Great article from the New York Times on Chile´s Adolescent Sexual Revolution

From the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html

(To see photos: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/09/world/20080913CHILE_index.html)

September 13, 2008
In Tangle of Young Lips, a Sex Rebellion in Chile
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

SANTIAGO, Chile — It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America’s most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaetón beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls ages 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts, revealing bras, tattoos and nipple rings.

The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can.

And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.

Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong into that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youths are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.

“Chile’s youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct,” said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile’s Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.

The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties, an explosion of Internet connectivity and through Web sites like Fotolog, where young people trade suggestive photos of each other and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,500 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society.

“We are not the children of the dictatorship; we are the children of democracy,” said Michele Bravo, 17, at a recent afternoon party. “There is much more of a rebellious spirit among young people today. There is much more freedom to explore everything.”

The parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and to escape the book-burning times of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging, and the pregnancy rate among girls under 15 has been on the rise, according to the Health Ministry.

Indeed, adolescent sexuality has changed throughout Latin America, Dr. Ramiro said, and underlying much of the newfound freedom is an issue that societies the world over are grappling with: the explosion of explicit content and social networks on the Internet.

Chilean society was shaken last year when a video of a 14-year-old girl eagerly performing oral sex on a teenage boy on a Santiago park bench was discovered on a video-hosting Web site. The episode became a national scandal, stirring finger-pointing at the girl’s school, at the Internet provider — at everyone, it seemed, but the boys who captured the event on a cellphone and distributed the video.

Chile’s stable, market-based economy has helped to drive the changes, spurring a boom in consumer spending and credit unprecedented in the country’s history. Chile has become Latin American’s biggest per-capita consumer of digital technology, including cellphones, cable television and Internet broadband accounts, according to a study by the Santiago consulting firm Everis and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Navarra in Spain.

Chileans are plugged into the Internet at higher rates than other South Americans, and the highest use is among children ages 6 to 17. Therein lies a central factor in the country’s newfound sexual exploration, said Miguel Arias, a psychologist and head of the Santiago consulting firm Divergente.

Fotolog, a photo-sharing network created in the United States, took off in the last two years in this country. Today Chile, which has a population of 16 million, has 4.8 million Fotolog accounts, more than any other country, the company says. Again, children ages 12 to 17 hold more than 60 percent of the accounts.

Party promoters use Fotolog, as well as MSN Messenger, to organize their weekend gatherings, inviting Fotolog stars — the site’s most popular users, based on the number of comments they get — to help publicize the parties and attend as paid V.I.P.’s. Many of the partygoers use their online nicknames exclusively, and some of the wildest events are dominated by teenagers who call themselves the “Pokemones,” with their multiple piercings, angular and pressed hair, and devil-may-care attitude.

Dr. Arias did a study of the Fotolog phenomenon, scrutinizing the kinds of photos teenagers are posting, even the angles and distances of the pictures — all of which are part of an “identifiable” language, he said. “The kids of today are expressing their sexuality in erotic ways for the whole world to see.”

That online world also carries over to Santiago’s parks, plazas and the afternoon parties, where teenagers go to discover the physical side of their digital flirtations. At the Bar Urbano disco on a Friday afternoon, a 17-year-old boy, Claudio, danced with Francisca Durán, also 17, whom he had just met, and soon the two were kissing and rubbing their bodies together. They posed eagerly for photos, sucking each other’s fingers as Claudio put his hands under the girl’s T-shirt. Within minutes they separated and he began playing with the hair of another girl. Soon, they, too, were kissing passionately. Claudio, who declined to give his last name, made out with at least two other girls that night.

“Before, someone would meet and fall in love and start dating seriously here; at a party today, you meet like three people and make out with all three,” said Mario Muñoz, 20, co-owner of Imperio Productions, which organizes some of the larger 18-and-under parties.

“There are very few kids having serious relationships,” he said, an observation shared by some doctors trying to reduce teenage pregnancy here.

On a recent Saturday, about 1,500 teenagers piled into the cavernous Cadillac Club, another downtown disco, for Imperio Productions’ weekly event. The partygoers, many no more than five feet tall, lined up at the bar to buy orange Fanta and Sprite, wearing oversize sunglasses.

Not too long ago, Mr. Muñoz and his brother Daniel were teenagers attending such parties themselves. Now they defend their parties as good, clean fun. Alcohol is not allowed, and cigarettes are not sold, though smoking was widespread among the teenagers at the Cadillac Club. Security guards monitor bathrooms and regularly throw out boys whose groping crosses the line — if the girls complain.

The Muñoz brothers said that party promoters feel pressure to be “hotter” than their competitors.

That includes scantily clad, older male and female dancers; strip shows that hold back just enough to remain legal; and party names intended to titillate, like “What would you do in the dark?” On this night, dancing was interrupted for a “slapping” contest onstage in which a boy, pulled randomly from the crowd, was blindfolded and had his arms held behind his back. A lineup of girls and boys took turns slapping him, with the final blow delivered by a heavyset D.J. that sent the slender boy flying across the stage. As he rubbed his reddened face, the boy got his reward: the chance to make out with the girl of his choice in public to the screams of other teenagers.

“Everything starts with the kiss,” Nicole Valenzuela, 14, said during a break from dancing at the Cadillac Club.

“After the kiss follows making out, and after that, penetration and oral sex,” she added. “That’s what’s going on, sometimes even in public places.”

Her mother, Danitza Geisel, a 34-year-old sex therapist, said in an interview that she did not worry about her daughter’s attending the parties and, expressing a somewhat contrarian view among academics here, she said the current generation of teenagers was no more promiscuous than previous ones. But Ms. Geisel lamented the dearth of sex education in Chile.

The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education. Chile’s first public school programs were put in place at the end of the 1960s. But after the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government ordered sex education materials destroyed, and moral conservatism took hold. It was not until 20 years later, in 1993, that a new sex curriculum was introduced in the schools. Even so, by 2005, 47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with the avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet.

“Of course we are not happy with that,” said María de la Luz Silva, head of the sexual education unit of the Education Ministry. She said that the explosion of Internet access had created a “tremendous cultural breach” that was straining the limits of educators, but added that the ministry was putting in place a new sex education curriculum this year to better “protect” children.

For now, Chile’s teenagers are making decisions on their own.

“This is about being alive,” Cynthia Arellano, 14, said after the Bar Urbano party. “It is all about dancing, laughing, changing the words of the songs to something dirty.”

And with a slight giggle creeping in, she said, “Well, it’s about making out with other boys.”

Pascale Bonnefoy and Tomás Munita contributed reporting.

Victor Jara

Recently, I read Victor: An Unfinished Song, Joan Jara’s memoir of her life and the life of her late husband, Victor Jara, the famous Chilean folk singer killed during the coup d’etat. I was greatly moved by this book and saw some of myself in the writer.

Joan Jara grew up in London during the Second World War. Her parents were middle-class socialists. She fell in love with dance at an early age and became a ballerina, which is where she met her first husband, Patricio, a Chilean dancer (and later choreographer and political dissident). They moved to Santiago in the early 1950s and had the opportunity to tour the country with the ballet. It was those early trips that first awakened her political consciousness:

These early experiences in Chile seemed to me like going backwards fifty years in time as well as traveling so many thousands of kilometres, while the extraordinary beauty of the landscapes, the ocean and the mountains made the poverty and misery much harder to see. I was wrapped in a kind of cocoon – the egocentric life of the professional dancer, bounded by the disciplines of training and rehearsal, as strict as the routine in a convent. We might find ourselves in the middle of the Atacama desert or in the land of the Mapuches, but we traveled in our own micro-climate.

Then, as today, English-speaking, white foreigners enjoy a great deal of privilege. Americans can come to Chile and get jobs without credentials that Chilean study for years to have because English is the key to social mobility. In fact, there is a lot of reasonable resentment of native-speaker English teachers like myself.

Then, as today, the wealth gap was enormous and the European-descended upper classes live in the barrio alto or in estates in the countryside, while the working class live in poblaciones in the city and countryside. They are like two different worlds – two worlds which I have also navigated between in Chile. That is, the world of my wealthy students and the world of the poor city kids at the foster home or my boyfriend’s family in the countryside.

Victor, of course, came from a very different background. He grew up in a poblacion in the countryside and his father was an inquilino (tenant farmer) and an abusive alcoholic. The family lived in extreme poverty both in the countryside and when they moved to the city, to the poblacion behind the Estacion Central (still one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Santiago.) His mother worked from 4:00 am until late at night selling food in the market, until the day she died of a stroke when Victor was a teenager. His mother, who he adored, had taught him to sing, but he learned to play the guitar by himself. Like Violeta Parra, he traveled around Chile learning and cataloguing the folk songs of the different regions.

After a stint in the army and at a seminary, he got a scholarship to study acting at the Universidad de Chile. There, he met Joan, who was his movement teacher. She and her husband had separated after the birth of her eldest daughter, and she and Victor started seeing each other soon after. He opened her eyes to a side of Chile she had not seen before:

I myself was no longer a raw gringa. With my gradual Chilenisation came also the shedding of many feelings and prejudices which I had had when I first arrived in the country. I no longer felt an unbridgeable abyss between myself and the extremely poor who lived in the shanty-towns and urban slums. I had many friends and acquiantances among them. Not only did I understand much more intimately what their lives were really like, but, without idealizing them, I felt much more comfortable in their company than in that of our middle-class neighbours.

Though he was originally known as a gifted actor and director, Victor became more and more involved with singing and songwriting. The Jaras attended Peñas, meetings of political-active artists and musicians, where they formed what came to be
known as Nueva Cancion, the New Chilean Song Movement.

Nueva Cancion has strong parallels to the folk music revival in the United States during the 1960s, and Victor’s role was similar to that of Pete Seeger. The movement was an attempt to draw from the older folk tradition, to reinvent it as a reaction to the commercialization of music and to use it as a vehicle for social protest. Victor worked with Violeta Parra and her children Isabel and Angel (also singers); with Quilapayun, perhaps the best-known Nueva Cancion group; and with Inti-Illimani. They became internationally-recognized and toured around the world.

Back in Chile, they strongly supported the campaign of Salvador Allende and the reforms of his government, Popular Unity. The Left, in particular the Communist Party and the trade unions (organized by the CUT), had a strong interest in promoting cultural work. The poet Pablo Neruda became a sort of national hero; Joan Jara promoted the Bailet Popular; and the Brigadas Ramona Parra painted gorgeous, colorful political murals all over the city at night:

Indeed, although there was much impatience for ever more achievement, a great deal had already been done. The nationalization of one of the largest publishing houses was an example. During the three years of the Popular government, Quimantu, as it was renamed, published dozens of paperback editions of world literature at prices that everyone could afford, and distributed them to the newspaper kiosks where they competed with the US comic strips. Editions were sold out almost immediately and you could see ordinary working people on the buses reading Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain; young Chilean poets and novelists were given their first chance of being published; new magazines and other publications appeared, like the popular history series Nosotros Los Chilenos, which gave a vision of Chile and her people far different form the traditional identikit picture of the roto chileno, telling in words and pictures the story of the poblaciones, the mines, the fishermen, of working-class struggle and repression, of the earthquakes and natural disasters, and even of the growth of the New Chilean Song Movement.

Unfortunately, the many benefits brought to the poor in the Chile thanks to Popular Unity sparked a virulent backlash by the upper classes. The capitalist class generated shortages by stockpiling or destroying needed commodities; the transportation companies called bosses’ strikes; and the CIA supported it all. The popular classes attempted to fight back with volunteer efforts and self-organization, but they were ultimately defeated by the guns and bombs of the 11th of September.

Victor, like so many others, was “disappeared” in the days immediately following the coup. The CUT had put out an emergency call during the coup for all workers to go to their place of work, and so Victor headed to the Universidad de Chile, knowing full-well that he was a major target. The armed forces invaded the university and took everyone to the Estadio Nacional (the National Stadium, now known as the Estadio Victor Jara), which was transformed into a makeshift concentration camp. Thousands of people were tortured and detained and hundreds were killed in the first days. Victor was found in the morgue that week, with all of the fingers in his hands broken, and his family fled the country soon after. It’s absolutely chilling to read the rapidity with which this all took place and the utter inability to fight back.

Joan Jara also notes the inadequacy of the justice rendered since that time (writing in 1998):

Chile is still bound by the constitution invented during Pinochet’s dictatorship where the Senate is weighted by designated, unelected senators, among them other ex-generals who were his comrades-in-arms at the time of the military coup. This in itself makes it impossible to change the constitution. . . A large percentage of this generation has not enrolled on the electoral register because it has no faith in this ‘democracy’ and repudiates an economic system where the gap between rich and poor is greater than ever before.

Immense fortunes were amassed during Pinochet’s regime by that small group of his supporters who profited from the free-market system, untrammeled by democracy. The same group still wield the economic power, own or control the mass media and have the lifestyle of the international jet set. Of course, the benefits of these riches have not ‘trickled down’ to the poorest level of the population, which still lives in extreme hardship and deprivation.

We have had nine years of this so-called democracy, but to this day the great majority of the disappeared prisoners have never been found, the torturers and murderers have not been punished, and an amnesty has protected even the known perpetrators of the crimes that were committed. . . Chile is still a very divided country.

Sadly true.



Victor Jara, Manifesto (written in the weeks before his death)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en8yqVxuT-U

I don’t sing for love of singing,
Or because I have a good voice.
I sing because my guitar
Has both feeling and reason.
It has a heart of earth
And the wings of a dove,
It is like holy water,
Blessing joy and grief.
My song has found a purpose
As Violeta would say.
Hardworking guitar,
With a smell of spring.

My guitar is not for the rich
No, nothing like that.
My song is of the ladder
We are building to reach the stars.
For a song has meaning
When it beats in the veings
Of a man who will die singing,
Truthfully singing his song.

My song is not for fleeting praise
Nor to gain foreign fame,
It is for this narrow country
To the very depths of the earth.
There, where everything comes to rest
And where everything begins,
Song which has been brave song
Will be forever new.

Teleradio Donoso

At the concert

Several weeks ago, we went to see Teleradio Donoso, this up-and-coming Chilean band, and they're our current favorite. Check out their videos from their album, Gran Santiago:

Eras Mi Persona Favorita (You Used to Be My Favorite Person):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfXTQfhF4Ag

Gran Santiago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSWsAWVjuRM

And from their new album --

Amar en El Campo (Love in the Countryside):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su3UWFD0c3E

Another weekend in Paine

I spent the weekend in Paine at Marcelo's family's house. It's so nice to be outside of the city: to breathe fresh air and be surrounded by trees and fields, with the mountains in the distance. The house is cozy, especially in the winter. It's basically a wood cabin, that's heated by a wood-burning stove. Marcelo's mom is a great cook and there are always lots of relatives around. I really love spending time there.


The view in front of the house


The almond orchard next to the house


Meow Meow, Marcelo's neice's cat


Me and Marcelo


Marcelo at the house he's working on


A view out the window of the house Marcelo's working on

Nicanor Parra, antipoet

Since picking up a copy of Nicanor Parra's "Canciones Rusas" (Russian Songs) at the Feria Bio Bio a few weeks ago, I've become a big fan. He is Chile's most famous contemporary poet, and the brother of Violeta Parra (see below). His most famous collection of poems is "Poemas y Antipoemas" (Poems and Antipoems.) He writes in a very straightforward manner -- the meaning is transparent and the language is unadorned. I'm including a translation I made the other day for a friend of one of my favorite of his poems.


The Final Toast

Whether we like it or not
We only have three alternatives:
Yesterday, today and tomorrow

And not even three
Because as the philosopher says
Yesterday is yesterday
It belongs to us only in memory:
From the rose that has already lost its petals
You cannot take another petal from her.

The playing cards
Are only two:
The present and tomorrow

And not even two
Because it is a well-established fact
That the present does not exist
Except in so far as it makes itself past
And has already passed. . .,
like youth.

In short
Only tomorrow remains for us:
I lift my cup
For that day that never arrives
But that is the only
One actually available to us.

"There are in every part of the world men who search. I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introduction of invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself."
-- Franz Fanon

July, So Far

The past couple weeks have been really nice (except for the awful, disgusting smog, of course.) The big news is that my friend Daniel (who I knew from Berkeley) moved into my apartment. He volunteered at a community center through the organization I'm volunteering with and is now back in Santiago working for the organization. He's a really cool person and I'm really happy to have someone else to hang out with here since Vero is in Europe on vacation for the month.


The roomies: Carlota the Cat, me, Vero and Daniel

Two weekends ago, Vero and Daniel and I went to a great dinner party at Eduardo and Genaro's house. They invited a bunch of very interesting women they know: a deaf-rights activist; a woman who works with Eduardo in an empowerment program for underprivileged women in Santiago; and a woman who is working on an International Labor Organization project with seasonal farmworkers in Chile.

The next day, I went down to Paine to have Sunday lunch with Marcelo's family. He lives with his parents (who are actually his aunt and uncle) and his sister (who's actually his cousin) and her daughter and his grandmother. In the house next door, lives his other aunt and uncle and two cousins and their grandmother. His other sister and her family live nearby, so there are always a ton of people around. The families built the houses themselves and the houses are surrounded by orchards. Marcelo and his brother-in-law and his sister's boyfriend all work for his uncle's construction company. The houses are like cozy cabins -- they're built of wood and have these small Scandanavian wood-burning stoves that keep them warm. The kittens were curled up under the stoves -- I kid you not (it was adorable). His three little neices played outside and looked at princess pictures books, and the guys watched soccer with the grandmothers, and the aunts and sisters cooked a huge meal. They're a nice family and like to laugh and the women make fun of the men. We looked at lots of old pictures. It was really nice being there. It's so different from my life at home (and my life here.)

Last weekend, Daniel and I went to see a couple of very interesting films at the Cine Arte Alameda about the student protests in 2006. If you want to learn more about it, he did a write-up on his blog, so check it out: www.danielsaver.blogspot.com
And afterwards, we had wine and cheese with Vero and Eduardo and Genaro and kept her company as she packed for her trip.
The next night we went out with Marcelo and on Sunday Marcelo and I went to this huge feria, the Bio Bio, and walked around for several hours. They sell everything imaginable, from pirated videos, to electronics, to clothing, to furniture, etc.

This week, I finished my three kids classes, which was exciting. A semester is a long time actually, even though it's only three months. I'll miss my students a lot. The kids here are so sweet and really a lot of fun.

And this weekend was great. My friend James, who lived here in Santiago before, just got back from traveling in Peru and Bolivia, so he's staying with us for the week. He has a great sense of humor and always makes me laugh. Yesterday, all the boys were here for brunch (Daniel, James, Zack, Marcelo and Pancho.) Afterwards, we climbed up the Cerro Santa Lucia to check out the beautiful view after the rain. I think it's the most beautiful sight I've seen in the entire time I've lived in Santiago. From there, we headed over to Bellavista and hung out until it got dark at one of the bar/cafes on the street.

Anyways, life is good here as you can probably tell. Hard to believe how much time has gone by.


Brunch with the boys (Pancho, Zack, James)


Marcelo and James' GQ shot


Zack looking very angustiado (he misses his polola)


A wintery Cerro Santa Lucia


Looking out across the city to the mountains from the top of the Cerro Santa Lucia


Me and Marcelo (awww)


Santiago at its most beautiful (after the rain)


Daniel wolfs down a triple-decker sopapilla sandwich on the Pio Nono Bridge over the Rio Mapocho in Barrio Bellavista


Daniel's GQ shot