Land

ArticleAcquisition for the Railways in Bengal, 185062

Genesis of Youth Cultures in

Chile: Colricos & Carlotos
(19551964)
Yanko Gonzalez

377
Young
20(4) 377397
2012 Sage Publications and
YOUNG Editorial Group
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/110330881202000405
http://you.sagepub.com

Austral University of the South of Chile, Chile

Abstract
This article examines the birth of youth cultures in Chile in the mid-1950s. Using
biographical accounts and archival material together with theoretical, and historical
analysis, it is proposed that these groups were shaped by the segmented cultural
industry (especially the film industry), as much as by the labelling and press- induced
moral panic. Consequently, it is believed that the colricos and the carlotos are
more than just youth subcultures or countercultures associated to a particular
generation of middle-class men marked by the unequal impact of the modernizing
transformations Chile experienced in the 1950s. Instead, it is stated that youth
cultures arose as a hyperbole of social change as they synthesize the mutations that
affected intergenerational relations and the concept of youth itself, shifting from the
status of being single to just being young, based on practices that the adult society
does not carry out, such as informal dating (pololeo), collaborative home parties
(malones) and segregated film attendance (matins).
Keywords
Chile, history of youth, youth cultures, colricos, carlotos

Introduction1
The historical-cultural theories and approaches concerning young people have been
developed primarily from Central European and Anglo-Saxon sources. Even though
such approaches have experienced a gradual development in Latin America and particularly in Chile (e.g. Salazar and Pinto, 2002; Caccia-Bava, Feixa and Gonzlez,
2004; Feixa and Gonzlez, 2005), most studies have approached only some aspects
and periods, neglecting important groups of actors, processes and dimensions relevant to the field of youth studies. Thus, it seems paradoxical that while synchronic
studiesethnographic, for instanceon youth cultures multiply, historical-cultural
approaches are scarcely developed or focus eminently on the post-authoritarian
times, from 1990 onwards (Zarzuri and Ganter, 2005).
The 1950s and especially the 1960s became a milestone for the full visibility
and protagonism of young people, expressed through groups of interest, pressure,

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Yanko Gonzalez

poweras Mattelart and Mattelart would say (1970:10)and even of new proletariatism (Hermann, 1968:127). These decades expressed the transition from a
co-figurative to a pre-figurative culture according to Mead (1990), in which peers
replace parents as the referent to build young peoples socio-cultural present, and
thus establishing an incomparable generational breach in history. The appearance of
youth cultures implied a greater complexity, density and autonomy of the biological (age) and generational marker of young people in relation to adults. This way,
groups of young people gathered together into micro-societies which started proliferating in the cities. Shaped by class, ethnicity, territory and shared aesthetics (Feixa,
1999), these groups were created and recreated by the mass media (the segmented
cultural industry) and the market.
On the one hand, the generation who embodied the emergence of Chilean youth
cultures was conditioned by the gradual modernization of the material sphere, greatly
supported by a populist state that encouraged development. On the other hand, it was
also affected by the American economic success after the Second World War, which
was transferred to Latin America in the early 1960s through the US programme
Alliance for Progress. Modernization and economic development allowed for the
extension of electricity, urbanization, education, industrialization, and migration
from the countryside to the city. In fact, halfway through the century, Chilean society
had experienced accelerated changes, which, in the end, left its social structure radically modified. There was a swift urbanization plus continuous demographic growth
due to increased birth rate and decreased mortality. In this context, a biologically
young majority started to emerge: at the beginning of the 1960s, 49.9 per cent of
the population was younger than 20 years old, according to estimations by ECLAC/
UNICEF in 1967 (Gurrieri et al., 1971:17). Furthermore, from 1952 onwards, the
number of secondary and higher education students increased as never before: in
1952, there were 9,335 university students and in 1957, the number augmented to
20,440; in 1965, the number rose again to 41,801 (Gonzlez, 2004a).
However, it is the modernization of the symbolic sphere that has the greatest
impact on the constitution of these youth cultures, a phenomenon usually ascribed
to external influences such as the Americanization of customs through the appearance and expansion of the cultural industries or the decline of the national bourgeois
social forms. These changes in the cultural field are undoubtedly related to the transnationalization of the symbolic market in Latin America and to the reproduction of
the first world cultural industry at a local level (Brunner, et al. 1989; Brunner, 1998;
Garca, 1990).
By the end of the 1950s, both the cultural industry and the media were progressively growing in Chile. In this sense, the so-called American abundance
society had a huge impact on the social life and the young people of the region.
An unprecedented massive youth market arose, the teenage market, including youth
journalism, segmented film and music industries. Rock and Roll burst in together
with a series of associated products such as transistors, vinyl discs, turntables and
motorcycles, among other fetishes. Several American music and film idols, whose
images were rapidly deterritorialized thanks to new communicative technologies,
iconically embodied this moment: Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley.
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379

However, as it will be seen, this process was gradual and differential in Chile and
Latin America.
These consecutive structural transformations in Chile would make possible
the new identities among young people. Within this framework, this study tries to
account for the genesis of Chilean youth cultures between 1955when the processes of modernization, social mass mediation and the youth segmented cultural
industry beganand 1964when Eduardo Frei became President, thus marking
the deepening and radicalization of these processes. Consequently, the article seeks
to identify, describe and interpret the socio-cultural contents and expressions in the
biographical memory of the subjects, participants and witnesses of the emergence
of the first youth cultures, thus establishing, from an analytical viewpoint, the milestones, signs and practices that articulate these identities. These cultures are then
matched with theoretical approaches from studies on similar phenomena, subjects
and problems, such as those conducted by the Centre for the Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham at the beginning of the 1960s.

Methodology
This study is based on interviews with more than thirty exemplary cases (Coller,
2000) who were young (biologically or socio-culturally speaking) between 1955 and
1964 and who lived in two cities: Santiago, the capital of Chile, and Valdivia, in the
south of the country. The method of choice for the study was the life history
(Bertaux, 1981), because it allows accessing individual interpretations of social
experiences and it is efficient to reconstruct sense of belonging as it was experienced. This method approaches the subjects memory as the manifestation of the
wealth of experiences and knowledge to be found in past and present social action,
which becomes an essential procedure to investigate identity (Lindn, 2000: 104).
Regarding data collection, in depth face to face interviews were conducted with
the participants in order to access both their memories and their attached meanings in
the subjects own words. Dialogues were tape recorded and then transcribed. In addition, written and audiovisual documents, as well as personal objectssuch as newspapers, youth magazines, films, photographs, letters and all kinds of symbolic goods
associated with the emergence of the youth identities of the period in questionwere
collected and analyzed in order to shape the socio-historical context of their lives.
Informants were selected by way of the snowball procedure, that is, through
consecutive contacts based on social networks. The initial interview subjects were
identified via written sources (press, files and research studies). Additional subjects
who would be of significant contribution to the study were then located by way of
referrals received during the interviews. This process gave more importance to the
analytical representation of the subjects than to their statistical territorial and group
representation.
In relation to the systematization, interpretation, and representation methods, data
went through different stages depending on their nature and aims. In depth interviews, which allowed for life stories, were transcribed and classified according to four
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structural elements: subjects age, class, territory, and gender. After that, interviews
were read and listened to, in order to systematize them based on the identity profile
built through social practices and cultural expressions that the subjects had recalled.
Later, each subjects life story was structured and compared to other sources (written
and audiovisual materials, objects) in order to triangulate the information. Finally,
life stories were returned to their respective subjects in order to expand, specify or
correct data.

Panic and Evidence

The year Blackboard Jungle (1955) premieredin Chile it was called Semilla de
Maldadthe film Rebel without a Cause was launched. In Rebel without a
Cause, Jim Stark (James Dean), in an internal exile, faces a group of friends who
do not understand him. At the same time, he copes with his parents in a universe
ruled by adults and in which adults gave in (Monod, 2002:12223). Strictly speaking, since the early 1950s, the American cultural film industry had begun a clear
segmentation of its audience, favouring the world of youth by producing several
teenpics (Doherty, 2002) or films made for and starred in by youth. In 1953, The
Wild One portrayed Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) as the leader of a gang that
hung around the streets of different Midwestern towns in the United States, intimidating their inhabitants and ready to make the comfort and well-being ideals of the
American way of life stumble (Sol, 2006:166). The Wild One started the expansion of the black jacket style and its variants across the world (for example,Teddy
Boys, Rockers, Blouson Noir, Raggare, Halbstarken and Rebecos) with the image of
the tough, inscrutable, empty and solitary guy who James Dean took further two
years later in Rebel without a Cause. These films, among others, were to become a
symbolic framework which would articulatea bit earlier than the segmented cultural music industrythe production and reproduction of the first youth cultures in
North America and Europe. Only two years later, evidence of these first youth cultures appeared in Chile.
On 13 April 19592, when he was probably 17 years old, Carlos Boassi Valdebenito,
an upper middle class young man, part of a wealthy family and owner of all that
freedom in which bad seeds develop, (Vea magazine, 23 April 1959:16-17) who
lived in the noble municipality of uoa (Clarn, 22 April 1959) in Santiago, wore
a black leather jacket in the style of James Deans or Marlon Brandos characters,
his traditional and typical three-quarter montgomery and tight pecos bill blue
jeans (Clarn, 21 April 1959). He was the youngest of 16 children; his father was an
entrepreneuran Italian immigrantand his mother was a Chilean housewife. He
had reached 11th grade in the secular school San Pedro Nolasco and had his own
vehicle, an elegant Italian motorcycle, and [...] the key to get into his house whenever
he wanted (Ercilla magazine, 29 April 1959:16). He combed his hair backwards
with gel and was popular among young women in all senses, from his physical
appearance to his way of thinking He was tall, 1.80 metres [] a rather goodlooking person [] he stood out [] his son Carlos Boassi Leonicio3 recalls.
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In October 1958, Boassi Valdebenito had met Mara Luz Tamargo Gonzlez at a
party. She was in ninth grade at Liceo de Nias N9 and was the daughter of Alberto
Tamargo, owner of a bookstore in downtown Santiago, called Tamargo. He started
visiting her in her home and soon they started going out on his motorcycle to the
clubs Brujas and Charles (Ercilla magazine, 29 April 1959:17). The relationship he had with his girlfriend (who was 15 years old) was not going well. Carloto,
as his friends called him, had gone on an adventurous trip to the north of Chile and
Bolivia and he combined the thrill of speed with wandering (Vea magazine, 23
April 1959:17), which his girlfriend did not like. On Saturday 10 April, Mara Luz
got upset again because Carlos preferred his motorcycle to her (Ercilla magazine,
6 May 1959:8) and would not visit her on Sunday because he was going to travel to
participate in a motorcycle race that the Curacav fire brigade had organized (Ercilla
magazine, 6 May 1959:9). That Saturday, Mara Luz told him she was capable of
anything, even of killing herself (Ercilla magazine, 6 May 1959:9). Then she asked
him to bring her a gun in order to commit suicide because they had been arguing.
Carlos reported that she had the upper hand She was very domineering. She told
me bring me your gun if you are such a man (Vea magazine, 7 May 1959:16). In
order to make up, on Monday, 13 April, he picked her up on his Ducatti for a ride.
A few hours before, Carloto had borrowed a gun from his friend Orlando Zunino. I
told her I had taken the gun and she started to laugh. I also laughed. We walked hand
in hand along Vasco de Gama Street playing jokes on each other (Vea magazine, 7
May 1959:16). They stopped at Cruz Almeida Street and after a while, they argued
again. From a pocket of his jacket, Carloto took out the Famae 6.35 mm gun he had
borrowed from his friend.
At eight oclock, a neighbour heard a gunshot. When she got closer to the place,
she saw the young woman lying on the ground. Mara Luz was taken by other
people to the Hospital of Neurosurgery, where she died ten hours later. Carlos Boassi
Valdebenito hid throughout the next two weeks, which made panic grow and caused
the immediate criminalization from the media and the sanction of public opinion. He
eventually turned himself in to the magistrate Ral Guevara Reyes, who ordered his
immediate arrest; he had been accused of committing homicide. For several months,
the investigations yielded conflicting results, full of contradicting experts and disqualified witnesses and testimonies4.
The singularity of the incident Carloto was involved in and the opacity of the circumstances caught the publics attention. The press informed and caused an unprecedented moral panic (Cohen, 2002) in Chile towards these new youth identities,
disseminating recurrent judgments such as Boassis fearsome gang [] speaks to
the existence of a secret command of motorcyclists who would meet at a sports
club called Taurus (La Tercera, 17 April 1959). Also rampant were photo captions such as the innocence and beauty of the schoolgirl were about to tame the
rebel gangster. But Carloto soon reacted with morbid passions and gunshots (Vea
magazine, 23 April 1959:16).
In addition, the media sensationalism offers the first opportunity for reflection and
public debate on these new actors. Besides recording the different expert reports, the
media also recorded the testimonies of young people from Carlos and Mara Luzs
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environment. Likewise, the journalistic investigationsin depth articlesnot only

unveiled legal details of the case but also explored, based on some qualified sources,
the biological, social, educational, and sociological edges that explained the crime
and the appearance of these youth groups in the Chilean society. In fact, on 29 April
1959, the Ercilla magazine published a long article on the drama of the young [sic],
entitled A generation at stake. The article includes the extensive opinion of a well
known psychiatrist, and former Minister of Health, Juan Garafulic, where he states:
It is essential that men recover their authority and role as the man of the house. Women will
be imploring to go back home in 40 or 50 more years. Men have grown accustomed to
resting on their wives and children, who bring money home. In this way, men have lost
their authority at home []. Only money and material possessions are important. Girls
demand party dresses and social debuts; boys demand motorcycles and pocket money.
[]. (Ercilla magazine, 29 April 1959:16)

At the same time, the press in provincial cities such as Valdivia regularly talked
about Boassis trial. This media focus even took the form of El Correo de Valdivia
newspaper article titled Choleric Youth? which associates the confusing event in
which Carloto was involved with the moral madness of youth and adolescence
brought on by the strange and exhausting rhythms such as rock n roll, the colourful
clothes, the loose shirts, and the tight trousers, the shouts, and the speedy races on
rickety motorcycles (Correo de Valdivia, 28 April 1959).
Those opinions expressed a double complaint, common in different circles at
the moment: one was the growing perception that modernization was affecting the
privileged sectors of Chilean society by modifying the role of the family, especially
the role of the mother in the upbringing of her children. Due to her new role, not
only does she have children, she also produces goods. The role of the father also
changes: he is not the authority in the vigilance and control of the young people
anymore. At the same time, the second complaint addressed the material emancipation that young people had achieved via the pocket money provided by their parents
to spend on leisure activities widening their moratorium from the educational sphere
to leisure. By empowering them as consumers, pocket money allowed young people
to participate in the emerging market of youth leisure (eg cinema, nightclubs and
speed racing) and its concomitant: the emergence of mobs or gangs that install their
deviant practices in the cracks of institutional life. In this way, access to the segmented cultural industry that gives way to youth leisure is considered a threat as it is
located on a borderline among family, job, and school, where control from tutors or
supervisors is limited or nonexistent (Bothius, 1995).
The deviationist interpretations of the phenomenon are naturalized in the conservative Chilean society of the moment and are mechanically reproduced in the
media. These reproductions are based on the criminalization, stigmatization, and
confirmation of the youthful condition as a pipe dream of problem, torment or
drama: A threatening, but also vulnerable group. These interpretations are based on
the first socio-scientific contributions on youth behaviour and gang formation at the
beginning of the twentieth century in the United States (e.g., Stanley Hall in 1904
and research by members of the School of Chicago such as Robert E. Park in 1915),
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but, above all, on the research studies from the beginning of the 1940s by the North
American structural-functionalist sociology. In this sense, it is important to highlight that socio-scientific studies on youth in Chile and Latin America were poorly
developed well into the 1950s. Conceptual heritage, generically located in essays,
was primarily based on Ortega y Gassets (1968) generational theory and Jose Carlos
Mariteguis (1988) contributions as their critical contrast (Gonzlez, 2004b).
Although by the end of the 1930s, Anbal Ponce published two scientific works
referring to these groupsSociology of Adolescence (1938) and Adolescents
Ambition and Anguish (1939)his contributions tied together and summarized
most of the research studies related to the field developed in the United States and
Europe from the early twentieth century (particularly by Stanley Hall, Jean Piaget
and Eduard Spranger). Consequently, the theoretical views and foci of the educators
and psychologists of the region hardly went beyond the possibilities that the poorly
institutionalized social sciencessuch as psychology and sociologyprovided to
decipher the phenomenon. These views and foci primarily came from a stigmatizing structural-functionalism concerned with normalizing the dysfunctional or deviated young people resulting from the industrialization and rural-urban migration
processes. These foci and theoretical referents derived, among others, from Talcott
Parsons, who conceptualized youth as a social segment that maladjusted because
of an abrupt transition caused by the change from a traditional to a modern society,
needs and demands, in its rebelliousness,integration spaces: A disposition to work
within the system rather than against it (Parsons, 1963:130).
From a psychological perspective, the conceptual referents came from the understanding of youth as a universal state of the human being, where a turbulent battle
between instinct and culture takes place within the individual. This conflict, characterized by a lack of rationality and an excess of passion, explains the deviation from
the norm and a phase of confusion in the pursuit of identity (Erikson, 1950). In this
context, the nicknames colricos5 and carlotosa more radicalised version of the
colricos,with which the media and the public opinion qualified these new actors,
acquired their consistency and expressive meanings: rebellious, aggressive, and irate.
The generative role and responsibility of different institutions and the mass media
in making these deviated individuals into folk devils seem obvious, by creating
youth stereotypes and labels thus contributing to the creation of models that tell
society which behaviours and roles to avoid (Cohen, 2002). The profusion of information and the moral panic generated from this episode not only shed light on the
theoretical and conceptual referents Chilean society counted on to understand the
appearance of these new youth identities, but also lead to a partial indication of the
reach and depth of these expressions of identity in the country.

Living It Up: Motorcycles, Style, Class and Masculinity

Although Boassi Valdebenitos death prevents us from analyzing the story through
his personal biography and the youth model he incarnates, the accounts by several
informants from his generation and by his own son, Carlos Boassi Leonicio, allow
us access to some of the clues of these groups through their affiliations, practices and
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cultural images. He had a close relationship with his father. His career in dentistry
and his strong dedication to the profession did not impede him from working with
his father on numerous business endeavours that he started after his release from jail.
The chain of life experiences that his father was able to transmit to him, related to the
episode, helped Boassi Leonicio understand first-hand the trend and situation surrounding Carlotos youth during the 1950s. This trend is the combination of various
conditions that ended up giving Boassi Valdebenito a double foreignness: being the
son of an Italian immigrant with a small fortune (European porcelain trader, owner
of two hotels, and real estate constructor); and expressing publicly and dramatically his differences with the adult world, spectacularizing his youth identity,by
means of embracing a style and intra-generational sociability practices codified as
strange and transgressing. In fact, after dropping out of school, Carloto stopped
receiving pocket money from his family, but got part-time jobs in the neighbourhood
directly related to his new love, the first motorcycles arriving to the country via
direct import:
[] At that time, my father helped a mechanic [] some hours a week; he went there two
days a week and also on weekends and he learnt while he was there. Even though my
father, belonged to a middle-class, or upper middle-class family, he never counted on his
father giving him money, that is, many times he earned money working at those garages
and saved money assembling, fixing, or painting motorcycles in order to go on a big summer trip (Carlos Boassi Leonicio).

Although Carloto, like many other young men, worked to access these youthful
material and symbolic goods, most of his material needs were covered, since he lived
in his parents house. Therefore, he could spend the money he earned as he wanted
and did not need to share in the financial responsibilities at home (as happened with
many young Chileans at that time). This way, Carloto learned mechanics and saved
enough money to buy second hand motorcycles, pimp them and use them in one of
his favourite hobbies: competing in motorcycle races outside of Santiago.
Carlotos partial economic independence allowed him to use and own a traditionally adult and respectable means of transportation, which had become industrialized and widespread following the Second World War. However, its manipulation
and modification brought him closer to the world of young people since, according
to Hebdige, this bricolage operation subverts the original meaning of the motorcycle, turning it into a threatening symbol of group solidarity (2004: 144145),
essentially masculine:
They were mainly men. Because remember, at that time, trousers (for women) were not as
popular as they are now. [] So motorcycles were more like a man thing [] (Alicia
Acevedo, uoa, Santiago6).
[women] liked to be co-pilots, but not pilots; I dont want to be male-chauvinistic but it
was men who rode the motorcycles. (Jorge Sanhueza, Santiago Centro)

One of their main activities was travelling on their motorcycles during the summer
and going on trips to the coast, where some boys had beach houses. Those activities
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asserting the emancipation from parental control and sociability rules were carnivalized by means of style and an uninhibited and troublemaking attitude. Their slicked
down quiffs, certain arrogant male chauvinism, leather jackets and the deafening
noise of their motorcycles became a challenge to the syntax of their peers daily
lives and to the small resorts where they arrived, which ended up strengthening their
social, economic and cultural belonging hierarchy.
Carloto? [] I knew they lived there, in that house [San Sebastian resort], they came on
their motorcycles, making noise, they went everywhere at any time of the day [] The
colricos were well off people [] [they were] violent, arrogant, with their motorcycles,
they wore black, all leather, and they showed-off the money they had. I think we pushed
them away, [] as high middle-class, they were arrogant, I mean, [they said] here we are,
let us get past, and one of them, I dont recall his name, had been accused of killing his
girlfriend. (Celio Calvo, La Cisterna, Santiago).
Although some people thought that choleric meant you liked to be free [] with no one
telling you what to do [] a guy without responsibilities [] because all of the parents of
that time were very authoritarian (Jorge Sanhueza), little by little the image of the colricos mirrors the North American teenpics and is being constructed and settles around
otherness, authority and masculinity since they were the leaders, the cool ones, the chicks
went nuts (Boassi Leonicio).

After the murder in which Carloto was involved, the image thickened and the
first signs of youth tribalization were subjected to institutional criticismfrom
the police, the law and the mediastriving to produce a hegemonic interpretation of their nature through labelling. Consequently, in the experience of many
who were interviewed, these meanings are crystallized and the emerging images
of these young others, masculine, elitist, and minority are reflections of this
repertoire.
In this way, the distinctions established by the mass media are reiterated and
reproduced in the collective memory. These distinctions disassociate the experience
of youth from the values and attitudes represented by the more radical young people
who identify with the image of Dean, Brando, or Presley, synthesized and localized
in the colricos and the carlotos. At the same time, different forms of appropriation
and experience emerge for the stereotypical identity fed back by the mass media and
the segmented cultural industry.
This first case corresponds to a significant portion of the biographical narrations, which insist on the distance related to this type of youth identity, highlighting
their minority and masculine existence. They focus on the richest sectors of society,
whose anti-systemic behaviour is remembered as a kind of juvenile violence whose
source is the social class and the gender to which they belong:
They called the arrogant one Carloto. When the guy gave himself airs, when he was cool,
as they say now, he was called Carloto []. But they were a minority. They were not well
considered either. Those original carlotos were an icon, because the guy came from Las
Condes [an upper-class neighbourhood] [] People were very class-conscious: only the
rich people owned motorcycles. They were bad guys [] But you could instinctively tell
them apart (Leonardo Prez, San Bernardo).

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In this direction, it is necessary to point out that the image of these groups, built
upon the dominant classes, is the pillar of the testimonial imaginary, whose structural correlation has a partial, yet effective support. Contrary to what happened in
the United States and Europe, in Chile the youth identity prototype colrico/carloto
did not emerge from nor was it reproduced in the subordinate, popular or working
classes, as occurred with the Motorbike boys, Teddy boys, Rockers or Blouson
Noir.
In Chile, the children of the upper echelons were the first to have access to those
cultural goods associated with young people. According to Ahumada (1958), in the
early 1950s, the country was immersed in the import substitution economic model,
and had a slow industrial growth and an enormous agrarian delay due to the concentration of lands: The agrarian reform would not take place until the mid-1960s. This
gave shape to a society with evident structural inequalities and social disparities: By
the end of the 1950s, 9 per cent of the active population received about 43 per cent
of the national income (Correa et al., 2001: 186). For that reason, the purchasing
power and consumption of imported productsemblems of the new youth condition
such as jeans, motorcycles, leather jackets, youth magazines, discs and turntables,
among otherswere markedly unattainable for the common classes, whose teenage
children did not receive pocket money and were not able to afford these segmented
symbolic goods. The youth from these classes were workers, with a small minority
of them being students7; they did not experience the privilege of being semi-independent from their families nor the very condition of being young, since they had to
contribute to the economy of their homes.
We grew up in a period when everything was difficult, everything was hard to achieve []
there were people who bought two spoons of tea every day to be shared by their family of
four or five people [] everyone started to work when they were young, my husband []
when he was eight, nine years old, he worked at a factory filing toys. Young people were
actually adults because of this and they got married very young [] (Sandra Rivera, San
Miguel).

The second case corresponds to the emergence of the more evident effects of
the labelling and direct reception of the mass media: Young people who would turn
the stigma (of being young and rebellious) into an emblem. In spite of the huge
structural inequalities of the country in the 1950s, by the 1960s, the middle class,
mainly settled in the cities, would slowly grow, thanks to the expansion of education,
the growth of state bureaucracy, the effects of urban concentration and rural-urban
migration. The latter explains why the appearance of the first youth cultures does not
only occur in the upper classes, but also in the new metropolitan middle class levels.
It is this dissemination that allows us to dig more deeply into these groups and gives
us an idea of their extension.
The life experience of Jorge Sanhueza lvarez, born in 1937, serves as an
example. He was the son of a non-commissioned officer and a housewife, so his
childhood was marked by austerity, discipline and parental control, from which he
emancipated himself radically. His fathers institutional position guaranteed job
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387

stability and allowed the family to rise to the middle class. Sanhueza arrived in
Santiago when he was 17, after living and studying in different cities throughout
Chile. He joined the Air Force in 1958, where he studied and worked for three years
as a mechanic. Shortly after arriving to Santiago, and in a precarious way, Sanhueza
gained economic independence and, together with some colleagues and neighbours,
he started to buy motorcycles [] to gather in groups of seven, eight, ten, fifteen
single men and we went out trying to recover those working hours they had not
dedicated to themselves. In the afternoons and also on weekends, they gathered in
parks and streets in the centre of Santiago, went on motorcycle trips to beaches near
the city and went out to nightclubs and parties. A year after the event in which Carlos
Boassi had taken part, despite the class and territorial distance, the name to describe
the type of identitythe most extreme cholerismis spread and re-monopolized.
Sanhueza and his friends started to identify themselves as the carlotos:
And we also picked it up; we started to call ourselves carlotos, together with all of the
riffraff below us []. Being a Carloto meant to be a rebel, against the establishment,
against society [...]. And why carlotos? Because of this young man who killed this girl, his
girlfriend, out of rebelliousness, maybe because she was going out with some other boy,
and he felt jealous, he couldnt deal with it, so he overreacted, he shot her. [] Carlotos
family had money, he wasnt our friend, he belonged up there, he lived in Las Condes, I
never met him []. All the people in this age group, especially if they rode motorcycles,
were called carlotos [] (Jorge Sanhueza, Santiago Centro).

Part of Jorge Sanhuezas biography provides evidence of the consequences of

the labelling phenomenon spread by the mass media. It not only changed the representations of reality, it also altered reality itself by directing the performance of the
people, who started acting and shaping their identities according to these new representations. As Thornton (1995) suggests, the mass media and the music industry
finally were an active agent in the creation and reproduction of the youth cultures by
means of labelling them. The practices of the youth, as well as their restricted and
ghettoized styles, were visible through a process of confiscation, massively legitimizing and inoculating them into the global adolescent and into the social voice
itself. In the same manner, as Cross (1998) has shown in the case of the Teddy Boys,
the first youth culture in England surfacing toward 1954, an important part of the
identity of these groups was formed by what the representations of the adult society
had and by what adults expected from these young people. Therefore, it became a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
At the end of the 1960s, the theories formulated regarding these kinds of groups
in Europe and the United States restudied the tyrannical and unidirectional role of
the media and the segmented market in the automatic production and reproduction of youth cultures. However, the colricos went through two different microprocesses in Chile, characterized, at the beginning and from 1955, by a passive
assimilation of the segmented cultural film industry, and laterfrom 1959, when
their identity and labelling as the carlotos was strengthenedby an active and
expressive appropriation. Starting in 1959, the media labelling had bidirectional

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Yanko Gonzalez

consequences for these youth cultures as they were both structuring and being
structured by their own cultural and material practices. Thus, a process of simultaneous confiscation (by young people and the media) took place, conducted and
synthesized fundamentally by style. The first signs of this process are revealed in
Jorge Sanhuezas life story.
I was greatly influenced by Elvis Presley, not in terms of singing, because I was not good
at singing, but in terms of clothing, the way I dressed. The other one too, the rebel without
a cause, James Dean [] Some of us started to wear pink trousers at that time, short-sleeve
light blue or pink t-shirts. A man wouldnt wear that in those times, but Presley wore
them he also wore khaki, light brown and straight trousers so we all tried to imitate
him [] but what was cool was to ride a motorcycle, because there werent motorcycles
like there are now (Jorge Sanhueza, Santiago Centro).

Boassis son narrates the first effects of the active appropriation of the style
brought about through the coat initially popularized by the English general Bernard
Montgomery. His image among and in association with young people is ascribed to
the North American teenpics actor Montgomery Clift.
They wore leather jackets and montgomerys. [] They say my father started the montgomery trend. I dont know where he would have gotten it from, but at least a lot of people
have told me he started the montgomery. [] The buttons were made of something like
bones at the beginning, so they say my father bought a coat and changed the buttons and
[] thats why they called it the Carloto coat [] (Boassi Leonicio).

Soon after, these activities resulted in the well-known stylistic repertoire, which
had stemmed from several alterations and personal touches some youths had given
to their clothing and appearance. As Clarke (1976) and Hebdige (2004) suggest,
style turns up as an active, selective and consistent configuration where symbolic
goods and behaviours subjected to dynamic semantics are warped. These goods and
behaviours are able to organize a sense of belonging and group distinction basically through bricolagethe way objects, goods, and symbols are reorganized and
relocated in order to generate new meaningsand hegemony, the symbolic correspondence among objects, values, life styles, and subjective experience, among
others, used to express and strengthen group identities. In our case, for example, the
consistent combination of clothing with motorcycles, leather jackets, montgomerys (sleeveless jackets worn to dance and wander about), and motonetas can be
mentioned.
It is important to consider that this public declaration of juvenile identity through
clothing is basically new in the country, since at the beginning of the 1950s the range
of clothing tailored for young people was highly limited. Clothes were made,in a
context of simulation of international integration,by small factories and neighbourhood seamstresses (Montalva, 2004). Work clothes were worn during the week and
Sunday clothes, on the weekends. The colricos and the carlotos crossed the line,as
did their counterparts in the world,between a functional tailors shop and a fashion
showcase.
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389

Pololeo, Malones and Matins

Although everything revolved around motorcycles [], mechanics, races, the
weekend started with the motorcycle just recently fixed [] (Boassi Leonicio), the
members of these first youth cultures had enough time to meet with young people
from the neighbourhood in the afternoons and on the weekends. Small and middlesized parks became common spaces of socialization and interaction that widened
their social practices. There they planned their malones (small gatherings at someones home where one could dance), tours to the beach, visits to the boites (nightclubs and places of public leisure gradually taken over by young people), and, above
all, matin outings (film showings in the afternoon). These were spaces and times
that allowed young people to build their youth identity not only through the way they
dressed, but also through new rhythms that arrived slowly but decisively in the country by halfway through the 1950s, such as rock and roll.
It is worth mentioning that an important part of the democratization of the youth
condition of this timein the case of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, in the
lower classeswas the result of access to film productions at local and regional
cinemas, which transmitted the visual-juvenile aesthetics and also the incidental music of their process in shaping their generational identity, like rock and roll.
During most of the 1950s, access to youth symbolic goods (such as discs, turntables,
and clothing) was restricted to the upper classes and the radio programmes were
tailored for adults (tangos, mambos, boleros, Mexican folk music, and national folk
music), but when Blackboard Jungle premiered in 1955, the matins multiplied
youth and middle class attendance at the cinema: besides being semi-hidden places
for dabbling in love, matins became a vehicle to spread the words and beats that up
to that moment had been financially and territorially restricted and almost forbidden
on the radios, especially in the provinces. During the second half of the 1950s, the
exhibition of teenpics in Chile, particularly in Santiago, was abundant, especially
those related to rock and roll. There were eight films alone between 1956 and 19578,
not counting Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, which reached most
provinces in Chile and played for more than three years.
In this way, the matin made up for the absence of a locally segmented music
industry to spread the new rhythm, which would appear and make a significant
impact on the new ramifications of the youth Choleric archetype (rock n rollers)
starting at the beginning of the 1960s (Salas, 2003; Ponce, 2008)9. Several testimonies bear witness to the impact of the matin regarding the spread of rock and roll:
We would get together and usually go to the matin. One of the first musical films, which
was all the rage, was Blackboard Jungle. We saw them all and we came out dancing. []
(Lorenzo Carmona, Valdivia).
We would go to the matin on Sundays; the cinema was the Oden, on the Eighth Avenue;
[] and you could meet your friends quite often and look at the boys and things like that.
[] If you wanted to go to the cinema, you had to behave yourself; [] you cleaned the
house on Saturday night, on Sunday morning you went to the church, [] when we came
back, you had to pay attention to anything that needed to be done to get permission and
money for the matin [] it was a space for young people (Sandra Rivera, San Miguel).

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Yanko Gonzalez

Besides the matins and rock and roll, additional spaces that allowed other actors
to solidify their youthful identity appeared. On the one hand, the girls entered. Up to
this point, they had been permanently under sexual and moral watch and had much
more restricted spaces for identity building. On the other hand, the young people in
the provinces entered, and to a lesser extent, people of subordinate origins. They all
came together in the malones and boites, their own places where they could express
their youth and mix with the opposite sex.
The malones have the widest extension of the three activities and the testimonies
about their organization and experience are abundant:
[] we organized malones, we found a house where we could have a small party and
everyone had to bring something; at the beginning, at age 16, it was only soft drinks, no
alcohol, but two, three years later, there was everything. And they danced rock and roll
[] So I chatted, watching, trying to approach a girl I liked (Lorenzo Carmona,
Valdivia).
The malones, to which everyone had to bring something, we agreed on what to bring []
at that time, we talked and danced, and drank little (Alicia Acevedo, uoa).

These events have the particularity that they explicitly segregated the adult actors
from the interior of the family and the community, forming small gaps that allowed
for new manifestations of fashion, style, and youth sociability, including transgressions such as limited alcohol consumption and the carnal exercise implied by the
speed and skill of rock and roll. In a maln, for instance, girls could make their
youthful condition explicit through their sophisticated clothing and hairstyles and
experience, like the boys, the joy of being looked at. Flamboyant colours, poodle
skirtsusually made by relatives or local seamstresses imitating North American
fashionallowed girls to excerpt a degree of control over their bodies and access an
identity and filiations forbidden in other spaces:
[We wore] poodle skirts [in the malones], which were yellow, a beige or brown blouse,
with a yellow pin, rounded, pinned on our shoulders, which my aunt Carmen [made for
us]. [] we only wore underwear and a petticoat under the skirt, and short socks and canvas sport shoes or patent leather shoes. What I remember the most is my hairstyle [] I
had these buns or we wore ponytails or pigtails. [] Adult women didnt wear those
dresses, only the girls. [] (Rosario Casala, Buin, Santiago).

Beyond that, malones had a triple importance: first, they congregated most of
the people who were perceived as or who perceived themselves to be young people;
second, they created specific attributions and distinctions regarding age, separate
from the symbolic spaces and goods understood as adult; and third and most importantly, they established the distance and proximity of different youth sensitivities
based on their omissions and choices of these cultural goods. Contrary to what
took place in the boites, in the malones the actors themselves controlled the music
to which they danced, as well as the organization and production of the events.
Therefore, the material and symbolic contents that were believed to belong to the
youth image of the moment or, better said, that were felt to belong to a youthful
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Genesis of Youth Cultures in Chile

image of us, were key to understand the different youth identities both at an internal and external level, and these images were directly updated and crystallized. The
cooperative nature of malones strengthened these mechanisms since they did not
only involve bringing food and drinks, but also sharing vinyl discs to be listened and
danced to. This was an important aspect, since there was not much music available
for the youth at home.
From another angle, malones made up for the limited leisure and entertainment
spaces where youth could interact with the opposite sex and start love relationships,
even though these spaces were controlled and almost disciplined. It wasnt that we
did what we wanted and nobody said anything. The housewives were around. I think
there [was] control, because we had permission up to a certain time (Rosario Casala,
Buin). These spaces allowed gallantry, dabbling in love, and informal dating: What
Chileans call pololeo.
Moral rigidity and the strict affective prescriptions of the past slowly began to
become out-dated, thanks to the experiences of the new generations. This is why the
extension and institutionalization of pololeo since halfway through the twentiethcentury was one of the major driving forces of a young persons biography and the
main device that altered and deepened the short condition of being single, typical of
rural societies, to define the socio-cultural condition of being young. This premarital
condition,which had previously been severely watched and even sanctioned,started
to include younger and older people since this kind of relationship was not conditional on matrimony and the resulting step into adulthood for the sake of productive
and reproductive emancipation. Although contraceptives (pills and prophylactics)
were not yet widely used, the alternation of more important relationships (not necessarily long and without implications of procreation) ended up extinguishing the
condition of being single as an agglutinating identity agent and a biographic episode
of youth, especially in the upper and middle urban classes. This way, marriage
understood as the limit to youth in the pasttended to disappear as the last defining threshold of the condition of being young. Although adults tolerated it, pololeo
implied several customary norms that ritually regulated it: From pincharthe act
of wooing and seduction, moving to making the relationship explicit,the boy asking
the girl out, and the latter asking her parents for approval, to the physical and social
activities that were allowed.

Discussion: Subcultures or Countercultures,

Generational Hyperboles?
The youths polymorphism in this historical moment, particularly that of the colricos and the carlotos, and the material and symbolic ways that they used to build
their own identity and world as youth, created conceptual and theoretical problems
of a certain complexity. Since the late 1960s, the researchers at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham focused on the first youth
cultures that emerged in England beginning in 1950. Their empirical referents were
precisely combinations of youth styles similar to the Chilean ones. They proposed
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Yanko Gonzalez

the analytical concept of subculture for their referents, thus displacing the biological and deviationist theories and postulates, which were very fashionable at the time,
that reduced the problematic existence of youth cultures to a generational gap without paying attention to their social classes. In this way and through the Gramscian
concept of hegemony, an important part of the studies compiled by Hall and
Jefferson (1976)researchers at the CCCSthe styles and expressions of these
youthful groups concerning social and material life were understood as ways of symbolic resistance against the oppression of the control systems imposed by the dominant classes. Therefore, identity building was interpreted as a rebellious ritual and a
magic solution for the real class conflicts and contradictions, which were represented by young people in the theatre of hegemony (Feixa, 1999: 75).
However, not only do the colricos and the carlotos not fit this canonical and
specific notion of subculture coined by the authors in Birmingham, they also go
beyond the concept of counter-culture, a term used to refer to the alternative
youth cultures that emerged in the middle and educated classes, like the Beatniks and
Hippies. The identity building practices of such youth cultures aimed at articulating
an opposition toward the dominant institutional values, thus directly breaking with
the bourgeois cultural hegemony by means of political, artistic and moral dissent
(Hall, 1970).
The colricos and carlotos mostly bourgeois and middle class roots cannot be
matched to their European or North American peers, who were mostly part of the
subordinate and/or working classes. Their counter-cultural project was non-existent
and their sub-cultural constitution was restricted to their embryonic and rather harmless rebelliousness calling for the recognition of the renowned youthful condition.
Their resistance, in the most radical cases, did not focus on the reproduction of the
existing class relations, but, at most, on the perpetuation of the dominant intergenerational relations. Rather, it was a resistance to parental culture, which, as Cohen
(1980) posits, fluctuates between youths need to create and express autonomy and
difference with respect to their parents and the need to maintain their identification
with them. Their identity building around masculinity, for instance, expressed this
oscillation: a simulation of rebelliousness against parental domination that does not
imply subversion of the order and fundamentals of inter-gender, and subordinate,
relationships in the patriarchal family constitution. Furthermore, the daily activities
experienced in their peer groups strengthened this order as these practices served as
rehearsal for adult life: classism, authoritarianism and sexism.
For that reason, I believe these first youth cultures were mainly generational
connections: People who share the same socio-historical environment and the same
community of historical life, who can create a connection if they are of the same age
or in the same generational position (Mannheim, 1990). To a lesser extent, according
to Mannheim (1990), it is these self-conscious generational units that react together
and get worked up together, which implies a much more concrete identification
with certain historical-spiritual contents. In my opinion, it is clear that a significant
part of the biographical accounts convey this generational connection. Many of
the transformations of the parental culture, such as the spread of pololeo and the
mutation of the condition of being single, the new social practices in the interstitial
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393

spaces of institutional life, and the impact on the development of a segmented

cultural industry had a correlation to the stratification of experience. However, the
specific materials that shaped this state had substantial variations related to class,
gender and territory. The biographical accounts by women, for example, have more
restricted processes of youth experimentation in relation to the mens accounts, due
to womens greater dependence on, and vigilance and control from their parents
and to the limited access to the spaces and times that then belonged to the young.
The same happens to people from middle and lower classes or people from places
territorially far from the nodes of dissemination of the segmented cultural goods, for
whom the youth culture presented itself as a privilege, a short phase linked to the
preliminary moments of formal education.
These conditions and variants equally bear witness to the presence of more intense
generational identities, although they were held by small isolated minorities. The
existence of a self-conscious generational unit manifested by some more radical
Choleric youthlike the carlotosexpresses the greater importance these groups
gave to the youthful mark, since they acknowledged themselves and identified with
the contents and referents allotted by the group to that specific period in their biography. The articulation of these units had specific counterparts and contents, like the
spectacularization and media massification of style, and the social practices associated with it, but these units encountered material and symbolic limits in regard to
morals and values. These limitations ended up blurring and reducing more intense
identity elaborations, which allowed for the formation and extension of concrete
groups (Mannheim, 1990) in the wider society.
Despite the latter, the extensive genesis of generational connections that emerged
in Chile beginning in the second half of the 1950s expresses a cardinal fact:
Alteration of individuals modes of production, accompanied by the same habits
(Bourdieu, 1988). In this sense, the changes in the conditions of material and social
reproduction in Chile gave birth to new agents in vast sectors of the Chilean society.
Even if the most radical stories are limited to specific episodes in the biographies of
the interviewed young people, and the social construction of deviation built by the
media institutions can be read as an exaggeration, the colricos, and particularly the
carlotos, emerged as an extreme metaphora hyperboleof social change.
Years later, in the early 1960s, this hyperbole marked its referents because these
first youth cultures, generationally connected, gave way to the proliferation of selfconscious generational units and diverse concrete groups with a stronger identity
supportsymbolic definitions and boundaries. The colricos and the carlotos were,
in this sense, beachheads that were able to communicate and build young archetypes to be observed and appropriated by other young people, thus giving continuity
to these youth cultures. By 1961, the magazine Ercilla opened a report about the
Cartagena resort with the following paragraphs:
[] Those who believe that the James Deans and the black leather jackets only live
on the screen will be surprised if they go to Cartagena. There arent small groups there; its
almost all the young boys who wear the Blackboard Jungle clothes. Fortunately, many
of them only imitate the clothes and gestures, although groups of carlotos (as people call

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Yanko Gonzalez

them) have tried to destroy electrographs, where someone, innocently, wanted to interrupt
a series of rock and roll and put on a Mexican song. [] The James Dean outfit is cheap,
and also comfortable: blue jeans, a jacket, a thick sweater, long hair (saving money from
not having to go to the hairdressers) (Ercilla magazine, 1 March 1961:12).

Notes
1. This study is part of the results of the FONDECYT Project Nr. 11075007. The author thanks
the valuable participation of his colleagues, friends, and informants, especially Cecilia
Baeza, Cristian Seplveda, Leonardo Pia, Alejandra Cornejo, and Soledad Alarcn.
2. The Civil Registers Office recorded Boassis birth date as 14 February 1943; therefore,
on the day of the assumed crime, Carloto was 17 years old. However, the police found
the baptism certificate issued by the parish church San Crecente, where it says that he was
born on 22 August 1940. This fact turned him into an adult, at 19 and 7 months, and, therefore, attributable to criminal liability. A third document that was a source of dispute was
the fingerprint sample presented by the identification office, which states that Boassi was
born on 27 February 1942. In the end, the judge stuck to the certificate issued by the Civil
Registers Office due to its greater validity under the law and asked for an examination of
conscience (La Segunda, 29 April 1959).
3. The oldest son of Carlos Boassi Valdebenito; his identity, unlike the rest of the key informants and the life accounts herein included, is unveiled because of the characteristics of
the information given and his issued consent.
4. Finally, after months of journalistic scrutiny and police procedures, justice finishes its
work. The process assigned the number 48,598 in the Sixth Criminal Court gives account
of the details of the confusing event. Boassi alleged he was completely innocent. He
assured the court that Mara Luz had taken the gun from him when he had showed it to her,
and had shot herself in the head. It was a joke with a fatal ending, told Boassi to the press
(Ercilla magazine, 6 May 1959:8). After serving half of his sentence and because the judge
received a clemency petition presented by Carlotos family, which was signed by President
Eduardo Frei Montalva in December 1967, he was freed. They didnt judge Carloto
but the colricos, the rebel youth, Boassi told the journalist Jos Carrasco, when he was
finally free (La Cuarta, 30 August 2003).
5. The namemaking reference to the Greek-Latin theory of the four humours (choleric)
appears in the second half of the 1950s and first refers to the Chilean version of the
Motorbike boys and Rockers. Then, after the mid-1960s, with the invasion of British
rock and roll, the meaning of the term changes. The dictionary of Chilean idioms by
Morales Pettorino defines it as young and uninhibited rebel from the 1960s known for
his constant attitude of protest manifested, among other things, through a language, physical appearance and extravagant clothes which seemed innovative or colourful because of
it novelty (2006:652). This definition makes a clear reference to the Yes-Yes and Hippy
movements.
6. The real names of the informants were not used in this work. They have all been protected
with nicknames. However, socio-cultural equivalents were found for their names and surnames since they imply a specific origin. In terms of socio-territorial origin, the municipality and city where the informants spent their youth were mentioned, respecting the current
political and administrative divisions but looking for the socio-spatial equivalence in relation to the period when they locate their testimonies.
7. By the 1960s, only 9.87 per centof the young population (between 1519 years of age) was
in high school (INE 1999).

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8. In fact, during these years, according to our analyses of the entertainment magazine Ecran,
the following films were premiered: Rock around the Clock (Fred Sears) in December,
1956; Rock, Rock, Rock, in January 1957; Dont Knock the Rock (by Fred Sears) in
March 1957; Rock, Pretty Baby (Richard Bartlett) in July 1957; Crime in the Street
(Donald Slegel) in August 1957; The Young Stranger (John Frankenheimer) in December
1957.
9. These groups are shaped by the movement and conjunction of the Choleric youth archetype, which was created by the cinema in the image of an adaptation of Rock and Roll.

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Yanko Gonzlez has a PhD in social and cultural anthropology by the Universidad
Autnoma de Barcelona. He teaches social anthropology at the Institute of Social
Sciences at the Universidad Austral de Chile. He has researched on ethnographic
representation, and anthropology and history of youth. He has published Hroes
civiles y santos laicos (1999) and Jovens na Amrica Latina (Caccia-Bava, Gonzlez &
Feixa, 2004), among other books. He is also the main editor of Revista Austral de
Ciencias Sociales (Chilean journal). [email: ygonzale@uach.cl].

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Mritikumar Sarkar