Making Friends and Making Out:The Social and Romantic Lives of Young Communists in Chile (1958–1973)

Abstract

“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.”