Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  Youth sexuality was perhaps the single issue that awoke the most serious concerns from the “adult” world, and that was the reason why the new magazines insisted on prudence toward ongoing changes. The “new youth” of the mid-1960s did not generate such a wave of anxieties and debate as its predecessor of the mid-to-late 1950s did. Rather, psychological professionals, sociologists, and journalists of the new magazines could demonstrate a degree of satisfaction through the representation of a politically inactive and sexually prudent “new youth.” This “new youth,” sociologists confirmed through their findings, had been raised in a realm of modernizing families. These families supported and promoted dialogue and tolerance and avoided the harsher forms of patriarchy. In turn, the “new youth” promised to gradually change sexual mores and eventually become a stabilizing force in politics. The Argentina of 1980, as imagined through the attributes endowed to the “new youth,” would be rational, perhaps democratic, and prudent: it would have overcome the “transition” to a modern nation.

  As cultural critic Lawrence Grossberg has noted, the term “youth” does not have its own center: it is a “signifier of transition and change.”100 All the voices that attempted to mobilize, categorize, and discuss youth in the 1950s and the early 1960s also attempted to signify transition and change. They projected onto the cultural category they were constructing their hopes and anxieties regarding broader sociocultural and political issues in a country that, for the most part, was also thought of as undergoing its own “critical transition.” Carving out a place for youth meant also defining the parameters for young people to “act” their age. Through their enduring conversation, an array of cultural and political “adult” actors helped set many of the conditions in which the experiences of flesh-and-blood young people unfolded: to a degree, they decided where and how youths could interact, down to even what movies they could watch; they expanded the notion of “normalcy” with regard to youth’s behaviors, habits, and attitudes, within the family and sexual realms; and, chiefly, they decided that youth had become of critical importance. They imbued young people with a renewed sense of importance.

  In terms of the historical emergence of youth as a cultural category, there were three key moments. The eruption of a public discussion took place when Perón mobilized and insisted on projecting onto youth the possibilities of generational continuity of his project. His political opponents constructed a narrative that centered on the ways in which Perón, through his alleged manipulation of youth for political purposes, generated the conditions for “perverting” sexual mores, producing hedonistic values, and subverting social and cultural hierarchies. From the outset, the talk about youth combined political, cultural, and sexual discussions. These were crucial in the second moment, which was marked by the emergence of experts and their association of youth with the “crisis-of-our-time” motif. Among those experts, conservative Catholic groups and psychological professionals represented broader positions trying to influence modernizing dynamics that, for better or worse, both viewed as ongoing. The Catholic groups attained a remarkable organizational success. Embedded in Cold War rhetoric, these groups promoted a connection between “liberalism” and Communism that had youth as its main target. Perhaps the mobilization of those connections explains their political influence: in the name of “youth’s moral well-being,” these groups participated in the apparatus of censorship (as well as other decision-making processes) that affected youths and adults alike. While prominent in the shaping of some conditions that made the local 1960s, these groups resembled a reactionary force. The psychological professionals, on the contrary, contributed to the normalization of the “youth” and of the “social” crisis, tying the resolution of both to the erasure of the more entrenched forms of patriarchal authority at the family and cultural levels. These professionals perceived youths to be in the privileged position of involuntary agents of modernization: youth promised to remove authoritarianism at home and in society while living their “normal” crisis at a particular time.

  By the mid-1960s, youth came to be celebrated in the public arena. The critical momentum of the eruption of the public talk had already been left behind, along with the notion of crisis and the belief in the existence of a “frustrated generation.” The representations of youth in this third moment emphasized some attributes such as prudence and rationality. The new magazines, for instance, depicted the “new youth” as the carrier of slow, careful steps toward a “modernization” of sexual and cultural mores. Most fundamentally, youth appeared as politically inactive. For many cultural actors, the youth of the mid-1960s represented the rise of rationality in all spheres of life, and some even dreamed that this type of dispassionate attitude would entail the crossing out of the Peronist/anti-Peronist divide. That was the youth landscape drawn by the mid-1960s. In the years that immediately followed, youth came to the spotlight again to signal that the serene landscape represented nothing more than desires and hopes. Talking about youth, however, always meant talking about desires, hopes, and fears.

  2 The World of the Students

  Increasing numbers of youths between thirteen and twenty-four years of age gained access to secondary schools and universities in the 1950s and 1960s. The vast matriculation of newcomers in the education system signaled the most basic dimension of the sociocultural modernization Argentines lived through: a porous and accelerated dynamic that held the schools and colleges as privileged sites. Yet looking at this dynamic from the vantage point of the student experience at both levels shows deep ambivalences. While secondary schools were sites for the developing of new peer-based sociability, they continued enforcing authoritarian practices and pedagogies. The experience of the secondary school students was as constitutive in shaping the 1960s as was the college experience. Hindsight presents a rather acquiescent view of the decade as one pervaded by notions of progressive change. Yet authoritarianism and change marked the dual sociocultural modernization that was embodied in youth.

  As the world of the students enlarged, more youths organized their daily lives around the schools and their attendant spaces. Intermittently, they participated in political activism that crystallized within a third space: the streets. The political socialization of students in Latin America has attracted attention since the 1950s, when local and international scholars tried to visualize and formulate the traits of the “democratic” and modernizing elites that those countries needed for their “takeoff” toward development.1 That interest was also related to the role that the student movement had in politics at the university and national levels. In Argentina, since 1918, the student movement had been overwhelmingly aligned with the ideas and projects shaped within the University Reform Movement. The basic principles set by the Reformists for the universities—autonomy, student participation in the university government, freedom of cathedras, and the social function of knowledge—served also as cornerstones for projects of social transformation that emphasized democratic values and modernizing ideals, including laicism. In practical terms, though, those tenets were applied on a limited basis. During Juan Perón’s governments (1946–55), moreover, the state suppressed university autonomy and banned student organizations such as the Federación Universitaria Argentina (FUA) and the Federación Universitaria de Buenos Aires (FUBA). Reformist students along with some Catholic students became strongholds of anti-Peronism, and they actively supported the coup d’état that overthrew Perón in 1955.2

  From 1955 to 1966, an ideologically changing but always significant student movement did participate in university and national politics, contributing to the makeover of the universities into showrooms for “modernization” and, afterward, forecasting their critique from a radical perspective. The Reformist-oriented groups and projects provide a window through which to access those changes. Between 1955 and 1958, students of both Reformist and Catholic orientations contributed to the “de-Peronization” of the universities; but their alliance ended when Arturo Frondizi’s government (
1958–62) decided to pass new legislation allowing the private sector to create title-granting universities, previously a state monopoly. In September and October 1958, laicos (laity)—the largely Reformist defenders of the state monopoly over higher education—and libres (free)—the Catholic defenders of the new arrangement—clashed in the streets on a daily basis. The unfolding of the laica o libre conflict brought important realignments within the Reformist bloc, which had been an eager participant in the intrauniversity politics. Although a majority of the secondary school and college students refrained from participating in politics as the 1960s continued, a minority affiliated with Reformist groups joined ranks with groups from divergent political and ideological backgrounds to pave the way toward increasing radicalization. In that process, the old divides between Reformist and non-Reformist, laicos and libres, and even Peronist and anti-Peronist began to blur, giving birth to a new student movement where the term “Reform” was gradually replaced by “Revolution.” The military that led the 1966 coup d’état tried to put an end to that process by intervening in the public universities. Yet, in their effort to depoliticize university life, the military merely exacerbated the expansion of the radical tide far beyond the “active few.”

  Schools, Corners, Streets

  Beginning in the 1950s, a growing segment of adolescents organized their daily lives around school. Girls and boys from lower-middle- and working-class backgrounds for the first time gained access to secondary schools, which endowed them with a sense of entitlement. For most students the experience became the keystone for creating new sociability beyond the school doors and, in some cases, for beginning their political involvement. A source of potentially stirring experiences, the secondary schools nonetheless provoked mounting criticisms. For the most part, the schools preserved the attributes they had had in the first half of the twentieth century, chiefly their emphasis on discipline and encyclopedism, which became the traits students found to be unbearable. As crucial venues for modernizing sociocultural dynamics—such as social mobility, homogenization, improved literacy rates, and egalitarian forms of interaction—the secondary schools enforced also authoritarianism.

  The dramatic expansion of enrollments at the secondary level of education began during the Peronist governments, but in the decades that followed it became more diversified in terms of gender and class. From 1945 to 1970, the total enrollment more than quadrupled, from 201,000 to 985,000 students.3 Although the dropout rates remained high, so did the percentage of the age group thirteen to eighteen that attended the secondary schools. At the national level, in 1960, 23 percent of that age group was enrolled, and the figure jumped to 52 percent in Buenos Aires.4 In 1970, the national percentage had almost doubled to 45 percent, and Argentina followed Uruguay and Chile as the Latin American countries with the highest rates of enrollment.5 There are three remarkable characteristics in that expansion. First, the student body became feminized: in 1950 girls accounted for 47 percent of the student population, and in 1970, 53 percent.6 During the 1950s, girls enrolled overwhelmingly in a traditionally feminine branch: the “normal,” or teaching-training schools. In the 1960s growth in the normal branch stagnated, and girls flocked to the commercial branch.7 This latter trend signals another characteristic of the secondary level: the class diversification of the student body. The commercial and technical branches trained students in tasks related to office and industrial jobs, respectively. Those branches attracted an increasing number of boys and girls from the lower middle class and from the upper stratum of the working class.8 Finally, the secondary level became gradually privatized and, basically, Catholicized. This process began when the authorities of the Revolución Libertadora restored official subsidies to the private schools that Peronism had discontinued. Between 1956 and 1958, for example, 110 Catholic secondary schools were founded. In 1970, 30 percent of the students were enrolled in private, largely Catholic, schools.9

  The expanded secondary level of education was a battlefield of diverging cultural and political projects. Consolidating their share in the secondary level through their own schools, the Catholic hierarchies and “defense of the family” groups went a step further in an attempt to shape the public system as well. Conservative Catholic groups exerted pressure on educational authorities to introduce religion and moral education in secondary schools—something they achieved in Córdoba in 1963, for example—and to reorient their curriculum toward the forging of “Christian humanistic personae.”10 Yet their most significant achievements were related less to the changes they promoted than to their ability to block changes they opposed. After the Catholic triumphs in the battles for (not) establishing coeducation and for (not) extending psychological orientation in schools, educators and psycho-pedagogues raised their voices. In August of 1958, for instance, representatives of public schools gathered en masse in Buenos Aires to discuss how the schools could help youths “undergo the emotional changes of their age” and “adjust to a shifting society.”11 Neither in this nor in subsequent conferences, though, could they articulate actual proposals for reforming the secondary level. In 1962, the chair of the School of Education at UBA concluded that the secondary school stood as an “obstacle” to change: “from the daily schedules to how the students are asked to walk,” she concluded, “everything is rigid at the secondary schools.”12

  Nor did the secondary schools lose their “rigidity” over the course of the 1960s. Since their founding in the late nineteenth century, the secondary schools’ overarching goal was to offer youths a general cultural background. The baccalaureate programs epitomized the aims of the humanistic school: as reservoirs of encyclopedic culture organized around subjects such as language and literature, history, and civic education, they did not train students to practice any professional activity but endowed them with general knowledge. In the 1950s and 1960s, although educational planners discussed better ways to train the “human resources” the country needed for development, and although the baccalaureate branch lost ground to the job-oriented commercial and technical branches, the humanistic matrix pervaded the entire secondary level.13 Students from the first to the third years at all branches were exposed to a so-called common cycle, where sixteen out of thirty-two weekly hours of classes centered on the humanities.14 Yet not only were the study plans rigid, so too was the focus on obedience and discipline as the organizing principles of school life. Ratified in 1957, the official Reglamento (bylaws) prescribed that the first duty of the students was to “obey their superiors inside and outside the school,” the second related to punctuality, and the third dictated standards on hygiene and clothing. Academic performance, meanwhile, was the last item addressed.15 Progressive educators in scholarly pieces and public lectures quoted the Reglamento to exemplify that “the school took from the barracks a cold authoritarianism,” which contradicted any hope of forging “democratic citizens.” That authoritarianism, one educator concluded, was met with rising opposition, since “today’s students reject the school as it is.”16

  Students and some educators alike centered their criticisms on the pedagogical encyclopedic styles. Encyclopedism, for example, captured the attention of the American sociologist Robert Havighurst, who visited ten public schools in Buenos Aires and Mendoza in 1961. He depicted the prevailing classroom routines of teachers delivering lectures and the students taking notes as well as memorizing. When he visited a female-only school, for example, Havrighurst was “impressed more than ever with the common feature of the Argentine secondary school—namely, the earnestness of the pupils to recite.” He wrote that the girls “flourished their hands in the air and sometimes got completely out of their seats in an effort to attract the attention of the teacher when she asked a question.” Instead of lecturing, that teacher “organized a recitation that was a rehash of the textbook,” without even trying to “encourage the students to apply what they read.”17 While Havighurst showed that some students had internalized the rule—and were willing to recite—other students voi
ced their disgust. In 1956, a student group complained that at school they were viewed as “empty receptacles in which to pour as much insignificant content as possible.” This had not changed ten years later, when 78 percent of the eight hundred students surveyed by a team from the University of La Plata pointed out that the “magisterial classes” were the major obstacle to a good school experience.18 With the “magisterial classes” at its core, encyclopedism meant boredom and fear. While being interviewed for a report, Jorge, a fourth-year student at a commercial school, stated that “school just makes me drowsy until I am called to the front.”19 To be called to the front meant to be evaluated. Gerardo still recalls the fear he felt at the prospect of being called. “It was arbitrary in the worst possible way,” he recalled. “I can see my fellow classmates’ faces when called ‘to the front.’ We all panicked.”20

  The school experience was marked by authoritarian practices embodied in pedagogical styles and also in daily prescriptions and discipline. Exposed to, and participating in, the emerging consumption and leisure practices of youth, the boys and girls that flooded the secondary schools found those routines and prescriptions all the more outdated and authoritarian when compared with their “outside” lives. That was the case, for example, with the enforcement of the series of rules regarding the Reglamento’s dress codes. In the late 1950s, for instance, the students of two schools in an industrial neighborhood in Greater Buenos Aires were asked to write essays that focused on their school life. Some of the girls picked the issue of discipline as related to clothing. A third-year student complained that the celadores (caretakers) “zealously” looked over “the shine of our shoes, the length of the girls’ guardapolvos [white cloth worn at the official schools], and the remote possibility of makeup.” Other girls found it “ridiculous” that the school principals did not allow them to attend classes in pants, “now that all youths are wearing pants.”21 As for boys, when they began to wear their hair longer, principals in many schools added a twist to the Reglamento. In late 1968, they mandated that boys’ hair should be eight centimeters above their shoulders. Speaking of this and other decisions, a schoolboy stated, “we form a line, stand up when the teacher enters the classroom, and keep our hair as short as a soldier. This is simply absurd.”22 As the 1960s went on, students were outspoken in finding those authoritarian practices “absurd” and “ridiculous.”