"How are you pretty," I heard, and I wasn't sure at first if I should reply "Pretty fine, thanks," or "Prettier than you." He was moving so fast down the street (perhaps worried I'd give him a kick in in his culo) that really I couldn't have developed any sort of answer, which is the best response always to a piropo!
But where do these men get the idea that it is flattering to have random strangers tell you things like the second piropo I heard (the street brigade was on a roll tonight!), a shouted comment from a quickly moving vehicle: "Missi I love you!" Now perhaps there was a woman named Missi somewhere in the 2 block radius that I just couldn't see, but I doubt it. Where do people learn words like "missy"? And why the shouting out the window? My male friends who are reading this, perhaps you can comment!
Perhaps I should teach an anti-piropo unit in English class, which would include phrases like "Let's have coffee," or "Do you have a business card?" in order to teach proper introductory phrases to my male students. These would be phrases they could use without needing to move quickly down the sidewalk or in a rapidly moving vehicle, and might be more effective than the "I loooooove you" yelled from across the street. Who knows? It could be a whole new era of intercultural communication.
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4 comments:
i, too, think it's funny the phrases they pick up and tend to use. but i will admit, i'd rather hear "missi i love you" from a moving car for shock value than the f-bomb from my fifth grader. that's right.
i was speechless.
piropos are alive and well in culiacán. but they seem to be relatively harmless. "good morning beautiful" is about the extent of it (at least in my experience)
When I was in a small beach town in Oaxaca with my mother, a bunch of old men at the cantina started with the "chh-chh, huerita!" as I walked by. The next day, I got a terrible sunburn, and when my mother and I walked by the cantina that afternoon to go to dinner, they started up again: "Ch-ch, huerita!"
I whipped around and called to them, "Ya no soy huerita; ya soy rosita!" They all laughed, and called me Rosita for the rest of our stay. They turned out to be very nice and actually helped us out when some not very nice, younger guys started bothering us. I'll take a piropo over an attempted groping any day of the week. (But yeah, the English they use is always so random, it's hard not to laugh, no?)
I'm glad to know a great-sounding word for this behavior - piropo kind of like pajaro... ever-present tweeting sounds that sometimes make up the background sounds for a place. :-)
Brazilians are more subtle in general, less of the traffic-stopping whistles and shouts of "Hola gringa" from blocks away I saw in Ecuador. Also SE Brazil is quite diverse - there are enough people of German/Italian (or Spanish/Japanese/Portuguese/African) descent that my phenotype is not outside the realm of possibility, and if I get any comments on the street, at least they're in Portuguese! Still, light skin/hair/eyes are prized and draw attention; my reaction has tempered from irritation at a racially-derived standard of beauty to acceptance of a (totally impersonal) compliment.
Indeed, the Colombia section of my Lonely Planet comments that "It is just the Latin-American way of life, and local males would not understand if someone told them their behavior was sexual harassment. On the contrary, they would argue that they are just paying the woman a flattering compliment." But we affect the culture of those around us, I love the "dating etiquette" unit idea! Wouldn't be such a bad idea for your native-English speaking students as well..
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