Epilogue

The epilogue briefly pushes the book’s discussion forward in time, into 1974, when countercultural youths faced very different conditions put upon them by a military regime whose leaders were familiar with anticounterculture discourses, especially those of the Allende years. Upon the military coup (led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte) that ended Allende’s presidency and democracy in September 1973, matters turned from troublesome to dismal for many hippies (including Jorge Gómez), Siloists, and countercultural youths in general as the dictatorship forcefully imposed its notion about youth, discipline, and culture.

Siloism, the Self, and Total Revolution

This chapter shifts the book’s line of sight away from hippismo and toward the esoteric counterculture of Siloism and the group of Chilean Siloists called Poder Joven (Young Power). The chapter unpacks Siloism’s call for young people to focus their youthful energy inward, peer deeply into their own psyches, experience fully the connection between mind and body, and realize socialismo libertario, or libertarian socialism. Such undertakings would effectively transform the individual, his or her immediate surroundings, and the world. These and other aspects of Siloist thought and practice raised quite a ruckus among those pledged to protect culture and public morality, thus motivating authorities to repress what many identified as Poder Joven’s depravity.

The Opening Set

The book’s opening chapter takes the reader to the Piedra Roja rock music festival. It focuses on the voices and agency of those who gathered—many of them hippies—at that landmark event in Greater Santiago’s municipality of Las Condes during a three-day weekend in October 1970. One person in particular, Jorge Gómez Ainslie, is the chapter’s principal figure. His experiences and proclivities as a teenager point to why the festival happened, and the people and goings-on at Piedra Roja speak to the Chilean counterculture’s coalescence, attributes, and allure during the late sixties and early seventies.

A Lot of Searching for the Magical

This chapter examines gender norms and sexuality, drug use, and music—important signifiers of identity, sociability, and agency. In popular parlance, “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” often prompts thoughts of hippies practicing free love while stoned and listening to Jimi Hendrix. A lot of that happened. But the adage also serves as a doorway into a broad range of sensibilities, innovations, and conflicts that lay bare cultural contestations—with generational overtones and sociopolitical implications—during Chile’s road to socialism then dictatorship. Sex, drugs, and rock music were part and parcel of a generation’s Zeitgeist, as many young people searched for things ethereal and new at a unique time in modern history.

A Bad Moon on the Rise?

An amalgam of circumstances and phenomena, including intergenerational dissonance and the outright rebelliousness of many young people, the “youth question” of the 1960s and 1970s was a complex substantiation of a generation gap with period-specific ideational and behavioral qualities and transnational manifestations. In Chile, the period saw student movements, outbreaks of street violence, and widely shared consternation about perils threatening the nation’s social and cultural footings, with the era’s main combatants instrumentalizing the youth question to admonish rivals. This chapter situates the Chilean case in a transnational context marked by the political strife and youthful activism—especially that of 1968— to provide substrate for the book’s examination of Chile’s counterculture and reactions to it.

The Palomita and Her Nest

This chapter focuses on the novel Palomita Blanca (Little White Dove) by Enrique Lafourcade. This best-selling novel in Chilean history, tells of counterculture, class, love, and heartache, with hippismo and Siloism making their marks in the lives of the story’s two young protagonists. Published in 1971, Palomita Blanca reflects the combination of lucid observation, misreading, and media-roused hogwash that characterized much of mainstream responses to both the youth question and counterculture. It is, of course, a work of literature, with all the leeway that grants. But the novel’s reach, including its extensive use in secondary schools, has done much to shape how more recent generations in Chile have come to understand the late sixties and early seventies.

Good Young Chileans

The imperatives of censuring and limiting the cultural heterodoxy of young people, in combination with the polemical barrages being exchanged among sociopolitical foes over counterculture, accorded particular utility to the subject of this chapter: the “good young Chilean.” The era’s foremost political factions each defined their own activist youths as good young Chileans who stood in contrast to both countercultural youths and their opponents’ young militants. For the Left, projections of the good young Marxist were particularly useful in discerning what properly revolutionary conduct was or should be in light of the revolutionary pursuits of Siloists and other heterodox youths. But intergenerational friction arose within leftist ranks as some young radicals gravitated toward forms of personal agency and expression that typically were associated with counterculture.

Contesting Hippismo

This chapter details the highly politicized moral panic that exploded onto the scene in response to hippismo—beginning with the public outcry over Piedra Roja—and emphasized such matters as sexual liberation and the use of marijuana as countercultural menaces to the Chilean family and nation. The chapter argues that as morality politics exposed mainstream values shared by leftists, centrists, and rightists alike, these groups also exploited such anxiety to score political and cultural points against their adversaries as the body politic polarized further.

Hippie Chilensis

Initiating the book’s closer reading of counterculture, this chapter looks at hippismo’s people, spaces, and expressions, spotlighting what hippies thought about their lives and the heterodoxy to which they contributed. It shows that while hippismo was of foreign origin, its Chilean practitioners made it theirs in everyday and pronounced ways. The chapter also maps hippie hangouts in and outside Greater Santiago, including the usual haunts of both affluent and working-class criollo hippies, as well as small-scale experiments in collectivism and communitarianism. Class is of particular importance in this discussion, as hippismo had the capacity to blur its inherent distinctions. Yet class remained a potent determinant of sociability that complicated young people’s generational identity, just as generation complicated class.

Introduction

This section introduces Chile’s criollo (or home grown) counterculture and the broader subjects of youth and youth culture during the late sixties and early seventies. It situates the phenomenon amid the country’s cultural and political landscapes on the eve of and during the “Chilean Road to Socialism,” the revolutionary project of Marxist President Salvador Allende and his governing coalition, Popular Unity. The section provides a theoretical framework for identifying and understanding counterculture and its Chilean peculiarities. Moreover, it describes the book’s novel approach to the subject in the context of Latin American historiography on youth, youth movements, and counterculture.