translated from Spanish: Generation of the eighties – The Counter

In the newspaper La Tercera of the last Saturday of August came a dozen articles whose main theme was generational disputes. Among them was one dedicated to the generation of the eighties – abundant in data, but without an interpretive horizon – which was entitled The Lost Generation. This note is to be complementary to that article.
Broadly speaking, the generation of the eighties is that of those people who were born in Chile between 1963 and 1970. It is a generation that politically has a vague memory of Popular Unity and a rather clear one of the military dictatorship; were those who in their childhood, adolescence and youth were tanned with the sports fiascos of Martín Vargas, Carlos Caszely and Roberto “Cóndor” Rojas; economically they were dazzled by the trinkets of the Boom and then suffered the hardships of the recession of the eighties. It is the generation that paled with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and that the same year, that news 1986, excitedly overnight to contemplate Halley’s Comet to which he did not even see a filament of his hair.
But what is a generation? It is a human group that wants to make a dent in time, a cohort that wants to be the protagonist of the story, a pleiade that aspires to be the heroine of its own biography. For a vital entity to constitute a generation – that is, a collectivity that shares a way of feeling and living life – certain conditions are required that distinguish it from other vital units. One of them is age. But this must be understood, in this case, as a primarily qualitative concept and only secondarily as a numerical indicator. Therefore, the generation to which a person belongs is not determined exclusively by his date of birth. A generation is something more complex. It is a certain way of interpreting the world and relating to it.
For a generation to exist, a certain coetaneidad is required among its members; that is, they were born within the same date area, but whose borders are porous and flexible, not absolute or impermeable. It also requires a certain physical and social proximity – which implies coexisting in the same geopolitical space – which exposes the group to the same stimuli and to having similar life experiences. It is also necessary to have a similar sensibility and a certain collection of shared beliefs that give rise to similar sufferings and joys. For these reasons, a mere birth certificate is not enough to be part of a generation. A generation is a lifestyle.
A Caletera Generation
It is a generation that has no frontline public man. The most outstanding are second, example: Claudio Orrego, Carolina Tohá and Daniel Jadue. If you look at the birth years of parliamentarians, ministers and party leaders, those who wear it were born before 1963 or after 1970.
The “pretty kids” of the generation, those to whom the world smiled in the eighties, were stunned. Perhaps, the child symbol of the stunned is Thomas Jocelyn-Holt. There are others who died young abruptly, presumably due to work stress, such as Pablo Andueza, who in cristián Warnken’s opinion was the brightest person of the generation.
In academic life no one has asserted himself or managed to excel, except in bureaucratic positions. Of course there are one or another exception, but they are just that: exceptions that confirm the rule. The university professors of that generation are subject to tremendous job instability. But that’s not all, moreover, they have never become well accustomed to neoliberal metrics that measure academic productivity, metrics that are absolutely natural for those born after 1970.
It is a generation that, when it was of postgraduate age abroad, the International Cooperation scholarships that were operating during the years of the dictatorship were no longer available. And when the Chile Scholarship program began, she was already over-the-top to apply. It is a generation that was never at the right time or in the right place.
In literature the generation of the eighties does not have any poet or narrator who is an icon. He doesn’t even have great athletes to his credit, except Iván Zamorano. Bam-Bam, as he was called, had some prominence in the mass media. First as an outstanding athlete and then as a television face. But his public life quickly turned into comedy. If the comedians and the tabloid pressIf they made him a caricature, he stubbornly took it upon himself to parody that caricature. However, it is an icon of a sector of the generation. Concretely, that of the one who conceives personal fulfillment, success, as the obtaining and ostentation of those goods, material and immaterial, that provide status in mass culture.
No one knows who he works for
One of the main characteristics of the generation is that it is laboric. That is why she is vitally exhausted, bursting, stressed, because she was overexploded from a very young age. It seems to me that he aged prematurely. In this regard, it is worth comparing it with other generations. Sometimes I look at professors who are chronologically old, seventy or eighty years old, and I see them being physically and mentally well. And then I look at colleagues who are my age and realize that we are not going to reach seventy or eighty years old with the vitality that they have.
Another thing that characterizes the generation that was born between 1963 and 1970 is that she was the one who put the vital inputs (her youth and her adult life) for great works without obtaining greater returns from them. It was the generation that in the eighties risked the skin to lower the bun to the dictatorship, it was the generation that in the early nineties sacrificed its aspirations of retaliation to make the transition possible and, in addition, it was the generation that with strenuous and poorly paid working days paid for the neoliberal development model (model that, along with its innumerable shortcomings, it is by far the most successful development model in Latin America.)
It is, in a way, a generation that did not live for itself, but for the others, whether these are earlier or later. One would have to wonder if he did it out of altruism, naivety or miscalculations. Or, perhaps, well done, but they were defrauded by the whims of the goddess Fortuna.
Specifically, her efforts were capitalized by the two generations that preceded her (to name them: that of Patricio Aylwin and Ricardo Lagos and also by that of Joaquín Lavín and Francisco Vidal) and what with effort was managed to build at her expense, finally, was stoned by the two subsequent generations (that of Giorgio Jackson and Camila Vallejo and that of the current university students; that is, the generations that starred in the social explosion). For these reasons, this generation has the adage that says: nobody knows who they work for like a ring to their finger.
In short, it is a generation that in its childhood and adolescence knew a certain poverty (covered with austerity, neatness and solemnity) and that, like no other in Chile, glimpsed the possibility of development, but that will have an old age – which is already around the corner – with retirements more miserable than imagined, after the percentage withdrawals of pension funds.
It is a generation that never came to fruition. It was a caletera generation, which managed to advance in stumbles, with rules of the game that changed on the fly, and that from one moment to the next became aware that its time has passed. In this regard, it is quite symptomatic that the two candidates for the Presidency of the Republic with the best chances, Sebastián Sichel and Gabriel Boric, were born in 1977 and 1986, respectively.
Perhaps, what explains the failed fate of this generation (a generation that initially had faith in itself and felt called to perform great tasks) is that it was educated for a world that ceased to exist, precisely, when it had just left the classroom.
A lost generation?
At present the generation of the eighties has only nominal existence. When did it cease to exist? During the nineties. It is a generation that the political turns of 1989, both locally and internationally, left it without a script. He was left without projects, without references, without friends and without enemies. He had no one to fight or what to fight for. In a hurry, and without being prepared for it, she came face to face with one of the many faces of nihilism: that of nothing is worth it, that of the futility of values, which in the colloquial language of the early nineties crystallized in expression I am not even there. And so it was that, in the blink of an eye, the clay that he so passionately kneaded with his hands and with which he was going to model his world vanished. He ran out of ideals, no projects, no utopias, he was left empty-handed.
In this regard, the lyrics of the songs of the iconic band of that generation: Los Prisioneros are symptomatic. She somehow sums up the trajectory of the generation. As it will be remembered, it is a generation that left with a tremendous impulse, with an enormous faith in itself, as well reflected in the lyrics and music of the The band’s first album, La voz de los 80. The lyrics and music of the following albums convey the intention of modeling the world at her will, after criticizing it, and in them there is no hint that she is intimidated by the magnitude of the titanic task that was assigned. But the band’s cycle ends abruptly with the renunciation of the world (deserting its mission without even officially giving up) and the consequent search for refuge in a cubil, not of ideals but of illusions; not of dreams but of daydreams. Of that flight from the world gives an account of the music and the lyrics of the song Mi casa en un árbol, although in strict rigor it is not of the band, but of who was its leader. This song is, among other things, an indicator of the existential and social loneliness of the veterans of the eighties. Solitude that accompanies them to this day; but that at this point no longer bothers them, since it is a habit, a way of life.
Some argue that it is a lost generation; others claim that it is a generation that betrayed itself (those who reject such a possibility vehemently allege that it was used and defrauded by the two generations that precede it) by being seduced by the molicie of growing material well-being, by trips to paradisiacal places and by the siren songs of consumerism; others believe that it was simply swallowed by the maelstrom of life like all generations. In the event that it is a lost generation, the problem is not that it has evaporated itself; the big problem is that with its disappearance the generational dialectic is interrupted and its enigmatic absence makes society more cojitranca than it usually is. From this point of view, the generation of the eighties is not one of rupture or continuity, it is simply an empty locker, a lion that suddenly stopped roaring and became a sphinx.
But who silenced the voice of the eighties? Were they the placebos of consumerism or, perhaps, the rhetoric of the jaguar that was imposed in the nineties or, perhaps, herself because she betrayed her vocation? She should be asked the same thing that the famous band asked the specter of Marilyn and say: Tell me, tell me who it was. Be that as it may, the concrete fact, from the political point of view, is that the generation of the eighties is unknown, because, although it is mostly registered in the Electoral Register, since December 1997 it has been reluctant to vote.
Nostalgia for the 80s
Despite what has been pointed out, the voice of the eighties persists as a slight melody that ascends from the underground of the soul, from the deep psyche, like a flash of light that allows us to rediscover the lost path. During the winter nights of 2020, perhaps, he gave birth to more than one veteran of the eighties with such extraordinary intensity that he felt encouraged to give up the placebos of consumption, the tinsels of economic success, trips to exotic places. But, perhaps, too late to reverse, reverse and return to the original path.
If the past sweeps away the empire of the present and we are flooded by a tidal wave of bittersweet waves with pleasant breezes that delight our conscience, it is because we have been flooded by the tide of nostalgia.
But it’s not just any past. It is an agonizing past that has longings for restoration, that cries out to roll back the hands of the clock, that resists dying. It is a past that still lives, but lives as a memory. An absolutely concluded past, irrevocably deceased, does not generate nostalgia. Nostalgia is a protest against finitude, it is a rebellion against the tyranny of time. Their minimum requirement is a second chance or, at least, to live once again – in fullness and for an instant – the same as before, what it already was irrevocably.
Nostalgia is an ambivalent feeling, since, on the one hand, it has a tinge of melancholy and, on the other, it has something pleasant, something that intimately arouses a certain rejoicing. We feel nostalgia for what we find pleasing, not the insperated. It also has something mysterious, because the fact remembered – and that provokes us rejoicing today – was not necessarily experienced as comforting in the moment it was lived.
What generates nostalgia? There is always a trigger, a punctual detonator, an accidental event, but this is not enough. Something more is needed: a predisposition to certain kinds of memories that is incubated in the here and now. Nostalgia, as an escape to the past, supposes an discomfort with the present and also an absence of will for the future. The nostalgic is, in a way, a fugitive from the present; he is a subject who not only perceives his time as inhospitable; he is, above all, someone who feels – or who is known – incapable of modifying it. The nostalgicHe shuns the demands of the present and – as a consolation and as a self-justification of his own impotence – observes it with a certain disdain from the watchtower of a selectively rescued past.
Why does the generation of the eighties strive to cultivate nostalgia?, what lies the sweetness of the past with which it is comforted?, what incites it to remember in a romantic way a decade that was of skins, tear gas, restrictions on freedom and all kinds of violence? In short, why do you idealize that past?

The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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