The Cocacolos

In the early decades of the century, a Colombian suitor, somberly dressed in black, wooed and won his senorita in classical style, even though it sometimes took years of hot-eyed glances through barred colonial windows, and reams of brief, impassioned verses, inscribed on linen paper of powder blue and slipped under a door. ("Love! Bitter love! Pursue me no more!") But the chaperons, the sedate hot-chocolate parties and all the genteel elegance of yesteryear are being put to rout. "Ay, chica," cries 1955's blue-jeaned swain as Night and Day booms out of the record-player, "you're sweeter than an ice-cream cone and a blue sky!" The girl's fashionable ponytail bobs happily in acknowledgment.

Anti-"Government" Parties. Around convertibles, mambos and soda fountains, reports Bogota's weekly Semana, Colombian teen-agers are building "a fresh, good-natured society" -the "cocacolos." For inspiration, youth draws more and more on the U.S. Typical day, according to Semana:

"Like businessmen, Bogota's teen-agers resolve most of their problems by telephone, so a girl first sets up operational headquarters in a chair next to the phone table, with the radio close by, magazines spread all over the floor and an interminable Coke dangling from her free hand. 'The government' [her parents] does not understand at all, but getting up a teenage party requires agonizing preparation. Henry, a Tyrone Power type with a notably gay mambo style, won't come if Gladys is invited because she just put him in a state of siege (see below). Maria Cristina can't come without her brother and he is an incunable* of 24, all serious and gummy. When everything is arranged, parents must be convinced that a woman of 14 can wear this dress and this hairdo and lipstick, too. Generally, she does."

Atomic Pineapples. What makes a cocacolo? They must be students, says Semana, and from the well-to-do suburbs. They wear blue jeans, sweaters and moccasins (though mostly at home), they must dance well, and "cultivate at least five of the following tastes : comics, spaceship adventure books, U.S. jazz, iced soft drinks, the movies, the radio, sports, chewing gum or hot-rods." Most notably, they must know the vocabulary. Samples: "phantasmagoric," "atomic" or "pyramidal" (for great), "pineapple" and "mango" (for a kiss), "curse of the green turkey buzzard" and "horror, horror, three times horror!" (as all-purpose exclamations of surprise or distaste).

But if cocacolismo has borrowed freely from the U.S., it has also put new life into an old Latin American custom, the piropo, or street-corner compliment. "My compliments to your mother," the boys say. "If you want to kill me, I'll die." For a girl in a green dress, the proper piropo is "If you're like this green, what you'll be when you're ripe!" As for the phantasmagoric girl who is already ripe, the boys draw on their memories-of Italian movies, and say: "What a Pampanini!"

*In bibliographical terminology, a book printed before 1500.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.