«With a prodigious ear to say, to capture the native, natural rhythms, and the subtle tensions of what surrounds us, she makes write for the first time those who had never written, in fact, who had not even spoken. The voice is not something that someone gives you or gives you back, the voice one day sprouts and screams, and finally the rest listens. Then it is intoned, rises, projects and reaches and infects others, like those of that handful of girls who speak in Quiltras (Tránsito Editorial, 2019), only women of the lower and very low middle class, when the internet was slow The buses were old like televisions and rum and orange were drunk in plastic cups from the bottles.

The experience of growing up for them will be to look at the background for the first time and twist the silence until a noise comes out, to emancipate themselves from that nameless thing that, they will soon know, crosses them as women, as people, and which is already collective memory. . They will learn, then, "why we lived so differently if we were from the same family", as one of the cousins ​​in her first story says.

The Quiltras girls will have to endure being boxed into peripheries, social resentment and generational rolls, 90s female pop referents and marginal urban imaginism through. But his real rebellion will have been to launch this beast tongue, that broken and irrecoverable cadence of the everyday slang of the impoverished neighborhood, which he names and renames, from a false nostalgia, to make the gap of our disagreements very clear. They're the kind of thing you only learn at the edges: knowing how to cut words when they get useless. Or what Arelis does with reality, letting it accompany her like a bitch on the way back home to whereabouts 20, as if they were two working-class proletarian friends. " | Gabriela wiener

"Tenderness. Something that little has been said about the stories of Arelis Uribe: that, underneath a dizzying timing to build verbal sequences, and a hectic tension between disgust and joy, and his virtuosity to politicize pop, and erotica nostalgia for a millennial feminine Santiago de Chile, and an unusual ability to draw freehand portraits of protagonists who suffer double or triple discrimination (being a woman, being young, being poor) without succumbing to easy pathos, beats a rabid tenderness that compresses and purifies the narrative until it gives it the texture of poetry. From its title, Quiltras (a cool Chilean slang word that designates breedless dogs that roam the street) is a waste of ear applied to the noises of the neighborhood, to cybertribal speech and university campus cliques, to the talk casual of peda or melodrama: dark corners of the conscience where, anyone has felt it, always lurks the sword of Damocles of shame and guilt. Unlike what happens in the savage literature, almost always messianic and hypocritical, the characters of Arelis do not evade the longing wanabism of those who were born in neighborhoods of social interest or worse: the persecution of a less shitty place to live, and the wounds that they inflict on us and that we inflict in that pursuit. It seems to me an exceptional position to speak of the Latin American reality from a fresh imagination ». | Julian Herbert

«These stories deal with the edges - ages, neighborhoods, bodies that are sought - and the fixity with which some women look at others. How in that gaze there is a complicity, sometimes difficult, and a need to understand each other and understand others that turns each act of writing into an act of love. Even if it is at the wrong time, due to cowardice, confusion or laziness - due to the murky accounts pending of each one - we will pick up the dog from the field. In that gesture we will both save ourselves ». | Marta Sanz