Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counterculture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship by Patrick Barr-Melej (review)

Psychedelic Chile, by Patrick Barr-Melej, analyzes conflicts surrounding the rise of Chilean hippismo and Siloism (an esoteric libertarian socialist movement focused on individual emancipation) to provide a fresh look at the social and cultural politics of the Popular Unity (UP) period (1970-1973). His work shifts the usual focus of study on the principal political and class conflicts of the period to consider other ways that youth in Santiago pursued social change and revolution, beyond—and often in conflict with—dominant political culture and traditional social norms. Barr-Melej's study examines the otherwise polarized Left and Right's shared social conservatism and condemnation of hippismo and Siloism, young people's exploration of life alternatives, and the UP's uneasy and often openly conflictual relationship with countercultural expression during the Allende years.

Psychedelic Chile addresses "what happened when some Chileans in their teens and twenties thought and behaved in ways a great many others found repulsive" (3). This approach reveals a complex picture of Chilean political culture during the UP period, including the Left's social conservatism, generational conflict within the Left, and the media's role in projecting and influencing public perception of countercultural youth. It also highlights several ways in which Left, Center, and Right held complementary, socially conservative views on gender, sexuality, and family that fueled widespread moral panic over hippies' and Siloists' rejection of social norms. Left and Right condemned hippismo and Siloism for different reasons born of their respective ideological and religious viewpoints, and their constructions of what constituted a "good young Chilean" (Chapter 7) diverged. Yet, the shared moral panic over such issues as marijuana use, men with long hair and flowered garb, sexuality and sexual experimentation, alternative views of family roles and generational authority, and young women's perceived vulnerability to the alleged predations of countercultural men, enmeshed hippies and Siloists in multiple layers of social, political, and cultural conflict throughout the UP period.

Research on the UP period sometimes runs up against a dearth of archival records because of the destructive forces of the dictatorship (1973-1990) that followed it. Barr-Melej draws from a range of surviving sources to trace the debates and conflicts surrounding countercultural Santiago. The analysis rests primarily on print media, supplemented with interviews, ephemera, theoretical texts, Siloist tracts, film, and literature. The interviews include the organizers of the controversial Piedra Roja festival, Siloism's founder, and others who participated in hippismo or Siloism during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The interviews provide important insight into the subjectivities of people who took alternative paths, and they lend complexity and balance to the often-negative portrayals served up in the print media.

Another of the book's strengths is that its premise and findings open avenues for further study. For example, although hippismo and Siloism were relatively small, primarily middle- and upper-class phenomena (although not without working-class participants), their power to provoke moral panic across the political spectrum was disproportionate to their size in the highly polarized political atmosphere of the early 1970s. Understandably, in this context, Psychedelic Chile focuses primarily on the Left's and Right's responses to counterculture during this period, with a more limited analysis of the political center. Yet president Eduardo Frei Montalva's centrist Christian Democrat administration was in power from 1964 to 1970, during the rise and spread of 1960s counterculture nationally and globally, as well as during the two catalytic events—Silo's Punta de Vacas speech and the Piedra Roja festival—that anchor the book's countercultural chronology. In its examination of the early 1970s, Psychedelic Chile offers a foundation for taking the analysis further back into the 1960s to explore the ways in which this earlier period, and the political center, might have shaped youth counterculture's development and informed responses to it in revolution...