Chetos, Emos, Floggers and....?

I spent hours yesterday watching videos on You Tube. How interesting! Now I know a little bit more about the names of different groups here, that apparently are popular among adolescents and maybe (hopefully) by the time kids become adults, are irrelevent.

I found a good video series of 3 parts that explores the phenomenon, especially with floggers. I'll try to explain what I learned.

Chetos, as I've said before, are rich kids. Real chetos are simply kids who wear designer clothes, have expensive things and live in nice neighborhoods. My neighborhood, Recoleta, is very cheto.

According to the video I posted yesterday by m1cest, who is very well-known on You Tube (there are other videos either criticizing him or supporting him, but he seems to be the number 1 voice on all of this) - there are three types of chetos - real chetos, glams and floggers. But I am not sure if the glams and floggers think of themselves at chetos, because it seems to me that chetos are kind of preppy and glams and floggers are not preppy at all. I don't think they'd be caught dead in a Ralph Lauren shirt.

Glams as I said yesterday look like glam rockers. They have long shag haircuts and wear tight pants. They may also be floggers. Floggers are people who post pictures on fotologs (fotolog.com has over 4 million members in Argentina). It seems to be an obsession. Some flogges even have fan clubs. Floggers are judged by the number of hits their sites get. One of the more popular floggers is Gazabril.

But there are also emos. Emos are kids who are emotional. They are kind of like goths. They wear dark clothes, black of course, and dark make-up, even the boys.

Negros are people who listen to cumbia. I don't know if they have any special way of dressing. I haven't found much on the internet about them.

And villeros are people who live in the 'villas de miseria' - shantytowns that line the outskirts of Buenos Aires. There is a very large villa near Retiro station, the train station that was not far from where I was living last year. That particular villa is one of the oldest and I think it actually has some services like electricity and water. At some point I'd like to visit the villas, but I can't go there alone.

I'm posting another video for anyone who is interested in learning more. This is part 1 of the series I found which includes interviews with a socialogist (or psychologist?) and some interviews with adults as well as lots of kids talking about the groups that they belong to. I still like the m1cest video for its humor (some people on You Tube call m1cest a racist for some of the stuff he's posted about villeros and negros, but I think he insults everyone equally).

I sent Juliana a link to the m1cest video so that we can discuss it in our class next week. I hope to be able to understand all of this a little better by the time I leave. It is interesting that without a whole lot of racial or ethnic identification it seems that the way people dress, the music they listen to, and even the soccer team they support (there are two choices in Buenos Aires) become ways of identifying people as well as sources of conflict. It's something interesting for me at least to find things that I can listen to in Spanish, and discuss with my conversation partners. Better than trying to read Borges!