Marcela

My host mother is an energetic mother of 2 in her early 40s named Marcela. She has long, curly, bleached-blond hair and might crack five feet tall if she were wearing thick-soled shoes. She is full of energy, which has its positive and its negative aspects. On the one hand, she’s a lot of fun to be around. On the other hand, she speaks about a mile a minute. “If you can understand her Spanish,” one of my host brothers told me, “you can understand anybody’s.”

Our apartment is small, but it is comfortable and it is in a safe, middle-class neighborhood, with a police station located all of 100 feet away. Marcela works the front desk and as a dance and fitness instructor at the Gimnasio Lembel, a swanky gym in Las Condes, the richest part of town. She puts in very long hours, and often doesn’t make it home until 10PM or later.

Her ex-husband pays nothing to support her two children (my host brothers) Claudio (22) and Mauricio (18), even though he lives only a few blocks away. When she refers to him, she laughs and makes a cutting motion across her neck.

In Chile, divorce has been a legal option for just 6 months. It was the last democratic country in the world not to have a divorce law, and, as it stands now, a long bureaucratic process means that a divorce is still fairly difficult to obtain. For Chileans, unlike many other Latin American countries, the institutional Catholic Church (e.g. the church hierarchy) still garners a fair amount of respect from the common people. While other Latin American countries are of course very Catholic, the influence of the actual hierarchy has been eroded over the years by the church’s continual political support of the wealthy, the powerful, and the autocratic at the expense of the poor and needy. In Chile, this tendency was much less pronounced, and this may have something to do with the tardy implementation of divorce, which the church heirarchy still vehemently opposes.

Before the new law, the only way to separate from your previous spouse and legally marry another person was through an annulment: a ruling stating that the original marriage was somehow illegal, and thus never a valid marriage in the first place. In fact, annulments became surprisingly common in pre-divorce Chile. Couples would intentionally misspell their names on their marriage certificates so that, years down the road, they could go back and claim an annulment on the grounds that the original marriage certificate wasn’t valid. I’m not sure which, if any, of these methods Marcela used, though the whole situation just goes to show you how hard it is for a democratic government to stop its people in a from doing what they want to do.

Whatever her marital status, Marcela is a blast to live with. She heads up a relaxed, fun, and informal house. She’s also made a promise to my friend Matt, the Stanford student who stayed with her last quarter who is currently trekking throughout Patagonia. She swore that by the time he returns to Santiago (sometime in early February), she would have found herself a boyfriend. I’m rooting for her.