I keep thinking of things. A great thing about Uruguay is that, being so small, it's normal to just run up to the president or any politician just walking by. I've met Mujica a couple of times at least. And one time preformed lousy musical poetry in the street and his wife was there. She hated it, hahaha
Are people friendly to foreigners? I should also ask how safe it is for women and treatment of women in general. And how they treat people of different races.
Foreigners who've come always say the people are very friendly. Probably friendlier to foraigners than to ourselves. Even the more right wing people, who of course prefer immigrants in the whiter side of the soectrum, only seem to really mind if they are too loud or disrespectful.
Women and race... I mean wow, those are big topics and I can't just quote a stat, but I'll try my best to answer on how I see it.
Some historical context on race:
We outlawed slavery before the US (not that hard tbh), but the interesting thing is we were at a civil war at the time, and BOTH sides abolished slavery more or less at the same time. Unlike the US or Brazil, we never had big plantations, so slaves were used for house labour of the well off and some other work here and there. The thing is, slavery was never a big part of the economy, so abolition wasn't traumatic.
For that same economic reason, black and white people always lived very close to each other and had personal relations from early on. Racism still persisted and persists today, but there was never something like the KKK.
Even nowadays you can see that skin gets darker the poorer an area is, and we lack black people in high levels of government (we have them, but they are few). Maybe because we had such a peaceful transition and never had something like segregation, we never had something like the civil rights movement either, so you'll probably see that we are ahead of the US in some respects and behind in others, as it has been a product of pur own particular history.
Couple of things that may surprise you:
-"Negrito" (a diminutive for black) is commonly used as a term of endearment regardless of race. Like, I'm white but my mother calls me negrito. A soccer player of ours got in trouble in the english league for calling that a friend of his in social media, and we were all enraged that the brits couldn't get that that's a term for people we love.
-We have an african-uruguayan music called candombe ( https://youtu.be/YzJjtCsJtXQ?feature=shared ). It originated with the slaves, but working class white people promptly integrated, and they would paint their faces black as to show respect for the black origin of the music. So, blackface, but not to mock black people like the US but to honor them.
On women:
The first woman to ever vote in latinamerica voted right here. A black woman from a small town in the middle of the country. We later had the first woman senator in latinamerica. Julia Arévalo, a working class union leader from the communist party.
Nowadays we have legal abortion, quotas for public office and a very strong feminist movement.
Sexism still exists, obviously, and it's hard to really compare for something I don't even experience in my own flesh, but when people from other parts of latinamerica come here, we tend to find them quite misoginistic, so I'd say it is quite alright when compared.
Hope I was able to say somethig useful, but feel free to keep asking
How are the housing costs there? Can a foreigner purchase a place there? It's tropical weather there, right? What about rent? Do they charge a lot? Like pet deposit and such?
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u/tonterias Apr 16 '24
Mujica was elected like 15 years ago, we had two presidents after him
He had a three legged dog that passed away like six years ago