College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

All the rage

Research by history's Patrick Barr-Melej on the counterculture movement in Chile finds popular acceptance.
At least once a year, Patrick Barr-Melej, assistant professor of history, travels to Chile to conduct his research.

Those efforts have produced one book, Reforming Chile: Culture Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (University of North Carolina Press), which provides the first comprehensive analysis of Chile's middle-class reform movement and its profound impact on that country's cultural and political landscapes from the 1880s to the 1940s.

His travels will soon deliver a second book to be published by the University of North Carolina Press, tentatively called Psychedelic Chile, on the counterculture movement in Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And like most researchers Barr-Melej has been able to conduct his oral history interviews and spend time in libraries and archives without being noticed.

That all changed during his last visit this summer. He gave an invited lecture at Chile's National Library in Santiago on the emergence of a specific group of countercultural youths who, in the late 1980s, formed the Humanist Party, a small but important contributor to Chile's process of democratization after 17 years of military rule.

"I couldn't walk through the library or the archives without someone stopping me and asking me a question about hippies and the counterculture," he said. "I was the 'hippie' guy."

The first indication Barr-Melej had of the interest in his work came when he saw a notice in Santiago's largest afternoon newspaper about his upcoming lecture.

" To my surprise here was my photo, which was lifted from a web page, right next to some text announcing the talk," he said. "At my talk, many people stayed after to chat with me about the counterculture movement in Chile. And it wasn't just academics."

One young woman, a member of the Humanist Party, was typical of the people that wanted to talk to Barr-Melej about Chilean counterculture and the countercultural roots of the Humanists.

"Before she heard my presentation she didn't know much about the background of her own party or the countercultural movement in Chile"” he said. "She told me that she 'didn't know what happened to people like me in the Salvador Allende era.'"

While many historians in Chile already were familiar with Barr-Melej's published work, his new project resonates with non-academics and academics alike.

Why the difference?

Barr-Melej explained that one of the major national television networks was airing a new soap opera about Chile in the 1960s called "Hippie." Popular culture was dovetailing nicely with his research.

"All of a sudden my work with counterculture in Chile became all the rage," Barr-Melej said. "Here I was, this professor from the U.S. who's interested in hippies, and everyone in Chile was talking about hippies because of the TV show."

For the record, Barr-Melej says the soap opera was wrong on many different levels but that it was enjoyable from a historical fiction standpoint.

" The soap opera was a good piece of art," he said.

Barr-Melej, who is of Chilean descent and was born in South America, says that the early 1970s was an important time in Chile's historical development. The Marxist government of Allende had fallen in a coup led by Gen. Pinochet and the countercultural movement wasn't popular with the new government.

But Barr-Melej has reached the conclusion that hippies weren't popular with the left-leaning Allende either, even though, as he notes, Joan Baez herself called Allende "the best thing that had ever happened to Chile."

"My interpretations are raising some eyebrows in Chile and here in the U.S. because there exists a very strong nostalgia for the Allende government, especially among progressive youths," he said. "But sexual liberation, smoking marijuana or listening to beat music was not the kind of 'revolution' Salvador Allende wanted in Chile.

"He wanted youths to be clean-cut and marching in the ranks of Marxist parties, and he deplored any form of revolution outside of the one he was building. My research indicates that hippies were actually repressed during this time period and that Allende's government and the Pinochet regime shared much of the same cultural conservatism that, in many ways, permeates Chilean society today."