Age of Youth in Argentina
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A similarly optimistic conception of “change” pervaded a series of cultural transformations unfolding since the mid-1950s, generally unified under the label of “cultural modernization.” Scholars have paid attention to one of the most crucial avenues for that modernization: the remaking of the universities as autonomous research institutions, a process that reached its high point between 1958 and 1966 and was reflected in the expansion of student enrollments. Meanwhile, cultural historians, art and film historians, and literary critics have examined different aspects of cultural renewal, such as the crafting of successive aesthetic projects in the frame of the new centers of modern art; the transformation of cinematographic languages carried out by the “Generation of 1960”; and the gradual joining of aesthetic avant-gardes and political vanguards.30 While most of these studies have focused on cultural production and, basically, cultural products that circulated among an expanded yet limited enlightened audience, other scholars have begun to address changes in popular culture, mass consumption, and everyday life, including the expansion of television, the transformations of advertising, and the appearance of new practices of sociability.31
Expanding on these themes, I complicate the narrative of sociocultural modernization that these studies construct. They tend to set clear-cut divisions between societal forces pushing for change and top-down “authoritarian traditionalist blockades,” as Oscar Terán characterized, in cultural terms, the effects of the military regime imposed in 1966. Examining the experiences of young men and women who were both the carrier and target of most of the everyday aspects of social and cultural modernization sheds new light on their contested situation. One example will suffice at this point. Student enrollment at all levels of education greatly expanded in the 1960s and incorporated increasing numbers of middle-class young women into universities and working-class boys and girls into secondary schools. By reconstructing the experiences of secondary school students, I show how they lived in and complained about the enforcement of daily routines and hierarchical relations that permeated school life with authoritarianism, before and after the 1966 coup d’état.
The embattled nature of sociocultural modernization embodied in youth is perhaps most evident in the realm of gender and sexuality. While the literature addressing political dynamics or the ways in which cultural modernization unfolded in institutional development or the arts has been abundant, scholars have only just begun to turn their attention to women’s history, gender, and sexuality in the 1960s. Scholars have unraveled the opening up of new educational and job possibilities for women, especially those belonging to the middle classes. They have also interrogated the traits of the emergent feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s as well as its tense relations with the revolutionary left and the medical and cultural debates over the uneven availability of the birth control pill. Most of them suggest there was a prudent liberalization of sexual mores and behaviors, especially among young people.32 Instead of focusing on midterm patterns of change, as most historians have done thus far, I have opted for looking closely at some junctures that I hope will illuminate the ways in which change, as it came especially to young women and men’s sexual lives, was debated and shaped.
Telling a History of Youth
This book primarily narrates the experiences of and the discussions about urban youth, which by 1970 represented more than 80 percent of the age group between eighteen and twenty-four. Researching how youth became a central category and one of the most dynamic cultural and political actors in Argentina from midcentury to the 1970s required piecemeal work with disparate materials, from institutional archives to movies and from music records to police files. In addition, telling this story required familiarity not only with the literature on the history of youth in other geographical settings and temporal frames, but also with gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies on consumption, and popular music studies.
I based my reconstruction of how youth was discussed and understood—that is to say, categorized—on an examination of archival materials kept by the three most important state and private institutions dealing with youth and family issues (the National Council of Minors’ Protection, the League of Mothers, and the Organization for Protecting Young Women); sociological and psychological reports; books of psychological, pedagogical, and sexological advice; pamphlets, party literature, and political presses; movies; newsmagazines and the popular press; and the three most widely read national newspapers. The national press and reports published in two business magazines, along with unpublished reports kept by a prominent agency, John Walter Thompson, gave me crucial insight into how advertisers and fashion designers imagined and appealed to youth, while published business reports and economic censuses and surveys did the same for the industrial aspects of rock music.
I began to gain access to the world that the secondary school students inhabited through the examination of daily memos by the Directorate of Secondary Education, official bulletins, and published memoirs. Student magazines, university publications, and academic programs, all from the University of Buenos Aires, allowed me to reconstruct the experiences of their university counterparts. Likewise, the archive kept by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences—which was a key institutional site for modernizing projects—was particularly useful to my understanding of student politics and everyday life. Besides the national press and newsmagazines, my investigation of young people’s political involvement with revolutionary organizations and of their construction of a shared political culture was based on the examination of the political press, published and unpublished pamphlets, folk (protest) music, political documentaries, published memoirs, and unclassified police reports.
With the exception of the voices of revolutionary militants or countercultural organizers, it was particularly challenging to find ways to hear the voices of young women and men from the past. Doing so required me to deploy alternative methodologies. Highly mediated yet still audible, these voices can be heard in countless letters to the editor (from women’s, lifestyle, and youth magazines) or in responses to the many reports and studies that not only the press but also psychologists, sociologists, and educators debated. They also are found in the form of song lyrics and music. Perhaps most fundamentally, I tried to listen to what young women and men did; or, to put it another way, to read the meanings of their practices. Those practices included bodily transformations (such as the male rockers’ long hair) as well as the apparent epidemic tide of “runaway” young women and girls from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Reading those practices led me to work with other sources, like the Daily Reports issued by Federal Police listing runaways.
Besides making use of two oral history archives, I conducted twenty-five semi-structured interviews with former students at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and with former working-class young women and men from Valentín Alsina, a working-class neighborhood in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The School of Humanities was one of the “star players” of the dynamics of the university renovation in the 1960s, and the media took its students as the epitomes of “modern youth.” While some histories of the Argentine 1960s used to take those students’ experiences as a synecdoche for being young in that decade, I have opted for also incorporating the voices of 1960s working-class youth. Through these conversations, I intended to gain insight on how those formerly young women and men from different cultural and class locations narrated their lived experiences of being young in the 1960s and 1970s. While I did not expect to reconstruct factual data, neither did I engage in an in-depth evaluation of how my interviewees remembered their political, sexual, or cultural pasts. That evaluation would have demanded the framing of a different project centered, for example, on the building of social memories of youth, politics, and violence and on the entwinement of memory and generation. Aware of the porous lines between memory and history, in this book I have opted for relying more thoroughly on the methodologies of social and cultural his
tory.
Telling histories of Argentina through the lens of youth, the eight chapters of this book focus on particular themes and problems while at the same time following a loose chronological order. Chapter 1 examines how youth was understood, debated, and regulated during the last years of Peronism and, chiefly, in the decade that followed its overthrow. In late 1953, Perón helped create the state-sponsored Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (UES, Union of Secondary School Students). Besides affording secondary students with a chance of participating in sports, tourism, and other leisure activities, the UES incited a vociferous reaction among the regime’s opponents, who understood that Perón was using it to manipulate and “pervert” youth. Many of those opponents would later on coalesce into an informal field of experts on youth composed of psychologists, state officers, educators, and Catholic institutions. These actors engaged in a contentious dialogue about family authority, the spread of the media, and the relaxation of sexual mores that young people purportedly embodied. In doing so, they connected their worries over youth with a reevaluation of the Peronist experience, and some of them projected onto youth the chance of eroding authoritarian practices from the family and the societal milieu, and of constructing a democratic and culturally modern Argentina. Although the allegedly progressive psychological discourse set the terms and dominated this public talk, conservative Catholic groups proved more influential in generating policies with regard to media regulation, policing of public entertainment, and education, policies that ultimately helped shape and condition young people’s lived experiences and set definite limits to the modernizing sociocultural dynamics unfolding locally in the 1960s.
Chapter 2 focuses on the promises of and the discontent with those sociocultural dynamics through examining both secondary schools and universities, chiefly from 1956 to 1966. By reconstructing student experiences at both levels, I explore how secondary schools continued to be spaces wherein boys and girls interacted with and eventually reacted against authoritarian and hierarchical practices. By contrast, the admittedly expanding minority of young people who enrolled in the public universities, and chiefly at some particular schools (such as Humanities and Social Sciences, the test case I follow), represented themselves as the epitome of the modernizing 1960s. While the daily life of secondary school and university students took place in a continuum from their classrooms to the street corners, at times many of them went forcefully to a third space, the streets. I evaluate the novelties of student politicization in the early 1960s with regard to previous traditions of student politics in Argentina and show that the trope of the “revolutionary student” haunted the public imagination, helping to create consensus for the 1966 coup d’état, when the military intervened in the universities.
In Chapter 3 I move from duty to leisure to explain the spread of youth-led music and consumption. I contend that these realms became pivotal to the ways in which young people constructed a sense of generational belonging at the time that they irrupted, as youth, in the public arena. Secondary school and university students, working young women and men: they all created and participated in new leisure and consumption practices that were exclusively youthful and helped to juvenilize mass culture at large. However, in these realms young people also built up renewed, class-inflected senses of cultural distinction, thus complicating any understanding of youth and youth culture as homogeneous categories. A juvenilized mass culture was the social space where the groups that participated competed for the definition of taste, as it related to music idols, sites of entertainment, or fashion items.
The next two chapters explore the gendered dimensions of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization, including its reactions and discontents. Chapter 4 delves into the changes of gender ideals and sexual mores that young women came to embody. The increased incorporation of young women into the workforce and the educational system and their participation in sociability devoid of adult supervision (which served to transform dating and courtship practices) were culturally perceived as ways of “leaving home.” Young women questioned on a practical basis deeply rooted notions of patriarchal authority and domesticity, generating familial dilemmas that sometimes led to girls’ running away from their homes. Using the prism of what sociologists call moral panic, I focus on an apparent tide of runaway girls in 1963 to discuss the relations among cultural modernization, gender, and sexuality. In this latter respect, I show that young women indeed stood at the center of the most significant change in Argentina’s sexual culture in the 1960s—the public acceptance of premarital sex—which further involved destabilizing domestic ideals based on a double sexual standard, yet that innovation was neither linear nor exempt from the embattledness that characterized cultural modernization.
Chapter 5 turns from young women to young men and explores the emergence of a rock culture as a window through which to analyze ideals and debates over masculinity. Beginning in 1966, an extremely active rock culture emerged in Argentina, one that attracted increasing numbers of working- and middle-class young men as poets, musicians, and fans, while young women remained largely excluded both on- and off-stage. Rock culture acted as a platform for young men to articulate a practical and poetical criticism of male “ordinary life.” By upholding the symbolic potential of the pibes (boys) and forging what I dub a “fraternity of long-haired boys,” rockers questioned the values attached to the hegemonic notions of masculinity, including sobriety and breadwinning capability. They also questioned the sites and practices through which they were supposed to be learned and internalized, such as the schools, the military service, and paid jobs. Drawing on a transnational repertoire of sounds and ideas, rockers shaped a cultural politics that on the one hand led toward “modernizing” masculinity (by endorsing values such as companionship and egalitarianism, for example) and, on the other, iconoclastically rejected the authoritarian and repressive components of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization.
Rockers and their cultural politics made only one subset of a broader culture of contestation that spread among young people. Chapter 6 explores the largest subset of that culture, namely, the involvement of young people in student, party, and guerrilla groups. I begin by reconstructing the juncture of 1968–69 to show that it was during the concatenated popular revolts in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba in May of 1969 when young people, chiefly university and secondary school students, became visible political actors. In that process, they differentiated their politicization from what was unfolding among youth in Western Europe and North America. They also wanted to erase the markers of their youthfulness (for example, their student origins) in order construct bridges with “the People.” In doing so, politicizing young people participated in the ideological and cultural transformations of the left, notably from the highly emotional assimilation of Argentina to the Third World. If there was a movement that informed and benefited the most from that assimilation and the politicization of young people, it was Peronism. It was within this political space that youth was most forcefully framed as a political actor and category and where a generational and familial language served to codify and enact ideological and political disputes. By 1973–74, these disputes were shaped as a dramatic family romance, whose resolution was overdetermined by the push to reconstitute relations of authority and hierarchies that had been symbolically “subverted” since so many young people had decided to poner el cuerpo (to put their body) at the service of a revolution.
Chapter 7 explores the embodiment of young people’s political and sexual experiences as well as the making of the “youth body” as a political and cultural category. Poner el cuerpo acquired for young people manifold, sometimes competing meanings. It entailed, for example, positioning the youthful body as the center of renewed fashion trends that reformulated notions and practices of eroticism as well as making young people’s bodies the carriers of transformations in prevalent sexual arrangements. Poner el cuerpo acquired a different meaning for the rising numbers of young women and men engagi
ng in radical politics who worked on their own material bodies to make them resilient, and thus to comply with the untiring militancy required to forge a revolution that many envisioned as imminent. Many of these militants realized that poner el cuerpo could have still a more literal, dreadful meaning. As Chapter 8 explores, beginning in the civilian Peronist government yet amplified after the military coup d’état of 1976, a project for “reconstituting authority” was crucially played out in the territory of the youth body. While legislative developments restricted young women’s access to the birth control pill and subjected to medical and judicial examination the bodies of “drug addicts”—a key device for that “authority-reconstitution” project—police, parapolice, and later, military squadrons engaged in more literal and tragic forms of battling an “enemy” that, in terms of age, was young. In the decade that started with the short democratic spring of 1973 and ended with a new spring in 1983, the “age” of youth in Argentina had ended.