Café con Piernas. February 2007

It is monday morning in Santiago, Chile.
But in the dimly lighted interior of the ‘café con piernas’ the night falls far from the busy rush hour. The customers are drawn in by more than just coffee. The waitresses in these ‘cafes with legs’ serve coffee in lingerie or bikinis. UV light and a raised platform give way to high heels and oil tanned bodies decorated by fluorescent g-strings. The customers are greeted with a kiss on the cheek.
No alcohol is served and the espresso machine operates Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Women working there are no prostitutes. They earn a lot of money in tips.
The café con piernas and Chile go way back. They excisted in a mild version since the sixties, when Chilean society was quite patriarchal and culturally repressive in sexual matters. There the Catholic Church had a lot to say. A harder version developed in the final years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, when pornography was forbidden, and they continue until now, being increasingly uninhibited. Their origin and their recent development might be an attempt to compensate for repression on sexual matters in Chile.
The question is their survival and even expansion in recent years, since Chilean society had a deep cultural change, especially in matters concerning sexual behaviour. Chilean society is an extremely fragmented society with extreme income, cultural and social differences. It is a country that has a woman a President and at the same time huge wage differences between men and women, uneven political and social participation, where just a tiny few women are managers of enterprises or political leaders. It is a place where you see the survival of old practises in some sectors of society where others are very modern. It is such a divided society that people belonging to the modern sector don’t know what is going on in the rest of society and visa versa. Another contradiction to the existence of the café con piernas is the power of the catholic Church. It still has a lot of power, most of the best schools are traditional, several important universities are Catholic. Anybody with power presents him or herself as Catholic or if not never criticizes the church. This instituation has been able to stall the approval of divorce law and is doing everything to block advances in abortion law. The contradiction is that almost nobody in power is seriously Catholic.
Maybe that’s why the café con piernas have a place in Chilean society.

© Edward van Herk