Clothes

Clothes

I have been wanting to write about clothes ever since I got here.   Before I left the States,  I was alerted to clothes as a Nica issue by Peace Corps which made a very big thing about a Nicaraguan dress code, which, we were told, required professional dress—pressed shirts, business shoes, khakis or dress pants.  Clean, neat.  Otherwise face possible ostracism and the failure of your mission.  Nicas have no respect, we heard, for back-packers with their slovenly dirty ways, their unkempt appearance.  Some of this is true.   Some isn’t true in my experience or only with qualifications.

It is true that Nicaraguans, all but the poorest, place importance on how they dress when they are outside of their houses. Older women (over 40, say) wear a kind of uniform which consists of a straight skirt, like a pencil skirt, a clean and, if necessary, pressed shirt, and dressier shoes like flats or heels or sandals. It took me some time to figure out where these ubiquitous skirts come from because they are not sold in the shops as far as I can see.  The clue comes when you look at them drying inside out on the line—the zippers tell you the skirt was handmade.  And the maker is a professional, a costurera, and there are some in every community.  They don’t hang out signs, but people tell you who is good.  You buy fabric and bring it to the costurera and tell her what you want and she makes it to order.

 For younger women the uniform is tight, tight, tight jeans almost as tight as leggings, so tight the flesh above the waist bulges over.  With this they wear tight, tight, tight tops.  (Nicaragua is a god-send for the lycra manufacturers of the world and a good place to go if you want to learn to accept your body type.  The word “fat” here is a description of fact, not an insult. )   That these  tight shirts accentuate the bulges matters not at all.  The tops most prized have some color and some bling, but t-shirts are common and especially American t-shirts, as long as they are tight.  More on that later. Shoes matter whether flats or high heels, but excruciatingly high heels are prized even by people who have to walk on impossible dirt roads or down precipitous declines.

Please note that the dress code applies outside the house.  In the house is a different story.  I lived in one house where the senora did all her household tasks in the morning dressed in yesterday’s shirt and a thigh length kind of shaper/girdle. People would come to the house to meet with her and she would receive them as described.  But when the time came to go out, she was showered, hair neatly combed and parted, dressed in the usual over-forty skirt and top.  In another house the senora ran a pulperia from her living room.  It opened at 7 in the morning and she ran it dressed in her nightgown.

Thank God I’m American because that excuses my abuse of the rules.  While I am appropriately dressed for school or other more formal occasions, on my time off,  I do go out of the house in casual hiking pants with a cool cotton roomy shirt. In the beginning, when it was so terribly hot and humid, I tried to walk in the morning in shorts.  It did not take more than 2 outings to figure out that was too much.  I was in damaging-my-mission territory, although the younger volunteers get away with running in shorts.  The embarrassment on the faces I passed while wearing shorts probably had something to do with my age and wrinkles.

What about men and children?  The rules apply to them, too, but in slightly different ways.  Men, as distinct from boys and teenagers, outside the house wear jeans or dress pants, leather (-like) shoes and clean neat shirts.  Polos are a favorite.  Teenage boys aren’t dressed up very often.  They wear baggy pants and t-shirts  and sports shoes sort of like in the States.  But hair matters to them a bundle.  Many, many men and boys look like they just stepped out of a barber shop. (Another aspect of the public appearance value.) Hair is trimmed and for teenagers worn often in a style unique to the boy and held in place by a ton of pomade.  Spikes predominate (”spikey” was one of the vocabulary words this week). Teenage girls are a little more casual than older women but tight jeans are their uniform, too. Of course the rule applies to teenage boys and girls at school where they wear a uniform of a clean white shirt and blue bottoms, dress pants for boys (not jeans) and a whit blouse, kilt and knee socks for girls.  Both wear leather(-like) shoes.

 What is notable is the way children, particularly little girls, are dressed. People seem to take a special pride in their little children’s clothes.  Nearly all little girls have long black hair which is arranged in pigtails or ponytails with nice straight parts and hair ornaments color- coordinated to outfit. .  A mom in her straight skirt and t-shirt walks next to the princess in a dress perfectly pressed with matching socks and polished shoes.  Some parents express this urge to glorify their girls by dressing them in the most fancy party dresses, often hot pink, loaded with frills and rosettes and bling.  I can’t say this is every day or all the time but little girls have and wear these dresses.  The feeling I get is that the little girls reflect back on the family, their status, their values, their hopes maybe.

A good question would be how all the emphasis on a consumer item like clothes is possible in a country reputed to be the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere. One answer lies in the example of a person I know who barely makes  enough to cover the expenses of the three people she supports.  She lives in a two room house with no furniture except for 2 beds and a kind of wardrobe.  Her family lives on rice and beans, but she doesn’t think of herself as poor (she doesn’t think she makes enough money, but that’s different from poor).  After all she has enough jeans and t-shirts and high heels to fit in with everyone.

How could that be?  A pair of new jeans costs $10-15.  And they are cheaply made.  To the rescue comes ropas americanas, used clothes from the States.  They come in giant tightly wrapped bales which can be bought, sight unseen, for $25-50. The purchaser opens the bale and with any luck there are enough clothes there he can actually sell that the investment was a good one.  The clothes are shaken out, hung up or stacked and sold in little shops in any sizable town.   The clothes come from the contributions of folks in the States.  Some of them have already been for sale by a charity like Good Will because sometimes you can see the charity price tag still on them. The good thing about ropas americanas is the generally pretty good quality of the clothes. Also, like everyone else in the world Nicas like name brands.  And ropas amiericanas are cheaper than new, e.g. a pair of jeans for $5.

At first I had a pretty big head of steam about this situation.  You mean the clothes I donated to charity are for sale in a poor, poor country.  I had in mind people getting them for free! Ok, OK it costs something to ship them here.  But everyone along the distribution chain makes a little (or a big) profit from my charitable donation (even me, now that I think about the tax deduction). But ropas americanas provide livelihoods here, another way to make a few bucks in the informal labor sector on which so many depend for survival in a country with a 50% under/unemployment rate. I bet someone has written about this trade in donated clothes.  Might be worth a google.

The presence of so much American clothing here makes for some good reads—of t-shirts. People don’t understand what they put on their bodies.  So a poor old woman with sagging breasts wears a shirt that says, in two strategically placed circles, “hot” “spot”. Or it might say “Hands off!”  My favorite t-shirt story, though is this:  I was jammed into the back seat of a microbus on the way back to my site.  A guy got on with a T-shirt with the logo and name North Hanover Grill, a small restaurant in my small town.  How many of these shirts could have been printed? How many could have gotten to Nicaragua as used clothing? And on my microbus?!  While I was on it?!! I was going to try to get to the guy to explain what he was wearing and then I thought 1) would he understand my impaired Spanish explanation and 2) would he care.  I sat back down I my seat.  But it was an amazing moment.

P.S. I don’t want to leave a false impression.  While the emphasis on how you look and clothes is important to –I’m guessing—middle class and lower middle class people, there are still many really poor people who haven’t the luxury of such a concern.  But it’s also true, as in the example above, that you can gave the concern even when you actually have very little.  There is nothing new about trying to look better off than you are.

P.P.S. Sometimes Nicaragua reminds me of the States 50 years ago.  My mom wore house dresses which never saw the light of day outside the house.  My aunt had a dog who knew the smell of her lipstick, a sure sign she was leaving the house.  So the in the house/outside the house divide isn’t unique to Nicaragua.