[Bizarro] Cumbio en el New York Times

“CUMBIO is here!” a young girl shouted out, after spotting Agustina Vivero on the steps of the Abasto shopping mall here one recent Sunday. Rushing over, the girl gave Ms. Vivero a hug and then pulled out a camera, leaned in to Ms. Vivero and snapped a shot with an outstretched arm.

Within minutes dozens of teens were swarming around, clamoring for a few seconds with Ms. Vivero, an Internet and television celebrity with pink-streaked hair and a pierced lower lip. Over the next hour, Ms. Vivero politely posed for endless photos, often sticking out her pierced tongue or smooching with her girlfriend, Marulina.

The past year has been a whirlwind for Ms. Vivero, known here simply as “Cumbio” for her love of cumbia music, a fusion of Latin pop, salsa and dance that is popular among Argentina’s lower classes. She has catapulted herself to stardom and unexpected affluence by transforming Internet fame as Argentina’s most popular “flogger” into marketing muscle, signing modeling contracts, promoting dance clubs and writing a book about her life.

And she is all of 17.

“When people see me in the street sometimes they cry or they want to hug me or kiss me,” she said in an interview. “Or they hate me. It is all very surprising.”

A foundation featured her in a campaign to raise awareness for H.I.V. prevention, and a filmmaker is shooting a documentary about her life. There is a Cumbio perfume and talk of a reality-based television show starring Cumbio and friends.

Her unlikely popularity is also redefining stereotypes of youth celebrity in Argentina. Ms. Vivero, who is openly gay, describes herself and other floggers as “androgynous” for their unisex clothing. She is comfortable with not being model-thin, eschewing dieting and boasting of her love of junk food and chocolate — a different message in a country where women have high rates of eating disorders.

“We are breaking a lot of barriers,” she said.

FLOGGERS take photos of themselves and friends and post them on photo blogs. Fotolog.com claims to have more than 5.5 million users in Argentina, which is one of the two biggest markets for the site; Chile is the other. Users comment on one another’s photos. The more comments, the more famous the flogger. Ms. Vivero’s fotolog site is among the most viewed Internet sites in Argentina, logging 36 million visits over the past year, based on figures tallied by fotolog, she said.

Her ride to fame started early last year when she invited some friends over to her family’s house in San Cristóbal, a working-class neighborhood of low-lying apartments and squatter homes. They hung out and took photos of themselves and their trademark big, carefully tousled hair, bright V-neck T-shirts and sneakers.

They soon outgrew the house and Ms. Vivero proposed moving the gatherings to Abasto. The first week about a hundred kids showed up. By the fourth week the number had swelled to 2,000.

Mall owners began barring them from entering the complexes. So they hung out on the steps. A few scuffles between groups of kids gathered outside drew the attention of the local news media. When reporters came to check things out the floggers directed them to Ms. Vivero, who confidently explained the new movement.

Soon she was making regular appearances on television news and talk shows.

“People don’t understand what this is all about,” she said. “People are used to fame coming from television or from sports but not from the Internet, where people are posting photos and bringing people together and having fun.”

Floggers are not “like hippies or punks, who had ideals of fighting to change the world,” said María José Hooft, who wrote a book, “Tribus Urbanas,” on youth subcultures in Argentina. “Floggers don’t want to change the world. They want to survive, and they want to have the best possible time they can.”

The Cumbio craze really took off after Guillermo Tragant, president of Furia, a marketing company, discovered Ms. Vivero and the floggers last April while scouting for fresh faces for a Nike sportswear campaign. Nike wanted “real people from the streets,” Mr. Tragant said.

“The power of the image for them is so strong,” he said, noting the afternoon “matinee” parties where floggers gather and walk a catwalk posing for photos of one another. “The sensation that the famous floggers are living today is like what Hollywood movie stars experience walking the red carpet.”

THE Nike campaign ran for three months, with Ms. Vivero’s image in sunglasses and a sideways-turned-cap appearing around the country. It included a giant sneaker-shaped slide outside Abasto that the floggers could slide down while posing for pictures.

The Nike modeling led to promotional appearances. Now on most weekends a manager whisks Ms. Vivero around the country to promote discos and to help sponsors sell branded clothes. They pay for the flights and pay for rooms in four-star hotels for her and a small entourage.

The dance club gigs alone can net her $1,000 a weekend, said two people close to Ms. Vivero, who declined to discuss her earnings. Her father refuses to let her help out the family, but does insist that she pay her own cellular and Internet bills.

In her book, “Yo Cumbio,” released in December, she writes that early on she felt like Eva Duarte de Perón, the famed former first lady of Argentina. At one Abasto gathering she looked down from the top step and blew kisses to the crowd, much as Mrs. Perón used to do from a balcony of the Pink House, as the presidential house is known.

Her parents have been supportive. Her mother, a homemaker, is a constant companion. Her brother, a television producer, is handling her finances and is involved in creating a pilot for the variety show. Her father, the neighborhood plumber, said proudly that his teenage daughter now outearns him.

“I can make 2,000 pesos in 15 days if I have work,” said Rubén Vivero. “They’ll pay her 2,500 pesos for an event, to show up for 45 minutes.”

Ms. Vivero’s parents welcome an assortment of her friends to their home for visits that sometimes last weeks. Her bedroom, with its creaky wood loft space where she keeps her computer, has become a sort of refuge for friends to escape their troubles at home.

“Sometimes there are 25 people at her house,” said Andrea Yannino, a filmmaker who has been shooting a documentary of Ms. Vivero. “What the floggers really want is the opposite” of their online relationships, “to have that touch, that contact with each other.”

Ms. Vivero said many of her gay friends seek out her house to escape prejudice at home. She has borrowed a video camera from her brother and started filming her friends’ testimonials.

She says she plans to study to be a television journalist. For now, she is working on lyrics for a band in the vein of Aqua, a Danish-Norwegian pop group known for the 1997 single “Barbie Girl.”

“I’ll have fun with this while it lasts,” she said. “When it ends, well, that’s that. I’ll still have all the photos.”

Admin escribió:que paices generos....

"The past year has been a whirlwind for Ms. Vivero, known here simply as “Cumbio” for her love of cumbia music, a fusion of Latin pop, salsa and dance that is popular among Argentina’s lower classes."

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