Dating in Jujuy as a Woman: Copleras, Carnival, and the Watched Street

The caja is a flat drum the size of a dinner plate, held in one hand and struck with a soft mallet, and in the high towns of Jujuy it is as often a woman holding it as a man. The copla is sung to that beat, one short verse at a time, and it is answered. That structure matters more than any description of it, because the form guarantees the woman her turn. In a rueda, the singing circle, a man can flatter, tease or try his luck in verse, and the woman he aimed at will answer in verse, to his face, in front of everyone, and the circle will score both of them. Quebrada women have been public, armed with wit and entirely within their rights in that circle for as long as anyone can document. It is the oldest piece of romantic machinery in the province, and it has never belonged to one gender.

Two sets of manners

A woman’s dating life in Jujuy depends heavily on which altitude she lives at. San Salvador, the capital, runs on ordinary urban Argentine manners: offices, the university, evenings along the Xibi Xibi park, groups of friends, a nightlife modest by Buenos Aires standards but recognisable in kind. Up the Quebrada, in Purmamarca, Tilcara, Humahuaca and the villages between, the manners change with the air. Towns are small, households are known, and a woman seen walking twice with the same man has generated information that will reach her family before she does. Local women manage this with the standard tools of small places, discretion and timing and the neighbouring town, and they will say, some fondly and some not, that the watching is also a kind of care. Plenty of young women live between the two systems, studying or working in the capital during the week and going home up the gorge on weekends, and they switch between the two sets of manners without thinking about it.

Who opens, and how

In the capital the default is the national one, men open and women filter, with the usual student-age exceptions. In the gorge the question barely parses, because openings there are not events but gradients: shared work, a festival, a family connection, a walk that becomes regular. A woman who wants something to start has levers of her own, the invitation to a peña, the seat kept beside her in the rueda, and using them is not read as forwardness because nothing about them is explicit. The system’s defect is the same as its virtue. Nothing is explicit, so a misunderstanding can run quietly for months, and jujeñas complain about exactly that with some regularity.

Carnival, read from her side

The carnival licence is real, and women use it as fully as men: the flour, the talc, the basil, the dancing, the flirtation open in daylight with the whole town powdered white. But local women read the licence more precisely than visitors do. It is communal rather than private, exercised inside the comparsa and the crowd, and the comparsa itself, the group a person parades and dances with, functions as an escort structure without ever being called one. A woman is with her people the entire time. Drink is everywhere and so is the crowd, and the crowd is the point: what happens at carnival happens in front of everyone, which is precisely what makes the openness workable. Visiting women sometimes miss this and treat the licence as portable, something that can be carried off into a private corner, and the correction they receive is usually social and swift. When the devil goes back into the ground the licence is buried with him, for everyone, and the woman who sang against you in February will greet you in March as if no verse had ever happened.

August, and being judged well

A serious relationship in Jujuy arrives, sooner or later, at a household rite. In August the family feeds the Pachamama, the earth, through an opened pit, with food, drink, coca and cigarettes, and the ceremony is domestic, unhurried and entirely serious. For a girlfriend brought along, it is also an exam nobody hands out in advance. What is being assessed is not knowledge but manner: whether you wait, whether you follow the order of things, whether you treat the rite as a household matter rather than a spectacle to be photographed. Women who married into keeping families describe the August table as the moment they were actually admitted, more than any introduction over a Sunday lunch. The reverse also holds. A partner who performs reverence, or films it, has usually answered the family’s question early.

Standing, stalls and grandmothers

The economic face of the high towns is substantially female. The ferias and market stalls of the Quebrada are largely run by women, the weaving and much of the small commerce likewise, and the grandmother is a genuine authority in a great many households rather than a decorative one. This gives courtship up here a shape that outsiders misread. The reserve of Quebrada women is not passivity. It is the manner of people with standing, who are not auditioning, and who expect a suitor to deal with the household as an institution. A man courting seriously in the gorge is courting a family economy, and the woman at the centre of it usually has more say in the outcome than the quietness of the process suggests.

The last bus down the gorge

Distance does its quiet work on women’s evenings especially. The towns of the Quebrada hang off one road, the services along it thin out at night, and the practical shape of an evening out is set by the question of getting home. Women plan around the last bus with the same unsentimental precision tucumanas apply to the remis, and a couple split between the capital and a gorge town lives by the timetable. In the capital the repertoire is the national one, the group chat, the message on arrival, the location shared on a long ride. None of it is discussed as fear. It is discussed as logistics, in the same tone as the weather at altitude, which also shapes everything and alarms no one.

A visiting woman in the gorge

Tourism runs through Purmamarca and Tilcara all year, and the towns have long since developed a commercial courtesy for visitors that runs parallel to local codes without joining them. A visiting woman travelling alone will be served, helped and largely left alone, and the attention she draws is milder than in the big cities of the north. What she will not easily reach is the interior of the system, the comparsa, the August table, the rueda, which admit people through relationships rather than purchases. Local men who orbit tourist women exist here as they exist everywhere tourism exists, and local women can identify them from across a plaza. Asking a jujeña is, as usual, the fastest research available.

The copla survives because its rules are good: each singer gets a turn, nobody is shouted over, and the exchange stays public until both sides want otherwise. A woman inside that form is never cornered. L’Amore Vince is built on a version of the same rule, staged rounds of conversation in which either person can pass between rounds and the whole thing simply ends, no scene required. The gorge would find nothing novel in the design. It has been letting women answer in their own turn, to the beat of a small drum, for centuries.