Hay Locos

In 1969, two pretty girls graduated from college and set out on an improbable journey:  they drove from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Santiago, Chile to get to a New Year’s Party.  They travelled along 12,000  miles of roads and were three months late.   Along the way, they met dictators and revolutionaries, generals and peasants.   What began as pure adventure gradually became a voyage of love, danger and self-exploration that challenged everything Hope Boylston thought she knew about the world.


Boylston experienced one of the grand social experiments of the last century.  Allende was the only freely elected socialist government South America has ever had. Although Boylston’s stories are mostly very personal, the events that surrounded them were momentous. Salvador Allende’s three-year “peaceful” revolution was followed by General Pinochet’s 17 year dictatorship.  Her essays record these extraordinary experiences with passion, humor and a fine sense of the absurd.


“Boylston’s bite-sized vignettes...slip by as amusing roadie tales from two privileged but adventurous Florida girls with fresh tans and a saucy attitude. But little by little, the anecdotes turn deeply, then deadly, serious....her own inner North-South boundary becomes blurred forever.” —Tim Frasca, author of

AIDS in Latin America


“Like opening a photo album in which each picture opens more memories and stories...Hay Locos, is rich with remembrance and understanding. Boylston’s stories from those years offer a unique and poignant account of what it was like to be fully engaged in those tumultuous times.” —Steven Volk, Professor of History

Oberlin College