- Tension: A Colombian teenager drops English to study Korean, and her mother thinks she’s throwing away her future. Across Bogotá, thousands of young people are making similar choices that look irrational from the outside.
- Noise: Critics see K-pop fandom as consumption and escapism, while traditional career frameworks can’t map the emerging economic corridors and community structures that fans are building through language acquisition, mutual aid networks, and cultural entrepreneurship.
- Direct Message: BTS didn’t give Colombian youth a hobby. It gave them a scaffold for building careers, fluency, and communities that their existing institutions never offered — and the music was just the door to everything they constructed on the other side.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Valentina Restrepo was seventeen when she told her mother she was dropping her English elective to study Korean. They were standing in the kitchen of their apartment in Chapinero, a middle-class neighborhood in central Bogotá, and her mother set down a cup of tinto and stared at her like she’d announced she was moving to the moon. “English gets you a job,” her mother said. “Korean gets you what, exactly?” Valentina didn’t have a clean answer. She just knew that for the past two years, something had been pulling her toward Seoul with a gravitational force she couldn’t explain, and the lyrics she’d been memorizing phonetically since she was fifteen deserved more than approximation. She wanted to understand them.
That was 2019. Valentina is now twenty-three, fluent enough in Korean to hold business conversations, and working as a junior translator for a Colombian import company that deals in Korean cosmetics. Her mother drinks Korean barley tea now. She still doesn’t fully understand what happened.
What happened, though, is something far bigger than one teenager’s language elective. Across Bogotá, and increasingly across Latin America, BTS has become the entry point for a cultural transformation that no marketing team designed and no government initiative funded. Young Colombians, mostly women between sixteen and twenty-eight, are teaching themselves Korean, enrolling in East Asian studies programs, pivoting their career ambitions toward translation and international trade, and building community structures that function like mutual aid networks disguised as fan clubs. As we explored in a recent piece on how K-pop rewired an entire generation’s relationship with identity and belonging in Colombia, this goes well beyond musical taste. It’s a full-scale cultural reorientation.
The scale is hard to overstate. The King Sejong Institute in Bogotá, one of the Korean government’s official language education centers, saw enrollment surge over 300% between 2018 and 2022, with the overwhelming majority of students citing K-pop, and specifically BTS, as their initial motivation. A 2020 study published in The International Journal of the History of Sport and Cultural Studies documented how Hallyu (the Korean Wave) had become a primary vehicle for identity construction among Latin American youth, noting that fan communities functioned as spaces of “cultural negotiation” where young people renegotiated their relationships with global power structures.
Consider what that means in context. For decades, the cultural aspiration ladder for young Colombians pointed in one direction: north. American music, American movies, American English. The path to upward mobility ran through Miami or New York, linguistically and culturally. Korean pop culture didn’t just offer an alternative aesthetic. It offered an alternative geography of ambition.
Camilo Herrera, a 26-year-old from Suba who now teaches Korean at a private academy in northern Bogotá, remembers the precise moment the shift happened for him. He was studying business administration at a public university in 2017, halfheartedly, when a friend showed him a BTS concert clip from their Wings Tour. “I wasn’t interested in the choreography first,” he told me. “It was the crowd. Tens of thousands of people in Seoul, moving together, crying, completely lost in something. I thought, what are they hearing that I’m not?” He started learning Korean that week on YouTube. Within a year, he’d passed TOPIK Level 3 (the intermediate Korean proficiency exam). Within three, he’d abandoned his business degree and was teaching.
His parents’ reaction mirrored Valentina’s mother’s confusion. In Colombian culture, particularly in working-class and middle-class families, career decisions carry enormous collective weight. You don’t just choose a profession for yourself; you choose it for the family’s economic future. Choosing Korean, choosing translation, choosing anything connected to fandom felt, to an older generation, like choosing fantasy over survival.
But the data tells a different story. According to the Korea Herald’s 2023 report on Hallyu economics, Korean cultural exports to Latin America generated over $750 million in related economic activity in 2022, spanning cosmetics, food, fashion, language education, and tourism. The ecosystem that fans like Valentina and Camilo plugged into wasn’t a dead end. It was an emerging economic corridor that traditional career counseling simply hadn’t mapped yet.
And the community dimension is arguably more significant than the economic one. Sofia Montoya, a 31-year-old social worker in Kennedy, one of Bogotá’s largest and most economically pressured localidades, started organizing BTS fan meetups in 2018 as a way to cope with burnout. What she found surprised her: the groups naturally evolved into support structures. Members helped each other study for exams, pooled resources to buy textbooks, organized charity drives modeled on the fan philanthropy culture that BTS’s fandom, ARMY, had pioneered globally. “People call it a fan club,” Sofia said. “But we were running a community center without the building.”
This mirrors research suggesting that the people who maintain the sharpest cognitive and emotional health are those who never stop being curious, who keep finding new systems to learn and communities to invest in. The neurological benefits of sustained curiosity and social bonding aren’t age-restricted. For young Colombians navigating economic uncertainty, political disillusionment, and the ambient anxiety of a post-conflict society, the structured engagement that fandom provides fills a void that formal institutions often leave gaping.
Psychologists have a term for what happens when an external cultural object becomes a scaffold for internal development: parasocial scaffolding. It’s related to, but distinct from, the parasocial relationships that critics love to pathologize. The scaffolding version isn’t about imagining BTS members as your friends. It’s about using the emotional engagement that music provides as a launchpad for real-world skill acquisition, identity formation, and community building. The attachment to the artist creates the initial energy. What the individual builds with that energy is entirely their own.
The generational misunderstanding is predictable but important. When Valentina’s mother worried about Korean replacing English, she was operating within a framework where cultural capital flowed along a single axis. English meant access. Spanish meant home. Everything else was hobby. That framework made sense for her generation. It makes less sense in a world where a 23-year-old in Bogotá can leverage Korean fluency into a legitimate career because the global economy restructured itself around cultural exports that didn’t exist at meaningful scale fifteen years ago.
As a piece on social connection and aging explored, the structures that keep people engaged with life, the daily rhythms, the communities, the sense of purpose, matter far more than we typically acknowledge. What’s remarkable about the BTS phenomenon in Bogotá is that young people stumbled into those structures through fandom. Nobody prescribed it. No therapist recommended it. They found purpose, skill, and connection because a song made them feel something they couldn’t name, and instead of letting that feeling evaporate, they chased it all the way to fluency.
Camilo teaches a beginner Korean class every Saturday morning in a rented room above a bakery in Suba. His students range from fifteen to forty. One of them is a retired schoolteacher named Gloria, who is sixty-two and learning Korean because her granddaughter introduced her to BTS during the pandemic. Gloria is not pivoting her career. She’s not building a professional network. She’s sitting in a plastic chair on a Saturday morning, carefully writing Hangul characters in a notebook, laughing when she mispronounces something, surrounded by people forty years younger who treat her like family.
Nobody in that room is confused about what they’re doing there. The confusion only exists from the outside, from people who look at a Latin American teenager learning Korean and see a phase, a trend, a curiosity that will fade. They see consumption. They miss the construction happening underneath: new languages learned, new careers forged, new communities built from scratch by people who decided that the culture they inherited wasn’t the only culture available to them.
Valentina’s mother eventually stopped asking what Korean was for. She stopped asking because the answer became obvious. It was for everything her daughter built with it. A career. A community. A version of herself that she chose rather than inherited. The music was the door. What was on the other side was a life.
Feature image by Alexander Nadrilyanski on Pexels
