“B. D. Q. C.,” as he signed his letter, must have felt pretty special that New Year's Eve of 1973. Some time that evening, the 15-year-old Communist boy from Santiago de Chile kissed a 17-year-old Communist girl admired for her beauty by all the young Communists from the local headquarters of the Juventudes Comunistas de Chile (JJCC), or Jota, as the youth wing of the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCH) was nicknamed. He had never dated an older woman before, and though he bragged about having kissed thousands of other girls, he had never truly fallen in love until then. “I dated her for only 13 days. We broke up, but every day that goes by I love her more and more,” he confessed in a letter to the editor of the young Communists’ magazine a few days later. To make matters worse for our lovelorn teenager, the object of his affection did not stay single for long. “She is now dating another guy from the Jota. Every day that goes by I grow more jealous of him and of everyone who talks to her, because even though I'm not with her any more, I dream we are still together, and I have hopes to be with her again.” The existence of a place like the JJCC local headquarters, which all the people involved in this romantic affair visited regularly, was the cause of both solace and affliction for this young man: “I waste the whole afternoon in the headquarters waiting for her to arrive and greet her, so my eyes can take her in. I think about her every minute, while she has thousands of things to think about, and I have only one.”Footnote 1
This article delves into the social and romantic lives of young Chilean Communists like B. D. Q. C. The article's focus is on the era often called the “long Sixties,” which here spans from 1958 to 1973.Footnote 2 Under the leadership of Mario Zamorano, first, and then Gladys Marín, the JJCC went from being a small cadre organization of roughly 1,000 to an impressive mass organization of more than 80,000 members. The growth, particularly noteworthy among previously underrepresented constituencies like young women and middle-class youth, gained greater momentum after the triumph of Chile's first Socialist president and long-time Communist ally Salvador Allende in the 1970 presidential elections.Footnote 3 By the time of the 1973 coup that ended Allende's experiment in democratic socialism, the JJCC was leading the student governments of the most important public universities in Chile (the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad Técnica del Estado), publishing its own magazine (Ramona), and producing music under its own record label (Discoteca del Cantar Popular). In addition, four of its leaders sat in Congress: Alejandro Rojas, Eliana Araníbar, Orel Viciani, and the aforementioned Gladys Marín.
The main purpose of this article is to account for the radicalization of vast sectors of Chilean youth during the Sixties. It does so by shifting the focus from the strictly political aspects of left-wing activism to the lively social life that was part and parcel of this activism. While scholars point to the increasing dominance of ideology when studying the radicalization of the Sixties, this article shows that Communist ideology was embedded in a rich web of social and interpersonal relationships. Bringing together thought and emotion, I contend that the appeal of the left among the youth of the era cannot be understood without recourse to feelings of friendship and love.
The article is divided into four sections. The first section, intended as a case study of the social life of the young Chilean Communists, examines peer sociability in party headquarters, where young men and women interacted with little to no adult supervision. It shows that the JJCC's language of camaraderie was rooted in social practices—sharing a cup of coffee, playing games, dancing together—that made the promise of community a reality for a number of young men and women who visited these headquarters. The following three sections study the romantic life of young Communists. Love played a pivotal role in their lives. Most longed for a deep, fulfilling relationship with a compañero, or comrade. Whereas previous generations of Communists had tended to date and marry people who did not belong to any political party and who sometimes did not even share their political views, love among comrades became the measure of political commitment in the Sixties. A significant number of JJCC members—perhaps as many as a third of them—married within the organization, and many others married Communist sympathizers and other left-leaning people.Footnote 4
Several changes led to the notable increase in romances among Communists. First, the number of Communist women, especially teenage and young adult women, grew significantly between 1958 and 1973.Footnote 5 This made it easier for Communist men to date and marry within the JJCC and PCCH organizational structure. PCCH membership was still predominantly male and working class, but the growing popularity of Communism among high school and university students of both sexes transformed the JJCC into a surprisingly heterogeneous organization that appealed to men and women from different social classes.Footnote 6 Second, the JJCC's new understanding of youth and youth activism also contributed to the increase in the ratio of romances. The leadership worked hard to adapt the JJCC to the times, organizing a variety of social, cultural, and recreational activities—from music festivals to social parties—to attract young people, which made it easier for male and female members to meet, mingle, and fall in love. The most iconic political activities of these years—campaigning during the night, marching from one city to another, and doing volunteer work elsewhere than your home region—also lent themselves to romance.Footnote 7 Finally, this was an era enamored with love. As one late 1960s sociological study discovered, Chilean youth thought of love as essential to “the search for happiness and fulfillment,” and many linked it to universal fraternity and solidarity.Footnote 8 Young Communists felt an intense need to date and marry those who shared their ideology. The most committed of them favored relationships with partners who not only belonged to the same organization but also understood the paramount importance of politics in their lives and were willing to make sacrifices.
The young Communist leadership both encouraged and sought to control these romances. It put forth a vision of comradely love among like-minded young people that also conveniently channeled passionate, hormonal youth into responsible monogamous relationships. The key terms were compañero, compañera, and compañerismo, and the ideal was that of a young heterosexual couple committed to each other and to society, and therefore willing to make sacrifices. To be sure, the notion of comradely love inherited several features of more conservative understandings of love and the so-called “Communist morality” forged in previous decades, which hailed the nuclear, male-headed family, repudiated the sexual recklessness of men, and guarded female virtue.Footnote 9 The puritanical side of comradely love was most apparent when discussing “free love,” a concept that resurfaced during these years and came to be associated with the lax sexual mores of the hippie movement and other countercultural lifestyles. But the vision of love advanced by the young Communist leadership of the 1960s differed from that of previous decades, particularly in regard to sexuality. Most notably, the focus shifted from sexual restraint to fulfillment, and female virtue was dissociated from virginity. However, it is important to bear in mind that the meanings of compañerismo remained vague and somewhat contradictory, with inconsistencies and disagreements running along the axes of age and gender. I have studied disagreements between PCCH and JJCC leaders over some of these matters elsewhere.Footnote 10 Here, I pay attention to discussions between younger and older JJCC members and the way gender factored into these discussions.
The vision put forth by the young Communist leadership does not reflect reality, and we should be careful not to mistake idealized depictions of comradely love for equality between partners. The idea of gender equality was an important element of Communist thought, especially through the notion of “female emancipation,” which experienced an upsurge during these years. The PCCH's appointment of Gladys Marín to the JJCC's highest post was intended to symbolize the party's principled commitment to gender equality—she was the first woman ever to lead a youth political organization in Chile. But we should not lose sight of the fact that Marín was one of only eight women of a Central Committee comprised of 45 members.Footnote 11 Young Communist women tended to occupy the lower echelons of the hierarchy, and this unequal access to political power and decision-making inhibited changes to the patriarchal sexual contract, both in the party and at home. As this article will show, Communism advanced the participation of young women in public affairs, but did little to improve gender relations at home. The notion of comradely love provided limited guidance on the distribution of domestic chores among young married couples. To make matters worse, its emphasis on personal sacrifice for the revolution ended up stimulating political activism to an unusually high degree among Communist men and justifying their absence from the conjugal home. Hence, domestic burdens fell mainly on women.Footnote 12
The Communist emphasis on heterosexuality made it extremely difficult for gays and lesbians to experiment with their sexuality and find love within the JJCC. In Chile, as elsewhere, the Sixties were years of both relaxation of sexual mores and anxious reactions to such relaxation. When it came to homosexuality, the Chilean left exhibited resistance rather than tolerance. Indeed, the PCCH's Secretary General Luis Corvalán confessed in his memoirs to having opposed the membership of a talented artist—most likely Rolando Alarcón—due to his sexual preferences.Footnote 13 The anti-gay rhetoric of the left was most apparent in the Socialist tabloid Clarín, which ran an infamous smear campaign against the right-wing presidential candidate in 1970, accusing him of homosexual proclivities, and the Communist tabloid Puro Chile, which linked homosexuality to criminality to increase sales.Footnote 14 The anti-gay strand of the left was also apparent in the Allende administration, which redoubled efforts to police and punish active homosexuals. According to Communist journalist Eduardo Labarca, under the Allende administration, the Investigations Police of Chile—led then by the Socialist Eduardo Paredes and the Communist Carlos Toro—followed the Cuban lead, infiltrating Santiago's gay underground and threatening to expose its participants.Footnote 15 Tipped off by the police, Puro Chile once went so far as to name a dozen gay men detained in a raid. Not surprisingly, the first known gay protest in Chile, in April 1973, came as a reaction to police harassment, and it was greeted with much contempt from the left.Footnote 16 This does not mean there were no gays or lesbians in Chilean left-wing parties—a gay couple from a small left-wing party was captured during a 1971 police raid, and a non-negligible number of former Communists from a later generation played leading roles in the 1990s gay liberation movement—but it does mean that very few of them chose to be open about it. The left's anti-gay stance forced them to hide their sexual desires.Footnote 17
The growth of the JJCC during the long Sixties took place in a context of increasing radicalization and fragmentation. Newcomers like the Revolutionary Left Movement, the Popular Unitary Action Movement, and the Christian Left Party of Chile sought to challenge the hegemony of the JJCC and the Socialist Youth of Chile among left-leaning youth. Scholars have shown that these political organizations benefited from the country's rich social fabric, recruiting followers from schools and youth associations, and promoting different ideas of adolescence and activism to garner support.Footnote 18 Proselytizing among, and catering to, the youth was not restricted to the left. The centrist and secularly oriented Radical Youth of Chile also had a presence on some public high school and university campuses, although its appeal among youth as a whole eventually diminished and forced the organization to turn to the left. The comparatively more successful Christian Democratic Youth of Chile, a centrist and religion-oriented organization, experienced tremendous growth in both the private and public education systems and linked itself to local churches and Catholic Action and Young Christian Workers groups. The emergence and growth of left-wing and Christian Democrat youth organizations posed a great challenge to the right, which went through its own metamorphosis. After the fusion and disappearance of the Liberal Youth and the Conservative Youth, the newly formed National Youth became the dominant player in many prestigious private high schools, although its influence seems to have been restricted to upper- and middle-class youth. In a way, the growth of the left invigorated and radicalized the right, as evidenced by the emergence of the university-based Gremialista Movement and the violence-prone Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front.Footnote 19 Activists across the political spectrum competed in variegated social settings to conquer the hearts and minds of Chilean youth. Some young men and women tried to carve out a space away from politics, but even that proved difficult in Chile's highly politicized environment.Footnote 20
Although the present article focuses on the JJCC, this case study has broader historiographical implications, providing insight on youth activism in the Sixties, a period of widespread social unrest and profound cultural change in Chile and elsewhere.Footnote 21 Youth became increasingly significant as an idea during these years, and young people joined social, political, and cultural movements in great numbers. The JJCC was very successful in adapting to the times and in mobilizing youth, but it should be considered emblematic rather than exceptional. Left-wing organizations around the world—whether of the Old Left or New Left varieties—learned from each other and copied what worked well. In Latin America, these organizations developed new tactics to attract the youth within the context of a transnational dialogue that had revolutionary Cuba as a beacon of inspiration.
Excessive attention to doctrinal schisms has blinded scholars to the fact that, notwithstanding ideological differences, rebellious youth coming of age in the Sixties shared “an affective-intellectual framework” that predisposed them to develop “a critical, freedom-seeking, libidinous subjectivity.”Footnote 22 Left-wing youth organizations took different stances on a wide array of topics, including friendship and love, but they all benefited from a shared ethos that defined the personal in relation to the political, without subsuming the former into the latter. The young men and women of the era believed that their personal decisions regarding friendship and love were inextricably linked to their worldviews. Perhaps more than any other period, the Sixties witnessed the coalescence of public stances and private life, or at least the expectation of such coalescence.Footnote 23
This article calls for greater dialogue between those who study politics and those who study emotions.Footnote 24 If we are to understand the surge of social and political activism that came to define the Sixties, we need to breach the divide between intimacy and ideology and develop an approach more sensitive to the issues of personal identity and emotional experience. Sociologists have already led the way, reacting to an earlier scholarship that assigned too much explanatory power to rational choice and political opportunity models when studying contentious politics. Their work has shown that emotions are often a crucial force in initiating and maintaining commitment, and that social and political activism is influenced by emotions in a number of ways. Activists invest time and effort in a cause because they find it to be emotionally rewarding, emotional events such as protests help forge bonds of solidarity among activists, and so on.Footnote 25 In the field of Communist studies, these insights have led to further research on so-called “psychological investment” in the Communist cause and to the emergence of a fascinating subfield, dubbed “Communist subjectivity studies.”Footnote 26 What is still largely missing is a greater understanding of the particularities of specific emotions, especially those related to love, intimacy, and sex. This article contributes to such an enterprise by studying “how activism is mediated and propelled by erotic energies (and vice versa),” to use the words of a scholar working on AIDS activism in the United States.Footnote 27 It examines not only the erotic energies underpinning the activism of young Communist men and women, but also the party's attempt to mobilize, harness, and channel those energies.
This article focuses on emotional idiosyncrasies while taking into account the personalities that helped shape them. Particularly important in this respect was Gladys Marín, who put special emphasis on the social and romantic life of young Communists once she became secretary general in 1965. Her outlook seems to have been informed by her teacher training at a normal school, which stressed self-discipline and personality development.Footnote 28 Several members of Marín's inner circle interviewed in later years by Chilean historian Carolina Fernández-Niño portrayed her as a charismatic leader who understood the importance of building healthy peer relationships. To quote Crifé Cid, who met Marín while doing political work in the JJCC: “She was always for young people to be happy, to have happy experiences. She did not criticize young people for dating. On the contrary, she helped them build relationships that were beneficial for both.”Footnote 29 Contradicting an old Communist principle, Marín encouraged—rather than prevented—romantic relationships among cadres. Marta Friz, a close friend of Marín since her years as a student in the normal school, described her as a great casamentera, or matchmaker: “She sometimes had these ideas, that this guy and that girl could date, and besides if the two are together they will do better political work.”Footnote 30 During the interview, Friz also recalled the attraction she felt for some male comrades and the gossip she shared with Marín and other female comrades. Fernández-Niño laughed when Friz mentioned such mundane events, but the interviewee made a point of clarifying that, for young men and women, feelings are no joke.
Youth Sociability in Party Headquarters
In the late 1950s, the JJCC took advantage of the opportunity created by the democratization of Chilean politics and began to do political work publicly, after a decade of operating underground. The JJCC main headquarters were first located on the second floor of a building dubbed People's House, on Compañía Street. This was the same building Salvador Allende used for his 1958 presidential campaign, and which Socialists and Communists kept renting together after the election—the Socialists used the first floor. In October 1960, the JJCC leadership moved to the fourth floor of a building on Monjitas Street, inside the Capri shopping arcade. Exactly a year later it moved once again, now to a two-story building on Matta Avenue with 11 offices and a terrace. The JJCC main headquarters were located there for nearly nine years, until the organization bought a spacious building of its own on República Avenue—all of its previous spaces were rented. The chronology of these changes of location is itself indicative of the organizational growth of the JJCC throughout the years herein studied.Footnote 31
The JJCC conceived of its headquarters as a collection of spaces where young left-leaning men and women could socialize in a rather informal setting. The young Communist leadership made every possible effort to give the headquarters a “youthful” character, to use a term of the day, and make them attractive to members and sympathizers alike. The JJCC main headquarters offered a ping-pong table, a foosball table, chessboards, and so on—and a library to lure intellectually curious youth. There was also a café where regulars and visitors could buy coffee and sandwiches at convenient prices. In addition, the JJCC often used its main headquarters to project films and host concerts, and the annual New Year's Eve party that the organization hosted there was something of a tradition. The JJCC main headquarters in Santiago provided a model for local headquarters around the country, and a number of these local headquarters were also able to buy a ping-pong table and furnish a library, thanks to fundraising campaigns.
The JJCC headquarters tended to be much more open to the community than those of the PCCH. The openness and youthful nature of JJCC headquarters sometimes sparked controversy among the old and the new guard. Gladys Marín mentioned in an interview several years later that some PCCH leaders had been unsympathetic to the young Communists’ idea of organizing a folk club in the JJCC main headquarters (this venue, devoted to folk and protest music, ended up being a big success), because they still operated with an old underground mentality. “I tried some things that sometimes the Party might not have liked. We transformed the headquarters of the [Communist] Youth into folk clubs. They didn't like that, because they thought that the headquarters should be very restricted.”Footnote 32
The legalization of Communism and the establishment of JJCC headquarters throughout the country changed the dynamic between the young Communists’ organization and potential recruits. Previously, those interested in Communism had a difficult time establishing contact with active party members and joined their underground organization only by invitation. Left-leaning young people from different backgrounds could now approach JJCC headquarters and ask to join, and, equally important, they were almost always welcomed. Luisa Sáez, a teenager from a small town near Chillán who described herself as left-leaning but not very politically informed, sent a letter to the JJCC magazine in May 1973 asking about the location of the Chillán headquarters and what she needed to do to join. The magazine published the question and provided an answer for everyone to see, stressing that anyone could join the young Communists’ organization, even Catholics or those who did not share belief in all the tenets of Marxism.Footnote 33
JJCC headquarters attracted young people and led some of them into the ranks of Communism. Middle-class Catholic schoolgirl Victoria Villagrán put it succinctly: “I joined the [Communist] Youth because the place caught my attention. I used to take the bus in those years and it passed by the headquarters of the [Communist] Youth, and there was always a lot of young people there, talking in the streets [and] inside [the building]. I remember I was attracted by the fact that there was a [pool table behind a] window, the window was open and there was a pool table. I wanted to play pool… . . It was close to the school. So, one day I got off [the bus] before the school and went to look.” In these headquarters Villagrán established amicable relations that led her to participate in political activities. Within only a few years she became deeply involved, so much so that she remained politically active after the coup and suffered imprisonment, torture, and exile.Footnote 34
Memoirs, oral-history interviews, and other personal accounts suggest that some young Communists hung out at party headquarters regularly. Communist martyr Manuel Guerrero wrote a few years before being murdered by the dictatorship in 1985 that he liked visiting the headquarters located on Monjitas Street when he was a teenager in the early 1960s, “just to spend time there, because for me they were the Jota's most beautiful headquarters of those years.”Footnote 35 Two of my interviewees—Jaime and Boris—recalled spending several hours a week in other JJCC headquarters. Boris, who joined the organization in 1968 when he was a junior high student, lived only a few blocks from the JJCC headquarters in Santiago's working-class La Granja district. He described himself as a “Taliban of politics” back then—using this odd, anachronistic term to stress his fanaticism—and complained that the time he spent in party headquarters and in the streets campaigning rarely left him time to sleep or study.Footnote 36 Jaime, a university student from a working-class background who joined the JJCC in 1967, recalled spending his weekdays between the university campus and the famous JJCC headquarters on Marcoleta Street, where high school and university students met, even before becoming a part-time functionary of the organization.Footnote 37 The infamous Miguel Estay, who ended up collaborating with the Pinochet dictatorship and is now serving time for the murder of the abovementioned Guerrero and other Communists, also became a regular of the headquarters located on Marcoleta Street in 1970, “where I stayed almost all day long, without a fixed schedule, [and where] hundreds of young people who shared the same ideology came by.”Footnote 38
Some made lasting bonds while carrying out political tasks or hanging out in party headquarters. Manuel Guerrero remembered seeing his good friend, future Secretary General José Weibel (1974–1976), for the first time at the headquarters located on Monjitas Street in the early 1960s, while a very young and laughing Weibel played table tennis.Footnote 39 Guerrero's murderer Miguel Estay also made friends at JJCC headquarters before becoming an informant and betraying their trust. In the Marcoleta Street headquarters he met the young Communist Mauricio Lagunas. They became such good friends that Estay, whose left-leaning, upper-middle class family disintegrated shortly after the coup, went to live with Lagunas's lower-middle class family in March 1974. He stayed in their house until he was abducted by the secret police in December 1975, which led to him becoming an informant and, eventually, an intelligence agent.Footnote 40
Perhaps no one has explained the significance of JJCC headquarters as well as Sergio Martínez, who joined the young Communists’ organization in 1961 and was expelled in 1969 for his ultra-left-wing leanings. In his memoirs, he made a direct link between the JJCC, its headquarters, and its community of young members: “The Jota, more specifically its central headquarters, which were then located at 832 Matta Avenue, near the corner of San Francisco [Street], had the characteristics of a home for me, and I think for several others as well.” Martínez described the JJCC headquarters as a hospitable and welcoming place, “where one could go not just to attend a meeting, but simply to hang around,” whether drinking coffee, eating sandwiches, or playing foosball. For someone like Martínez, who did not feel comfortable in his own middle-class home and whose parents were going through a divorce, “the Jota was a sort of ideal haven. That was, in a way, my true family: the fraternity of the young men and women devoted to the noble task of transforming the world—the Communists.”Footnote 41
JJCC headquarters were also places where some young members had their first love experiences and others made out. Eugenio, who held a leading position in the local branch of the JJCC in Talca during the early 1970s, recriminated a male comrade after finding him in a small room of the Talca headquarters passionately kissing a female comrade. “Compañero, the headquarters are not meant for that kind of stuff,” he remembered telling the passionate lover.Footnote 42 Some young Communists even met their future spouses at JJCC headquarters. Future Secretary General, Gladys Marín, from a lower-middle-class family, first saw upper-middle class Communist Jorge Muñoz in the headquarters located on Compañía Street, in 1959, when she was 17. “I saw him in those old headquarters, in that second floor packed full of students and workers.” They bonded a few months later while doing volunteer work in La Victoria neighborhood—an activity organized by the JJCC—and married in 1961.Footnote 43 Similarly, the young cadre Manuel Guerrero saw his future wife Verónica Antequera for the first time in the headquarters located on Marcoleta Street. He was in a relationship with another woman then, but the couple was experiencing a rough patch due to Guerrero's level of commitment to the cause. “After ending my long relationship with this girl, a painful and difficult experience,” Guerrero explained in his memoirs, “political activities brought Verónica and me together.” Her gaze met his at a demonstration on May 12, 1969, and they sealed their love later that year, in the second Valparaíso-to-Santiago march against imperialism.Footnote 44
The life story of José Zepeda, which won second place in a short autobiography contest organized for the PCCH's 50th anniversary, brings together several of the issues discussed in this section in a poignant way. Zepeda first joined the JJCC in his hometown in 1959, but he remained inactive for some time because he ran away from his home to try his luck elsewhere. By 1964 he was wandering the streets of the capital in an appalling condition, unable to find a job and a place to sleep. “I was confused, wandering around Blas Vial Street when I saw a JJ.CC. headquarters where the ‘26th of July’ base met.” He explained his precarious situation to the young local leaders and asked for help. They took him in. These headquarters were literally Zepeda's home for several months. He survived the winter by burning political posters to fight the cold weather. Later on, some comrades suggested giving up the headquarters, since they could not afford the rent anymore; “For me, that meant ending up in the streets.” Zepeda convinced his comrades otherwise and was elected as new leader. “I recall only one compañera complaining, saying that people should not trust a stranger so much.” As newly elected leader, Zepeda organized a funding campaign that helped pay the rent and left enough money to buy books, a ping-pong table, and a chessboard for the headquarters. His personal luck also took a turn for the better. He found a stable job and saved enough money to move out, and he ended up marrying the young Communist woman who had distrusted him at first: “That compañera who wanted to throw me to the streets would marry me and give me a daughter and the happiness of a modest Communist home.”Footnote 45
Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings
To understand why so many young Communists fell in love with, and married, fellow comrades, we need to account for their feelings. The texts published in the JJCC magazines Gente Joven (1959-61) and Ramona (1971-73), especially those published in the latter's letters-to-the-editor section “Just Ask,” are a fascinating window into the minds and hearts of young Communists, a veritable “archive of feelings.”Footnote 46 Ramona’s “Just Ask” was open to discuss love and the thorny issue of sex from the very beginning; indeed, the section's full name was “Just Ask … here we answer everything, even that [Pregunte nomás … que aquí contestamos todo, incluso aquello],” the pronoun “that” being a euphemism for sex in Chile's rather prudish society. The inclusion of this peculiar love advice forum—common in women's magazines and non-political youth magazines—was something of an innovation in the publishing tradition of the Chilean left, and the Socialist-leaning youth magazine Onda (1971–73) soon followed Ramona’s example with the creation of a letters-to-the-editor section called “What's your problem? … or talking about sex, love, and other stuff.”Footnote 47
What a reading of “Just Ask” reveals is a strong longing for affection. I have already quoted the letter sent by 15-year-old B. D. Q. C., who spent his afternoons in party headquarters just to see his beautiful ex-girlfriend. Resonant experiences can be found elsewhere in “Just Ask.” A letter by a young man from a working-class hillside community of Valparaíso, for example, echoes B. D. Q. C.’s feelings of despair. This young man explains that he had recently met an attractive 20-year-old Communist woman. “She has been on my mind since that day.” He had come forward and confessed his romantic feelings to her. “On January 27 we went to a dance party in Los Placeres Hill, and that night she told me that we would be friends and wouldn't date, I mean, she was pushing me away.” This young man's heart was broken, and he wrote to Ramona asking for advice: “What should I do, follow her or lay off?” The section's editor advised him to befriend the woman before inquiring about her feelings again: “Go to the movies, chat, exchange books, do political work, go out in groups, etc.”Footnote 48
Francisco, an 18-year-old Communist man from a working-class background in Santiago, lamented his fate in another letter. He explained that he had fallen in love many times, but that he had never had a girlfriend or a sexual relationship. He was shy and had an inferiority complex, which made it difficult for him to talk to the women he liked. “I'll tell you, living like this makes me very unhappy, because I spend most of my time analyzing and criticizing myself, which has many times led me to contemplate suicide and has even led me to suspect that I might be a homosexual.” The section's editor gave him a reassuring answer, offering tips to deal with his shyness and dismissing his fears as unfounded. “True faggots [maricas] do not ‘suspect’ that they are homosexuals. They just are. They detest women and unmistakably like men.”Footnote 49 As these examples show, the magazine and its young readership discussed together strategies to date and cope with loneliness, rejection, psychological complexes, and so forth.
A close reading of “Just Ask” also illustrates how JJCC sociability facilitated the young Communists’ quest to satisfy the longing for affection. For example, Francisco, quoted above, had joined the JJCC only a month and a half earlier but had already met several young women who might have eased his feelings of solitude. “I have met several compañeros and compañeras. I made a good first impression on many of them, one of whom I really liked, but I never talked to her because of my shyness, until a compañero stole her from me, as always happens to me.” This was not the only comrade who had caught this young man's attention in that brief period. “I recently met a girl from the Jota who is several years younger than me, but I think I love her deeply.”Footnote 50 Rulitos, a 15-year-old Communist girl from Rancagua who had recently moved to Santiago, was experiencing love sorrows of her own. She had fallen for a 21-year-old Communist man in a social activity organized by the JJCC. “I met the compañero I like doing volunteer work [in another city]. I was immediately drawn to him, but this guy took an interest in me only while we were there. We made out and then he gave me the cold shoulder.”Footnote 51
Oral history interviews confirm the significance of the JJCC in young Communists’ search for love. Some met in activities that were very political in nature. Jaime, an aforementioned university student, met his future wife while teaching a course for young Communist cadres in 1971. “I taught a class about historical materialism and she is a history teacher, so she was always arguing with me,” he remembered jokingly during a four-hour interview.Footnote 52 Others met at recreational activities organized by the JJCC or by individual young Communists. That was the case of Inés Maldonado, the widow of Hernán Chamorro, a Communist worker killed after the 1973 coup. When asked by an interviewer how she had met her husband in the 1960s, Maldonado replied: “Would you believe me if I told you that I met my husband at a party, a party of the [Communist] Youth?” Maldonado and her young Communist friends were dancing and having fun in the house of a family linked to the PCCH when Chamorro and two other young Communists from another group, or base, arrived. “The truth is that they caught everyone's attention because they danced wonderfully… . My husband was an excellent dancer. He danced rock and roll, and in those years it was the most popular, the trendiest.”Footnote 53
However, the importance of JJCC activities should not be overdrawn. As I explained at the beginning of this article, most young Communists dated and eventually married non-Communists. Memoirs and oral-history interviews suggest that the young Communists’ social circles coincided only partially with those of the JJCC, and it is clear that neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces were still the most common places for young men and women—Communists or otherwise—to meet life partners. Of growing importance were public parks and private venues, especially music venues and nightclubs (boites). The dance parties organized by groups of friends in their family houses (malones) also played a prominent role.Footnote 54 If the JJCC was successful in shaping the social and romantic lives of its young members, it was mostly because of linkages to neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, and its willingness and capacity to organize music festivals and dance parties attractive to the youth.
Pololeo and Comradely Love
To understand the romantic lives of our young subjects, then, it is imperative to take a broader look at Chilean society. During the Sixties, the strict rules regulating courtship fell apart. Crucial in this transformation was the homegrown concept of pololeo, which described a broad range of nonmarital relationships, from the informal to the formal, with or without sex. Initially coexisting with and eventually displacing the term noviazgo, the concept of pololeo helped dissociate courtship from marriage, encouraged the proliferation of romantic partners during the transition to adulthood, and gave couples more room to define the terms of their relationships. It was widely used among the young men and women of the era, most of whom had their first pololeo when they were between 15 and 17. The great majority of the young Communists cited above used the word pololear when talking about their relationships and referred to their boyfriends or girlfriends as their pololos or pololas, respectively.Footnote 55
The JJCC leadership did not oppose pololeos, but it did try to offer guidance and templates for members to build healthy and responsible versions of them. The concept of compañerismo was among the most effective tools at the JJCC's disposal to further proper relationships between young Communist men and women. To quote the soon-to-be married Gladys Marín, age 21, in her role as the cadre in charge of women's affairs in the JJCC: “In our relationships, the most important thing is mutual respect and responsibility. The young girl stops being simply the girlfriend [polola] and becomes the comrade, the compañera.” According to Marín, “The sentimental life of young Communist women is just like that of other young women. Primping, flirting, and dating are natural parts of our lives, it's just that we value stability, responsibility, and maturity.”Footnote 56
The terms compañero and compañera could refer to either non-married partners or spouses. Hence, they eased the distinction between dating and marrying, forcing young men and women to conceive of their boyfriends and girlfriends as potential life partners from early on. These terms made romantic relationships among young Communists more serious and, in a way, more important. Tatiana Zamorano, a second-generation Communist, wrote a short biographic piece in the early 1970s that speaks to these issues. She met her future husband during the 1958 presidential campaign, when she was only 17, and married him in 1963. “I had told myself that if I agreed to date a PC[CH] or Jota member, it would have to be the compañero of my life, the father of my future children, and not just to pass the time.”Footnote 57
The terms compañero and compañera had been in vogue for decades among Communists to refer to their life partners, but they acquired even greater prominence during the Sixties, informed by ideas of revolutionary heroism and commitment to the cause. Sergio Martínez, for example, explained in his memoirs that the term compañera had “a special connotation,” mediated by “the heroic films of the Soviet Union of the 1960s,” among which he mentioned Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying and Grigory Chukhray's Ballad of a Soldier. Each dealt with the tragedy of World War II in a somewhat innovative way, making love the narrative backbone of the film and depicting multidimensional heroes and heroines. “Those films showed us the humanistic dimension of the characters, which was inseparable from the cause they embodied.”Footnote 58 Along with Socialist realism novels like Alexander Fadeyev's The Young Guard and Nicolai Ostrovski's How the Steel Was Tempered, which were translated into Spanish in the 1950s and circulated widely among young Chilean Communists during the Sixties, these foreign cultural products linked love, self-discovery, and self-sacrifice.
The romance of revolutionary Cuba also helped to propagate an idea of love that stressed commitment to the cause, no matter its costs. Starting in 1959, for example, Gente Joven published biographical pieces narrating the stories of those Cubans who had made personal sacrifices during the fight against Batista. The romantic stories of well-known revolutionary couples, such as Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín, were accompanied by that of martyrs such as Orlando Donarse, who asked his girlfriend and comrade Ángela to hand him over a poisonous substance once they had been surrounded by the enemy. “I begged him much not to make that determination, but he stood up abruptly and told me: ‘Remember that I am your commander, and this is an order,’” recounted his widowed girlfriend.Footnote 59 As this excerpt suggest, the romance of the Cuban Revolution as broadcast in Chile challenged gender stereotypes only partially. This is particularly apparent in Communist magazines devoted to women, such as Mirada (1959-1961) and Paloma (1972–1973), which needed to balance the hopes and anxieties of women of different ages. Mirada’s treatment of Cuban revolutionary icon Haydée Santa María during her 1959 visit to Chile is telling. The magazine hailed her courageous activism, but it made a point of noting that she used to cry when thinking of the dead combatants and their families, even the families of the enemy. “She was a revolutionary, a guerrilla fighter, but above all a woman.”Footnote 60
Political ideals were considered something noble, something that every self-respecting person ought to have. “Personally,” a Communist high school student said, “I would not have as a compañera, neither as wife nor girlfriend, a woman who does not show any [social] concern, who does not think things through, who does not have incentives or ideals for which to fight.”Footnote 61 Finding someone who shared your passion for left-wing politics was definitely a plus. A 17-year-old woman who wrote to “Just Ask,” for example, found herself between two young men. One of them she had been dating for over a year, and the other she had started dating secretly a few months ago. She needed to make a decision, so she listed the pros and cons of her suitors. “Please advise me,” she requested, adding right away: “I have a great rapport with my old boyfriend when it comes to political ideas, because I am very much a left-winger and I really like politics.”Footnote 62 Acting on your political ideals and joining a political party was a positive step in the progression from awareness to commitment. Being able to make and then keep a political commitment, Communists thought, spoke volumes about your will and capacity to commit in other spheres of life.
Private letters by Communist cadres offer further insight into the blending of politics and love and into the importance of commitment. Take a letter written by Jorge Muñoz to wife Gladys Marín on November 7, 1973, less than two months after the coup. As already noted, Muñoz and Marín met in 1959 and married in 1961. The 1973 coup forced the couple to live separately—Muñoz went underground while Marín searched for haven in an embassy—and communicate through letters. This fateful event taught Muñoz to “value love: the immense value of having you as a compañera (I think that the fact of having being your compañero for 14 years is already a lot [to be thankful for], it's enough reason to be grateful for life).” The defeat of the left and the couple's forced separation took a toll on Muñoz, who, in his letter, confessed to his wife having cried in solitude. On that occasion, Muñoz explained to Marín, “I swore to be worthy (as I had already promised) of the P[arty], of you, of my children.” Muñoz's promises of political loyalty—made 20 years earlier—and marital fidelity—made 14 years earlier—were intertwined in his mind, and this strengthened both his political commitment and the couple's romantic bond. “An invisible thread of a material not yet invented by man, of infinite strength, connects me to you. You are my pride and my joy. You know that, don't you? Together with the great [political] path I chose, which gives meaning to life, you are the most intimate. My decision to struggle (a commitment made 20 years ago), to be a worthy combatant, is connected to the personal, to you, and this (which the enemy would like to break in order to break our spirit) will carry me until we meet [again] to have the [third] child [you long for], to see each other's eyes, to be together.”Footnote 63
Finding such a worthy partner was not always easy. Carlos Berger, for example, had trouble finding someone who shared his relentless passion for politics. He separated from his newly wed wife sometime in mid 1970 and traveled to Moscow to study Marxism later that year, in September. In a letter dated November 3, 1970, the then 27-year-old Berger tried to explain to his mother why he had ended the relationship and why he was now sure his marriage was completely over. The main issue was not, as his mother had thought, the incompatibility of the couple's characters—Berger being an optimist and his wife being a pessimist—but an incompatibility rooted in a deeper, philosophical understanding of the world. “She sees the world with the typical outlook of a little petit bourgeois [pequeña burguesita]. The world is just as it behaves towards her. There is nothing beyond the end of her nose, [beyond] what surrounds her, what she sees, what she hears. Pure subjectivism. The things that happen to her are real; the others are not. And I think that I have been able to rise above such a peculiar and narrow-minded view of the petite bourgeoisie.” Berger went on to discuss in his letter how one should see the world, indulging in a three-paragraph criticism of the “bourgeois idealist philosophy” on which his ex-wife's worldview was based and a three-paragraph example illustrating how one should see the Soviet Union. He then came back to the issue at stake to drive his message home: “It's not just about being an optimist or a pessimist,” he reiterated. The key was what he called “the sense of transcendence. I need to go beyond, to justify my life, to do something, to inhabit the world.”Footnote 64
The tone of Carlos Berger's and Jorge Muñoz's letters should not lead scholars to think that young Communists understood love in purely ideological terms. For all the seriousness of the topics discussed in his letters, Carlos Berger never stopped making jokes about his sexual wants and his luckless love life in the Soviet Union. This comes through more clearly in his correspondence with his brothers, although he also made witty remarks in some letters he sent to his mother. The tone of the letters Carlos exchanged with his brothers Eduardo and Ricardo is light and playful. When Carlos complained about his loneliness in the Soviet Union, Eduardo advised him to lower his physical standards and try his luck with less attractive women. When Carlos learned that his brother Ricardo was dating someone new, he congratulated him and asked him, “And how is she in bed?”Footnote 65 Carlos also ended up dating someone new in Moscow—Valentina, a young Chilean studying medicine there—even though he knew that the relationship had no future. Carlos and Valentina had a lot of fun together, as far as one can tell from his letters. Carlos, who traveled to the Soviet Union to study Marxism, was definitely the most politicized and intellectually curious of the Berger brothers, but he should not be mistaken for a fanatical cadre or a narrowly bookish intellectual. On the contrary, he was expansive and affable. To quote Eduardo's memoirs: “Ricardo and I knew that Carlos was not smarter than us, but we could not deny that he was much more charismatic and funnier.”Footnote 66 Or to quote Carlos's second wife, Carmen Hertz, who married him after his return to Chile: “We used to laugh a lot. Carlos had a great sense of humor.”Footnote 67
Cadres like Carlos Berger and Jorge Muñoz were certainly more ideologically driven than B. D. Q. C. and other teenagers who wrote to Ramona, but they had also fallen in love with left-wing politics and left-wing women in an environment of camaraderie and friendship. This vital experience informed their understandings of politics and love, and it continued to do so even after they had been uprooted from such a lively social atmosphere and could retrieve it only through acts of imagination. Carlos Berger often complained to his family about his dull life in Moscow, especially before meeting Valentina. “I keep studying and it's actually quite boring to study without having anything else to do. I don't go out, I don't go for walks, [and] I don't have girlfriends. There are no fun [political] meetings. No one is making the revolution. In sum, I spend all day inside [the university] studying or in classes. It's such a drag.”Footnote 68 Carlos needed the company of his friends to reinvigorate his commitment to Communism, and he decided to cut his studies short and come back to Chile to collaborate with the Allende administration. Similarly, after the 1973 coup, underground activists who had joined the Communist struggle in a more joyous era felt the need to evoke the world they had lost and for which they were fighting in solitude. In a 1975 letter to Gladys Marín, for example, a nostalgic and lonely Jorge Muñoz evoked a day on a lake the couple had spent with like-minded friends: “On that occasion, there was a moment of peace, of harmony, of complete joy … you were reading, our friends were lying nearby, and I was looking at you. Such a beauty!”Footnote 69
Love, Sex, and Marriage
The young Communists of the Sixties imagined love as something pure and true, untainted by material concerns or social conventions. According to them, love was threatened by the increasing commodification of social relations and by pernicious bourgeois trends coming from abroad. Young Communist Rodrigo Cerda, for example, called on Ramona readers “not to import love, but to search for it in our [working-class] neighborhoods and shantytowns, and you'll see that there love doesn't die… . Those who don't believe in love are confused, bourgeois young people. Poor people live on it alone.”Footnote 70 Young Communists thought that there was value in making economic sacrifices for love. Before marrying, some couples discussed economic issues and agreed that material well-being was of only secondary importance to them.Footnote 71 There was also some value in marrying down. In his memoirs, middle-class Communist cadre and engineering student Carlos Toro commented approvingly on the marriages of “young [male] workers with [female] university students,” using as examples the cases of workers-turned-party-leaders Mario Zamorano and José Weibel, who married middle-class Communists Isolina Ramírez and María Teresa Barahona, respectively.Footnote 72 However, we should not mistake the exception for the rule. Most young Communists married within, not outside, their class. The very structure of the JJCC, based on socio-geographical areas and the national educational system, facilitated interactions—and, indirectly, romances—between young Communists of the same social class. Toro himself, for example, married an engineering classmate and JJCC comrade.
Two social conventions, in particular, became topics of heated discussion among young Communists: premarital sex and the institution of marriage.Footnote 73 Young Communists feared the dissociation of love and sex popular in the United States and Western Europe, but they also feared sexless relationships. When interviewed by Ramona, for example, 20-year-old university leader Margarita criticized both sex without love and love without sex in the same paragraph: “Let me talk about young people and their exaggerated licentiousness. I think they take sex too lightly. They don't realize that it should be part of an affective relationship. Just like it's absurd that a couple sleep together if they aren't in love, it is also necessary that a [loving] couple has sex to have a real, harmonious, and complementing relationship.”Footnote 74
Ramona devoted a lot of attention to premarital sex, and for the most part it endorsed the practice. Journalism student and Communist sympathizer Patricia Politzer, for example, discussed the problems many young couples experienced when trying to take their loving relationship to the next level in a 1973 piece. Drawing upon the expert opinion of sexologists, she explained that “making out” was a pleasant yet only temporary phase, and that it should not preclude couples from engaging in what they really wanted and needed—sex.Footnote 75 These articles must have been welcomed by many of the magazine's young readers, as far as one can tell from the number of letters published in “Just Ask” that touched upon virginity, sexual initiation, and premarital sex.Footnote 76 These were controversial issues back then. Politzer herself still regretted, several decades later, not having had sex with her first love. “It was a long relationship, but in those days people didn't sleep with one another so easily like nowadays.”Footnote 77
The stakes of premarital sex differed for men and women. As the European sociologists Armand and Michèle Mattelart discovered in their pioneering study of Chilean youth, three-fourths of young Chilean women valued virginity. In contrast, only half of young Chilean men did.Footnote 78 Discrepancies became apparent in a lively discussion on love and sex among high school students—all of whom were left-wingers, most likely Communists—published by Ramona in 1972. While the majority of the students defended premarital sex and provided different arguments backing their position, gender factored in the discussion. For example, after Jorge argued that premarital sex helped discover whether couples were sexually compatible and thus diminished the risk of divorce, Adriana complained that “with that fib you men fool us women and then you don't even marry us.” Twenty-year-old university leader Margarita and 21-year-old journalist student Patricia Politzer endorsed the idea of premarital sex, but many of their younger female peers were less certain about its benefits.Footnote 79
Technological innovations made it easier for young men and women to practice sex without being married. Reliable contraceptive methods, which became available in the mid 1960s, led to a momentous revolution, in Chile as elsewhere. Women could now have sex before marriage, and love, not pregnancy, became the most important reason to get married.Footnote 80 Still, the revolution took time to gain momentum due to fears, prejudices, and lack of information. Even by the early 1970s, contraception does not seem to have been widely used by young unmarried couples. Ramona’s “Just Ask,” for example, published letters from readers who got married mid-pregnancy, and C. R. S., a young female Communist, sent a letter demanding information on menstrual cycles, asking, “Until which day [of the month] can I have sex without getting pregnant?” The section's editor gave her a detailed response, which ended: “In our opinion, the best solution is to go see a doctor, so the doctor can recommend the most appropriate pills for you.”Footnote 81 The majority of the articles in which Ramona discussed sex provided useful information on contraception as well. One of the most significant contributions of the magazine to the young Communists’ own sexual revolution was a five-issue report provocatively titled “How to have a boyfriend without getting pregnant.” Published in 1973, each article devoted between three and four pages to discussing birth control methods, from intrauterine devices to male contraceptives.Footnote 82
For the young Communists of the era, the issue of nonmarital sex was often linked to discussions about the institution of marriage. Twenty-year-old Juan Eduardo and his 19-year-old girlfriend Patty, for example, sent several letters to “Just Ask” discussing nonmarital sex and civil marriage, among other things. The couple had not slept together yet. Patty was hesitant to do so because Juan Pablo was adamantly opposed to the idea of marriage. The fact that Juan Pablo had cheated on her (and probably had sex) with another woman did not help. Nevertheless, this young Communist man explained and defended his stance publicly, in a letter to the magazine: “Given that we are two young lovers who claim to love each other forever [sic] (in spite of any deception from either part), there is no doubt that ‘Laws’ are unnecessary to unite us in any ‘sexual’ encounter. I think that the Civil Registry distorts women's true interests, which should only be a great and deep love.”Footnote 83
The JJCC's attitude toward marriage was fraught with ambivalence, but the agreed-on solution was to adapt the institution, not to reject it altogether. Ramona, for example, published pieces encouraging a different, more modern understanding of marriage, which presupposed better communication, greater independence, and a more egalitarian distribution of tasks and responsibilities. One of these pieces focused on a young feminist marriage officiant who ironically did not believe in the institution of marriage and yet tried to adapt the plain language of the civil code when performing her duty. Officiating a wedding ceremony, “She states categorically which rights and duties must be shared by the couple and affirms that both owe each other protection and respect.”Footnote 84 In another piece, Ramona endorsed the idea of “flexible roles,” by which the magazine meant: “The woman and the man will distribute the common tasks and responsibilities among themselves, in accordance with their inclinations and possibilities, without worrying about what others might say.”Footnote 85
Nevertheless, we should not make too much of these journalistic pieces sprinkled here and there. The most influential aspect of comradely love for young married couples remained its encouragement of relentless activism and willingness to sacrifice for the revolution. Twenty-two-year-old Alicia, the wife of a young Communist cadre from Concepción, vented her domestic frustrations in a letter to “Just Ask.” She explained that she shared her husband's political ideas and voted for the Communists, but argued that her husband's activism made the relationship almost unbearable: “He has gone to meetings, seminars, congresses, etc., and his little daughters and I have been pushed aside. At first, I saw no problem with him having his [political] ideas, but he is more concerned for the Jota and the PC[CH] than for his home.” The husband's absences from home grew longer as he rose in the organization's hierarchy. “That's the problem I have. I'm always alone, since he is never at home. First it was days, then weeks, now months.”Footnote 86
Young Communist men seem to have had their own expectations of family life, notwithstanding the Communist rhetoric of comradely love and Ramona's advice to distribute the chores. “Zarzal,” a 21-year-old husband and father from Santiago's La Florida district, complained in another letter that he was married to a lousy wife, who did not take good care of the house or give him enough love. His decision to support Allende's government by joining the Communists had placed further strain on the relationship. “I have to leave my home for two or three hours every day due to the [political] tasks that I have been assigned, but I don't neglect my home. However, my wife complains that I neglect her, and her indifference [toward me] has increased so much that she now denies me sex.”Footnote 87
Some young Communist men thought that their wives had no right interfering with their political decisions. Being an active member of a left-wing organization was their prerogative, and they never thought about relinquishing it. Nowhere does this come through more clearly than in Humberto Arcos's memoirs. Arcos, a working-class Communist who was married to a non-Communist woman, discussed his marital disagreements several times in his memoirs, but there is little sense of guilt or regret. The first clash took place when Arcos's young wife was pregnant with a third baby. She complained that he did not devote enough time to the family and wasted too much money on his travels concerning political and union issues. “But political and union activities had always been the center of my life, and I had never hidden that from her. I had never promised her to abandon these activities to devote myself to the family … So I suggested a divorce … She made a scandal. Then came the reconciliation. But from then on we began to distance ourselves from each other.” Arcos became a full-time JJCC functionary later on, assuming even greater political responsibilities and suffering a decrease in his income. The couple stuck together for several years, but they eventually separated. “I wasn't able to give her what she expected, and she wasn't able to understand what I expected.”Footnote 88
Conclusion
This article has examined the rich, intense social and emotional life of the young Chilean Communists of the Sixties. This was a period of sweeping politicization for a large number of young men and women, many of whom sided with the left. As I have tried to show in this article, the extraordinary appeal of the left cannot entirely be understood without recourse to feelings of friendship and love. Young people from all walks of life made informal, friendly contacts with young Communists that led them to commit further, and once active in the JJCC they forged strong emotional bonds that provided them with a sense of belonging and a shared identity. Sexual attraction, romance, and love played crucial roles in both bringing new people into the ranks of Communism and strengthening the political commitment of those who already belonged to the young Communists’ organization.
It is not my intention, however, to paint an overly rosy picture. The strong sense of community discussed in this article was built as much on distrust toward political enemies as on empathy toward in-group members. Political sectarianism undoubtedly affected the friendly and romantic relationships of JJCC members, and some felt ostracized when they chose to date someone from a competing youth political organization. One could even argue that the increase in the ratio of romances and marriages among Communists and the JJCC's emphasis on comradely love reinforced the political polarization that ended up tearing Chile apart.
