One Direction are hugely popular in Argentina. There are over 376,000 Directioners on the One Direction Argentina Facebook page alone, at the time of writing. Harry, Niall, Zayn, Louis and Liam have not visited Argentina yet, but the Argentina fans are just as dedicated as those from other countries.
Superfan Victoria from Buenos Aires says, ‘Being a Directioner here in Argentina is weird but great. We love them and we would do whatever it takes to meet them – we are dedicated. We try to catch the boys’ attention by contacting them on Twitter and trying to get phrases to trend. They are so popular in my country; their songs are number one all the time on the radio. Everybody is talking about them here. Many of my friends are Directioners. We have meetings in different parts of the city and we talk for hours about them. We want them to know how much we love them and how important they are to us. We dream that some day they will come to Argentina.’
The majority of Argentina fans can’t afford to fly to Mexico or America when the boys are playing concerts over there, so they can only hope that one day the boys will come to their country. The official Argentinian fan club organises a meeting every month so that fans can meet up and make new friends. Lots of fans enter 1D radio competitions in other countries in the hope they will win, but it never happens. Argentina Directioners hope that the boys will do a Latin American tour because there are so many Directioners in the different countries, not only in Mexico where the boys have played.
‘Fans in Latin America are completely different from fans from other countries,’ Victoria adds. ‘We freak out about everything! We would wait outside their hotel during winter or heavy rain, for weeks, if it meant Harry, Louis, Liam, Zayn and Niall would at least wave at us from the balcony. If we had to go, because we couldn’t stay any longer outside the hotel, we would write on the hotel walls with messages – our Twitter usernames, phone numbers and stuff like that. I know some Argentina Directioners who, during concerts in the US, have bribed the guards in the stadium so they can sneak in or just to be in the front rows; sometimes it works but sometimes not. If Harry tweets “I’m hungry”, I’m sure lots of girls would go to McDonald’s and buy them a Big Mac. We get out of control.
‘We are really loud. I imagine the boys performing and instead of saying, “WE CAN’T HEAR YOU! SCREAM LOUDER!” they would probably be like, “SHUT UP! WE CAN’T EVEN HEAR OUR OWN VOICES!”
‘I think Latin Directioners freak out all the time because the boys won’t come to our country, so we don’t have the opportunity to see them much. Merchandise here is not easy to find; you can find the CDs easily, but the dolls and the books are not easy to get. We don’t have 1D World stores over here, so we have to buy all the merchandise on eBay, which is not good because they never arrive: customs retain all the stuff you buy because they have come from other countries. So the easiest way to get merchandise is when someone you know travels to North America or Europe.’
Sofi is 16 and from Argentina. When Harry tweeted a photo of the huge screen in Madison Square Garden and announced that they were going to perform there on 3 December 2012, she knew she had to be there. She searched for tickets but they were too expensive. She didn’t tell her parents but a few days later, she couldn’t help but tell her mother, as her mother caught her crying. Sofi told her that all the tickets had been sold out so there was no chance of her going. Her mother hated to see her so upset, so vowed to try and somehow find her a ticket.
So Sofi went to school but, during the break, her mother called to say that she had found just one ticket, in row 11, section b, which was one of the best sections at Madison Square Garden, at a reasonable price. Sofi couldn’t believe it. Her uncle, who lives in New York, found out and he said he would pay for their plane tickets as a birthday present to Sofi. It was only May, so Sofi had a long time to wait.
‘Those months passed quickly and it was soon time to go to the airport,’ Sofi says. ‘I travelled with my mother: we had a 12-hour flight, with a stopover in Peru. I slept like a baby all the way there. When I entered the garden and waited with all those girls, there was this one moment in which the boys’ bodyguards appeared and we all started to scream. It was so much fun. The doors were opened, I had my ticket in my hand and the mob was pushing me to the scanner. Many girls went out crying because the scanner said their tickets were not accepted; that was when I started to be nervous. What if my ticket was not accepted, or fake?
‘It was my turn and what I didn’t want to see showed up: the cross on the scanner. The lady told me to go to window one to check my ticket. I couldn’t believe I was one of all those girls whose ticket was not accepted. I thought it was fake, that I would have to return home without seeing the boys, it was horrible. As I was queuing up, I met two girls from Venezuela who had three tickets – two were working but one was not. Their turn came and the guy from the window told them it was OK – to try again in another scanner. When it was my turn, the guy made me wait 20 minutes next to the window because he didn’t have a solution to my problem. Many girls had fake tickets and had to buy new ones but, in less than five minutes, there were no more tickets to sell. The guy from the window told me that the stage had been moved forward, so my row had disappeared and that they would give me a new ticket but in a different section. I literally wanted to go home. I’d come all the way from Argentina to see them and they changed my ticket to another section, which I thought was not as good as the one I had. I entered the Garden crying. I found my section … and realised it was better than the one I’d had! It was row 1 in section 109, which was next to the stage. I was literally two metres away from the stage. In that section sat Andy Samuels, Perrie Edwards and the boys’ families – everyone was there!
‘The show started with “Up All Night” and Niall waved at me! I was barely breathing. They were so perfect, Harry waved at me and I almost fainted. I was going to throw my phone on stage so the boys could record themselves with my phone or take a selfie, but it ran out of battery, so I grabbed my iPhone case, which was a pink penguin, and wrote “thanks. Sofi” on the inside. I threw it during “One Thing” and Harry grabbed it, playing with it as if it was a toy!’
Sofi and her mother tried to get tickets for the Jingle Bell ball a few days later in New York, and met another girl and her mother who were also from Argentina. A man tried to sell them tickets, saying that he knew One Direction and that he was British, but Sofi didn’t fall for it – she could tell that his accent was dodgy. Sofi and her new friend Vicky managed to get tickets from another lady; they made sure that the tickets scanned before giving her any money. They had an amazing time – it was the best week of Sofi’s life.