me mami. It sounds cute coming from little children. I don’t like it from grown-ups. I think it’s flaite’). She finally adds “los regg[a]etoneros lo arruinaron” (‘reggaeton artists ruined it’). This statement presents several matrices of meaning, which, when analysed together, reveal significantly political dimensions. First, mami is an infantile, affectionate term that resonates within a fundamentally feminine universe. Second, there is a marking of inferiority by social class, perhaps something new for the commentator. Finally, a possible reason that locates the origin of this inferiority is also apparent here: the wide use of the word among reggaetoneros.

Attributing the inappropriateness or incorrectness of the term mami to the influence of reggaetón’s sexualised, foreign language makes sense since this music genre is associated with Latin American working classes beyond Chile’s borders. Rojas (2012a) observes that in Santiago, Puerto Rican Spanish, in particular, is markedly valued as negative. Reggaetón, a genre originated in Puerto Rico, while fashionable among young people from all social groups, is generally imagined as distinctive of the lower classes. The widespread disapproval of the Puerto Rican dialect in Chile may not only be due to the marginal position of Caribbean Spanish within the pan-Hispanic order of linguistic correctness; it is also probably an iconisation established between a taste that predominates among the popular masses and the elite’s constitutive strategies of their own identity, largely determined by contrast and exclusion.

Likewise, the counterpoint between one perception of the term mami as infantile and affectionate and another one as sexualised and strongly localised in lower-class subjects also reveals deep-seated issues on gender, nation, and identity. This is evident when in the comments section a woman declares: “mami en tono caribeño, lo amo” (‘mami with a Caribbean accent, I love it’), a statement that situates the term mami in the realm of the erotic, giving rise to a complex, singular semiosis where language, social class, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics intervene. This goes hand in hand with certain specificities of reggaeton as a musical genre, loaded with erotic representations of the bodies (and the language) of Caribbean men and women, almost always racialised, youthful and heterosexual. In the Chilean context, these visions project the imaginary of a foreign cultural geography, that can, however, be decoded thanks to the common language, while it is also idealised as a territory where sensuality and pleasure prevail. The woman residing in such imaginaries (la mami) contradicts the racial, cultural, and moral order established by the national elites, especially when they think of themselves, which results in censorship. Additionally, the rejection of the use of mami coincides with a pattern of selective marginalisation of Latin American elements in the taste established by the ruling classes, something already demonstrated in other moments of history by the Chilean elite’s revulsion for music genres like cumbia, huaracha, ranchera, and other cultural expressions widely spread among the general population but unacceptable for the ruling class. All these genres have in common being produced in Spanish and a geopolitical origin located far from the European ideal.

Therefore, the pattern where certain varieties of Spanish are imagined as either “superior” or “inferior” is here reproduced. And, notably, given the allegedly negative influence of popular culture, it is necessary to update the ideologeme that suggests that “in Chile people speak poorly”, by adding the assumption that now Chileans speak “even worse” due to the effect of Caribbean Spanish.

Despite this view, there are signs that Chilean Spanish, especially the lower-class variety, is sometimes seen in a positive light, even celebrated, for example, on the Facebook page Es de roto.