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No this isn’t a Latino version of the sitcom “My Friend Irma” with Hollywood’s favorite dumb blond of the forties Marie Wilson. Yrma was an eighteen year old Chilean girl I befriended on my last summer (actually winter south of the equator) vacation there when I was also eighteen in 1958. I was visiting my parents at one of the copper mines in the Atacama desert of Chile. However, Yrma’s story is really about the average Latina women of the wealthy upper middle class background half a century ago. Although much has changed since then, a lot hasn’t.
You see other than ethnicity, age, and a common language, Yrma and I had nothing in common. Yet, it was my life that was unusual, not hers. For one thing Yrma was a married woman with two children. Her husband a geologist was ten years older than her. He had courted her under the watchful eyes of her family and he married her at the age of sixteen. Her education had stopped then and soon motherhood would seal her fate. I, on the other hand, was a high school graduate entering college in the fall with no thoughts of marriage and family until far in the future.
However, Yrma was worried that I was not concerned about marriage because in her culture, you would be considered an old maid if you weren’t married or at least engaged by the time you were twenty. So she was constantly trying to play matchmaker with an endless parade of her husband’s bachelor friends who were invited to tea whenever I was. But other than this minor annoyance, Yrma was a lot of fun to pal around with.
She, who was barely out of childhood herself, still acted a lot like a teen aged girl and her privileged station in life allowed her the servants and family support to indulge in her whims. She treated her children more like toys to be played with when it suited her, that she could hand back to various Aymara Indian nineras or nannies, or any number of visiting aunts or grandmothers to take care of them when she tired of them.
Her husband was also like a father figure to her, who told her when and what she would do, and who scolded her when she did bad things, like a loving father would. And Yrma did bad things like all the trophy child wives of privilege did and were almost expected to do while other female relatives turned a blind eye to what was going on. You see in Latin American countries, cuckolding your husband was a national sport.
One of the bad things Yrma did was figure out a way to get money from her husband when he wouldn’t give it to her. Since we did all our shopping in the mining camp in the company store, a tally was kept of purchases until the end of the month when a bill was sent. Irma bought all kinds of stuff at the company store that she stashed in a locked closet unknown to her husband. When she could con a ride with our mutual friend Harry, an American kid with access to his mothers Ranchero, we would pile the stuff into the truck and ride into the neighboring Indian villages with the loot to sell while her husband was at work.
After an afternoon of haggling with the locals Yrma would unload the goods for whatever the market would bear in exchange for the money that she would use to head for a small excursion to one of the coastal cities to buy what she wanted. She never worried about getting the same price for the goods as her husband paid for them. She never saw the bill and he paid for it sometimes wondering why it was so big. On those occasions he would ask her to curtail her household expenditures and she would agree but in a few months she was back to filling up the closet again.
Tired of relying on Harry for a ride and me for a chaperon, because it was considered slutty behavior for a married woman to ride around in a car with another man unless accompanied by another woman, Yrma decided that she needed a car of her own, but her husband refused to teach her to drive. I was going through the same problem with my father. I need to learn to drive and he didn’t want me to until I was back in the states.
So Yrma hatched a plan to learn to drive and I went along with something that I wouldn’t have dared on my own. Harry agreed to teach us, but said he wasn’t comfortable using his mother’s car so began our further descent into crime, stealing my father’s truck, while he was at work and on days that my mother was out playing bridge somewhere. We actually learned enough basics in driving a stick shift before we were caught. I was grounded and Yrma was chastised and humiliated thoroughly by her husband and an army of relatives. Harry got his driving privileges revoked for the rest of vacation.
By the end of summer, Yrma and I were back to being pals. All was forgotten. Before I left to return to the States, she took
me to a hidden location out of sight of her house to show me her new truck, actually a beat up 1941 Ford. She told me she had taken an excursion to Arica a free port north of there. She had loaded up with the best stuff from the USA and elsewhere in the world, stuff that she could sell to the Americans right there in camp for a profit even after paying bribes to the border guards to let her through with the merchandise. Her husband knew nothing of the truck, or that the visits to her extended family were really visits to the free port or to ships docking in the nearby ports loaded with goods to be purchased from crew like liquor and cigarettes.
Yrma had become a bootlegger. In a country that manufactured practically nothing at that time and that had some of the highest tariffs in the world for imported goods, a bootlegger was an honorable profession who supplied the demand for goods of the populace. I never saw Yrma again and lost touch with her. But to me she was the quintessential of oppressed Latina womanhood who had figured out a way to even the score in a patriarchal society. My glass is tipped to all the women who, if they can’t shake off the bonds, figure out a way to make those bonds work for them.
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