different country would come and talk. The best part was that after the last class we were going to Bolivia. The coordinating professor wanted the experience to be practical. We were going to confirm that the Bolivians were real people and not details from a book or a deranged mass that allied with Peru in 1800 to force its most unpleasant neighbor into submission.

From the workshop, I concluded that if South America was a neighborhood, Chile would be the upstart neighbor that buys a big car and a tiny dog and always uses a checkbook and credit card. My cousin compared it to the TV show El Chavo and said that Chile was the Quico of the Southern Cone. I didn’t say it, but I thought about our family and felt like my uncles were Chile and her mom and my mom were the loser countries, or a mix between Doña Florinda and Don Ramón: miserable housewives, never able to pay the rent.

I talked with my cousin about the trip to Bolivia. She proposed that we go a week early and stay with a friend she’d met at a poetry reading. We got some money from our grandparents, the university gave us a small travel allowance, and we contributed all our savings. My cousin had been to Peru, but for me, it was the first time outside of Chile. We traveled by bus and got to La Paz at dawn. I pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. I noticed the advertising most. There were posters selling cell phones with company names I’d never seen. Obviously every country has businesses with different names—you even see it in the commercials on cable TV, Omo detergent is called Ala in Argentina—but confirming it affected me. I noticed how I felt like a strange body, discovering that my codes weren’t valid there, even though we shared the same language and the same corner of the continent.

We arrived at the Bolivian friend’s house. It was an old building, next to the United States embassy. The apartment was on the fourth floor and had a parquet floor, three big bedrooms, and some sort of yard. There was an enormous bookcase full of titles by authors I didn’t know. The furniture looked like it was from the last century, like the kind they sell at Persa Biobío: fancy, flashy, inherited. The friend showed us to our room and we threw our sleeping bags on the floor. I was exhausted. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow I’d made, stuffed with a jacket and a pair of pants.

The next day we woke up late. Jessica—that was the friend’s name—had already gone to work. We went out to explore. The neighborhood was very green, with enormous mansions. Kind of like Ñuñoa, around the Juan Gómez Millas campus. I never imagined that there would be places like this in Bolivia. We walked toward downtown and that’s when we started seeing the other houses, the ones we would have lived in if we were born Bolivian. They looked like Brazilian favelas: a bunch of little boxes made of bare bricks, piled one on top of the other, covering the mountain. I thought it was just like Valparaíso, but there the misery goes unnoticed behind colorful paint.

We walked to a cyber café. We called our moms but didn’t say we were together. After checking our email, we read the newspaper a little. Later, my cousin called our grandfather, told him we were doing well, and reminded him to please not say anything. My grandfather—so loving when he was alive—said yes, he was on our side. Daughters, he said, had no reason to interfere in the affairs of granddaughters.

We kept exploring and went to the market. We ate some kind of stew, which cost about 500 Chilean pesos. Not even at university had we eaten food so cheap. We walked off our lunch. On the street we saw boys with hoods over their faces who shined shoes. We saw indigenous women carrying their children on their shoulders, like mother kangaroos, who evolved to carry and protect their young longer. We saw bare feet, police chatting and relaxing, and girls with slanted eyes and the reddest, most weather-beaten cheeks in this impossible place.

That night, Jessica made us coca tea and we sat on her terrace to smoke. I knew she worked as a language teacher in a private Montessori school. I knew what the Montessori method was. I knew that Jessica was one of those Jessicas who had English last names. I knew that in her family, she had a senator uncle and a cousin who had been Miss Bolivia.

Jessica invited us to her boyfriend’s house. We arrived at some kind of party full of white people in an apartment as big as Jessica’s. The people there studied at or used to study at the Catholic University of Bolivia. There was wine and slices of raw squash smeared in sour cream. I tried Paceña and a sweet fruit stuffed with cheese. Things I’d never even eaten at my uncle’s house. Some guy heard that we were Chilean and said we had to hear this story. He said: This happened to two Chilean friends in some kind of whorehouse, one of the ones in the center of Santiago, with the windows painted black. They ordered two cheap drinks. One looked at tits, and the other, asses. Then it was “happy hour”—he made air quotes—and this asshole Chilean, who was obsessed with enormous tits, buried his nose in the server’s cleavage. When he pulled away, he had a mouth full of cracker crumbs.

We laughed. It was a filthy anecdote and repulsive stories are always funny.

Everyone got excited and started telling vulgar stories. I didn’t have any, but my cousin did. She said: One time I went to Machu Picchu with the scouts. A lot of dirty things happened on that trip—she ended the sentence with a long, worried sigh, then continued—I’ll tell you what happened on the bus. From Cuzco to the ruins you have to go up the mountains. It’s a dirt road, full of sharp curves, along a cliff. We paid for the cheapest transportation, some trucks that smelled like the projects, with the seats losing their stuffing. The service came to pick you up at 6:30 on the morning of the camping trip. The night before, the leaders had gone out to eat and, even though it was off limits, to drink. The leader in charge of my group was Carlos, too fat and too much of a pisco lover to be a scout. We got in the van and since it was so early, I fell asleep immediately. I took my shoes off so my feet wouldn’t swell up. I left them on the floor, next to the backpack with my lunch, and I curled up on the seat. I had a dream about the rabid breath of a puma chasing me on Huayna Picchu. He roared so loudly that I woke up. I smelled a bitter odor, like something decomposing. An orange liquid ran under my feet, and it had reached my shoes and backpack. I grabbed my shoes. The laces dripped. I looked back and discovered the roaring was real. It wasn’t the puma, but the leader Carlos. He had drunk so much the night before that when the truck began to zigzag up the hills, his body regurgitated everything. It was disgusting, the scout leader Carlos was disgusting.

When my cousin finished her story, the laughs of the audience were awkward and concerned more than happy. My cousin’s face darkened, too. It made me want to hug her, want to have been with her on that trip. I looked at her clavicle and wanted to smell it. To touch her abdomen with the tip of my nose. I looked at her with eyes like a player in the club, and she winked in return. I wished that house where we were going to live existed. I wanted to fall asleep with our bodies together that night. I wanted her to tell me her secrets, to feel her sweet breath on my face.

By that time of night, Jessica was super drunk. She asked all of us if we wanted to hear something really nasty? She didn’t wait for us to respond (I wanted to say no) and started talking. Her grandfather had been an important Bolivian military man, decorated with medals, his name memorialized in history books. His proudest accomplishment, said Jessica, is that he’s the one who gave the order to kill Che. I can’t remember if she said “El Che” or “Ernesto Che Guevara” or “El Comandante Che Guevara,” but I do remember the awful silence that came after. I never found out if it was the first time she’d told her friends or not. After a few seconds, which were as intense as when you hear a song for the first time, Jessica broke the silence and said: But the really disgusting thing is that we never talk about it in my family.

That sentence killed me. The most disgusting thing is that in my family we never talk about it. I took in the words and looked at my cousin. We were both thinking the same thing, about everything vicious and rotten in silenced family secrets.

After Jessica’s story, the get-together started deflating and people began to say goodbye. Jessica said she wanted to stay at her boyfriend’s place and gave us the keys to her apartment. We walked in the dawn, alone and holding hands, through the streets of a city unknown. Dizzy but strangely happy, we laughed at every stupid thing that crossed our path. A poster for Chinese food with a printed photo of the owner, a pay phone that was too small, the top of a tree that looked like my dad’s head.

We got to the apartment and lay together in the sleeping bags on the floor. My cousin snuggled up next to me and began to shake. Gently at first, more violent later. I touched her face, and it was wet with tears. “He came into my tent, and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to,” she started, repeating those words endlessly, like the soft tap of a hammer. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to.” I brought my nose to her mouth and smelled her breath, as sweet as when we were ten. “I didn’t want to either,” I told her. I took her face in my hands, dried her cheeks, and gave her a kiss, deep and slow. “Me either,” I said again, before hugging her and beginning to cry.

translated from the Spanish by Allison Braden



This story first appeared in Arelis Uribe’s collection Quiltras, published in Chile in 2016 by Los Libros de la Mujer Rota and in Spain in 2019 under the Editorial Tránsito imprint.


Arelis Uribe is a Chilean journalist and writer. In 2016, she published her fiction debut, Quiltras, which won the Chilean Ministry of Culture’s annual prize for best book of short stories and was named one the best Latin American books of the year by the New York Times. In 2017, she published Que explote todo, an anthology of her opinion columns. She was director of communications for Beatriz Sánchez’s presidential campaign and at the feminist organization OCAC, which promoted a law against sexual street harassment in Chile. In 2019, she self-published the zine Cosas que pienso mientras fumo marihuana and founded Editorial Negra, her pocket-format poetry imprint. Currently, she is composing songs and studying for a master’s in creative writing at New York University.

Allison Braden is a writer and translator based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She serves as editor-at-large for Argentina for Asymptote, editorial assistant for the journal Translation & Interpreting Studies, and contributing editor for Charlotte magazine. Her journalism has appeared in The Daily Beast and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. Her interest in cross-cultural communication has led her all over the world, from Bangladesh, where she was a Fulbright fellow in 2014, to Venezuela, where she participated in The Carter Center’s election observation mission after Hugo Chávez’s death. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote and Massachusetts Review, and she is currently seeking publication for her translation of Arelis Uribe’s short story collection, Quiltras.

Ce que déjà des libraires en disent

— «Formidable. Presque incontournable je dirais. Une pépite. Un diamant brut, si je peux user d’une vieille corde. C’est vif. Ça dit tout en peu de mots.»
Romain, L’instant, Paris

— « Un regard plein d’acuité sur la société chilienne et sur celles et ceux qui la font. Un regard politique et social qui observe et fait parler les voix cachées. Un très beau recueil d’une nouvelle voix hyper talentueuse.»
Fabien Bernier Decitre, Grenoble

— «Uribe se fait le porte-parole des femmes dénigrées, invisibles au sein de leur propre pays. Elle leur redonne une place en huit nouvelles incisives. Vif, nerveux, touchant et engagé !»
Valérie Schopp L'Arbre à mots, Rochefort

— «Portées par une langue vive, sans fioritures, Les Bâtardes donne la voix à ces Chiliennes modestes, indigènes «ghostées», invisibles, ignorées. Arelis Uribe parle pour elles, à la première personne, un “je” concernant, volontaire pour une prise de parole militante et assumée. Une découverte.»
Claire, Le Marque page, Quintin

— «Des jeunes filles des quartiers populaires, métisses, bisexuelles, en proie au harcèlement et aux discriminations, se frottent à l’expérience souvent douloureuse de grandir dans une société chilienne machiste et inégalitaire. Huit nouvelles mordantes qui saisissent toute la tendresse des instants et la brutalité sociale.»
Marianne Loing, Charybde, Paris

Quiltras Book Review, by Lauren Cocking

“I’ll just read one story, then I’ll go to bed,” is what I thought when I plucked Quiltras from my To Read pile on the spookiest night of the year. But this turned out to be the very opposite of a book I could just dip in and out of – within a couple of hours I’d read the whole thing.

Written by Chilean journalist and author Arelis Uribe, Quiltras – comprised of eight short stories averaging about ten pages apiece – was originally published in Chile in 2016 and has just been republished by Paraíso Perdido in Mexico. Uribe has said in other interviews that she “wrote [Quiltras] with a clear aesthetic and political goal: write like I talk, write from my barrios.” [Translation my own.] Her protagonists fulfil those goals and then some.

Each story is a window into the life of working-class Chilean women — whether queer, brown, teenaged or all the above — and the prose is chatty but crisp, fizzy with Chilean slang and loaded with the springy elasticity and rhythm of the spoken, rather than written, word. And the moment her protagonist calls a German Shepherd a “fucking nazi” in ‘Bestias’? Inspired. (If you’re not familiar with Chilean Spanish, I’d recommend googling pololo at the very least before reading Quiltras.)

Quiltras, a feminised play on the Chilean word ‘quiltro’ (meaning street mutt or mongrel), is about solidarity, female friendship, and – to my mind — the undercurrent of disillusionment that accompanies growing up. Take ‘29 de febrero’, the penultimate story in the collection, in which the protagonist is left behind in a world of paddling pools and the diary of Anne Frank while everyone around her has picked up smoking and the habit of kissing on both cheeks. Or ‘rockerito83@yahoo.es’, in which the protagonist tells us about the cyber-boyfriend she met on Napster who turned out to be nothing like she imagined. As Gabriela Wiener writes in the prologue to my edition of Quiltras, referencing the women of Uribe’s narrative world: “ellas serán las próximas feministas.” (“They’ll be the next feminists.”)

Which brings me to class, perhaps the collection’s most important theme, and that epigraph by Chilean band Supernova: “Yo no hablo ingles/ vivo en un barrio que no es burgués.” Uribe’s observations on class regularly had me cackling and cringing in equal measure, such as when the protagonists of ‘Ciudad desconocida’ stay in La Paz with a wealthy girl called Jessica, “like the Jessicas that have an English surname…an uncle who’s a senator and cousin that had been crowned Miss Bolivia”. And in ‘Italia’, which is about a brief but intense relationship between the eponymous Italia and our protagonist, when Uribe hits on the “rules” of adolescent attraction which hinges on “the law of the excess of brown girls and scarcity of blondes”. For what it’s worth, these are the stories which bookend the collection and are, coincidentally, my favourites.

All that to say, Quiltras is remarkably fun to read, despite touching on topics like family in-fighting, teen pregnancy, and pre-Instagram catfishing. I think that’s really a testament to the intimacy of the narration, one that only comes from a writer deeply familiar with the scenes she’s sketching out; you – you – are in dialogue with these women, these quiltras. And Uribe is one of them.

Buy Quiltras: Paraíso Perdido (Mexico) | Los libros de la mujer rota (Chile)
About Arelis Uribe

Arelis Uribe (Santiago de Chile, 1987) is a journalist, writer, and student of creative writing. Quiltras is her first and, to date, only book of fiction.

Other Books by Arelis Uribe: Que explote todo (Los libros de la mujer rota, 2017)

https://leyendolatam.com/quiltras-book-review/