Dating in Catamarca as a Woman: The Plaza Remembers Everything

At half past eight on a summer evening the Plaza 25 de Mayo in Catamarca is full, and it is possible to stand at one corner and watch the city’s whole social order take its walk: grandmothers on the benches under the trees, families doing slow laps past the cathedral where the Virgen del Valle keeps her house, and the girls, always plural, moving in clusters of three and four with an ice cream apiece, crossing paths with the boys’ clusters at intervals that only look accidental. A woman crossing that plaza is greeted by name several times before she reaches the far side. That is the machine, still running. Catamarca is one of the last cities in the country where the evening walk does what it did a century ago, and to understand dating here as a woman you begin with the fact that the walk has an audience, and always did.

Accompanied, by habit

No rule says a young woman moves through the Catamarca evening in company, and none is needed, because the habit does the work. The company is cousins and school friends, assembled by message an hour beforehand, and it persists well past adolescence, so that a woman of twenty-six still tends to arrive plural and leave plural, less from vigilance than because the plural is the town’s basic social unit. A woman alone at a café table in the afternoon is ordinary. The same woman alone at night reads as waiting for someone, and will be asked, kindly, whether everything is all right. The hour that actually empties the streets is not midnight but two in the afternoon, when the siesta shutters the centre and the heat holds it, and a visitor’s first lesson is that the deserted city of the siesta and the crowded city of the evening are the same blocks, on the same day, run under different rules.

The Virgin’s calendar

The devotional year structures the social one. The feasts of the Virgen del Valle pull pilgrims in from the whole northwest, walking in along the routes for the great days, and the crowds those feasts assemble are the city’s oldest mixing chamber, everyone outdoors and visible for days at a stretch. The devotional labour itself runs substantially through women, the novenas, the promesas, the promises kept by walking or by service, organised by mothers and grandmothers with daughters conscripted alongside, and a family’s standing in that economy is part of what a suitor is quietly measured against. It weighs on women from both sides. Observance is read as character in the older families, and a woman’s distance from the calendar is noticed in a way a man’s is not, a double accounting nobody defends out loud and plenty still keep. In the university orbit and the provincial administration the accounting loosens considerably, and every catamarqueña knows to which ledger her own surname reports.

The silence marches

Catamarca carries a specific memory here, and it should be stated plainly. In 1990 a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, María Soledad Morales, was murdered, and the case reached into the families of the provincial power structure. Her schoolmates, led by the head of her school, a nun named Martha Pelloni, answered with the marchas del silencio, silent marches through these same streets that grew until they filled the city, held the country’s attention for months, and ended in the federal intervention of the province. A quarter of a century before Ni Una Menos existed as a phrase, Catamarca’s schoolgirls had already shown Argentina what organised grief could do to a government. The case is not conversation here, it is civic memory, and it lives on in the way the city raises daughters: the insistence on the plural, the phone calls, the accounting of who is where, kept now by mothers who were themselves the marching schoolgirls of 1990. None of it makes the city fearful. It makes the city precise.

The plaza’s ledger

Reputation in Catamarca is kept the way the plaza is kept, continuously and by everyone. A woman seen walking with one man is information; seen with a second within the season, she is a topic, and the asymmetry of that arithmetic, which does not apply with the same interest to the men involved, is the plainest surviving unfairness in the local system. It varies by circle, as everything here does. The administration, the courts and the university employ a large population of women who run their own lives on their own account, and in that orbit the ledger is thinner and consulted less; ten blocks away, in the older families, it remains a working document. Divorce and single motherhood sit inside the same split. Both are present, both are absorbed, the grandmother steps in and the city moves on, and both are still commented on in circles where comment is the local sport. A catamarqueña navigates this less by defiance than by placement, choosing which rooms get which version of her life.

July, when the ledger loosens

The exception is July. The Fiesta Nacional e Internacional del Poncho fills the fairground for two winter weeks with the whole province and its visitors, looms and food stalls and folk stages running into the cold night, and the fortnight functions as the city’s sanctioned loosening, the one stretch of the year when the audience is too large and too mixed to keep its usual accounts. Couples in Catamarca date their beginnings to the Poncho at a rate no other fortnight approaches, and women describe the festival plainly as the easiest weeks of the year in which to talk to a stranger, because the fairground supplies what the plaza cannot, crowds without a register. The first move there still arrives mostly from the man, softly and through the group, but the festival’s density gives a woman the widest field she will get all year for arranging her own accidents, and catamarqueñas of every generation know exactly how that is done.

Piropos, thinning

The piropo survives in Catamarca mostly in its older demographic, from the building sites and from men of a certain age on the benches, and it has thinned here as it has thinned everywhere in the country since 2015, the year the Ni Una Menos marches ran through every provincial capital including this one. Younger men have largely retired the form. What a woman receives crossing the centre at midday is less than her mother received and more than her daughter will, and it is handled with the standard technology, no answer, no altered pace, occasionally a verdict delivered to a friend a block later. Nobody here would describe the street as hostile. They would describe it as talkative, which is a different thing, and they would add that in a city where everyone knows whose daughter you are, the talk stays inside boundaries the anonymous cities lost track of.

Words, before the plaza sees you

The cost of the plaza system, for women, was never the walking, it was the register: every beginning conducted in public, priced in comment before it had decided what it was. A way of talking to someone first, before the city files the sighting, is the one modern convenience the system never offered, and that is precisely the shape of L’Amore Vince, where conversation runs first, text and then voice and then video, and a face is added only after there is a person attached to it. The plaza would recognise the pacing. It has been enforcing a slower version of it, under the trees and the Virgin’s windows, for as long as anyone in Catamarca has been alive.