Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  Students found at least three ways of questioning school authoritarianism. One of the most widespread “tactics of resistance” was called being en la luna (on the moon, i.e., distracted) throughout the school day, chiefly when the teachers lectured. While some educators related that lack of attention to psychological aspects of adolescence such as the “tendency to daydream,” others realized that it was a collective rather than individual issue. In a widely read pedagogical textbook, for example, an educator called on her colleagues to redefine their teaching methods because “the students ‘on the moon’ are shouting to us without words.”23 On the other hand, educators and state officers also grew preoccupied with indiscipline, which they—quite rightly, perhaps—attributed to the students’ dissatisfaction with school. A report showed that, in 1963, the school principals had applied 55 percent more disciplinary sanctions to students than in 1957. Although those percentages are questionable—since they did not take into account increased enrollments—they offer insight into how state officers and educators perceived the “state of rebellion.”24 Finally, a highly visible segment of students questioned the school and, in some cases, the society that created it through political activism. Although a decree passed in 1936 made any political activity at the secondary schools illegal, on different occasions and with variable intensity, students could circumvent and challenge the legislation.

  In September and October 1958, the participation of secondary school students marked the distinctiveness of one of the largest student-based mobilizations in twentieth-century Argentina: the laica-o-libre battles. In that context, two of the more long-lasting student groups came to the surface: the Unión Nacionalista de Estudiantes Secundarios (UNES, Nationalist Union of Secondary School Students) and the Federación Metropolitana de Estudiantes Secundarios (FEMES, Metropolitan Federation of Secondary School Students). The UNES joined right-wing nationalist students enrolled in private Catholic schools and in public baccalaureate institutions. Closely linked to university groups at the UBA and at the University of Córdoba, some members of the UNES founded the ultra-rightist and anti-Semitic group Tacuara, where they stood as vanguards of the libres.25 On the other hand, the FEMES (created in May of 1958) was linked to the Federación Juvenil Comunista (FJC, Communist Youth Federation) and to the Reformist university students.26 The boys belonging to the UNES and the FEMES, in fact, were among the bravest combatants in the daily struggles. For example, on September 5, 1958, students of the Colegio del Salvador organized a meeting indoors to defend the libre cause. Backed by members of the UNES, they left the school and engaged in a violent confrontation with the laicos affiliated with the FEMES. The police expelled the laicos, who fled to the nearby Plaza Congreso, where 119 underage boys were detained.27

  Besides street fighting, secondary school students, mainly those identified as laicos, showed remarkable organizational skills, eagerness to engage in radical action, and ability to articulate their overarching demands (such as keeping the state monopoly over the university system and preventing the spread of religious education) with other, more quotidian and localized ones. As the conflict mounted, the students created “leagues” in Córdoba, Rosario, Tucumán, and Buenos Aires. The “League of the South,” for example, joined students from two-dozen schools in the southern industrial neighborhoods of the Greater Buenos Aires area, who rejected “any chance of having the Church deciding our curriculums,” as they wrote in a pamphlet. This league was also on the front line of the most drastic actions that the students could undertake: the “taking” of student buildings.28 Over several weeks, a dynamic ensued in which the students occupied buildings, and the police moved them out. In some cases, parents became involved, such as at a female-only school in Buenos Aires, where parents accompanied the “sixty occupying ladies” when the police went to evict them and did not offer any resistance. In contrast, boys in seven technical schools and baccalaureate colleges, also in Buenos Aires, refused to abandon their schools, so police used tear gas to eject them and sent them to juvenile delinquency courts.29 Further, some students connected their defense of laicism to their condemnation of school authoritarianism. A group of girls enrolled in a commercial school took control of the school building and also visited the newspapers to complain that the school’s principal was “authoritarian like a Nazi.”30 The politicized context emboldened these students to denounce how authoritarianism unfolded at their particular school. In turn, the vast student involvement in the laica-o-libre battles indicated a desire to momentarily abandon school routines.

  That episode of mobilization, though, was extraordinary. As soon as Congress passed the law authorizing the creation of title-granting private universities—which gave a victory to the libres—the Ministry of Education intensified its campaign to deter student activism in the schools. After the demise of the laica-o-libre battles, in fact, only the most active members of the FEMES and the UNES continued doing political work at particular schools, which included some incidents of street fighting. In August of 1960, in a male-only baccalaureate college in Buenos Aires, several members of the UNES attacked a student while they cried out, “Communist! Jew!” The FEMES coordinated a campaign against anti-Semitism and led a successful student strike to condemn the episode. Yet the Ministry of Education also took advantage of the episode: after conducting an exemplary trial against the principals of that school, the minister fired them for not enforcing the decree prohibiting student activism.31 Right after these episodes, the FJC underscored how difficult it was to carry out activism at the schools. A report for 1962, for example, stated that the FJC had 679 members at schools in the City of Buenos Aires and 288 in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The report recognized that this was a tiny minority that also included “sympathizers.” Instead of focusing only on the effects of the repressive legislation, the report also explained the FJC’s weakness in cultural terms: “Most students,” the report concluded, “are influenced by the yanqui way of life; they like the ‘twist’ and are not interested in politics.”32The FJC conceived of that situation as still another battle, this time not against the libres but against yanqui imperialism.

  State officers and some educators were also concerned about the ways in which secondary school students engaged with the “new rhythms”—like rock ’n’ roll and the twist—and tried to regulate student sociability at the end of the school day. At the same time that the Ministry of Education made efforts to prevent political activism from happening at the schools, it promoted the creation of school clubs. From a rather paternalistic perspective, the Ministry of Education believed that these clubs could be sites where youth after-school life could be kept under strict adult supervision. The ministry suggested that the clubs might organize activities like vocational theater lessons, chess championships, or visits to museums.33 Not surprisingly, the clubs were a fiasco: students did not engage in creating them and did not participate in other extracurricular activities either. Given the unexpected success of folkloric music—which in the early 1960s competed with rock ’n’ roll for youths’ attention—the Directorate of Secondary Education promoted a folkloric dancing contest, but the insistence of the invitation to students suggests that they did not engage. Instead, many students requested permission to attend similar contests organized by a television show.34 The problem was not the activity per se, but the organizer and venue. For the students, enjoyment and leisure were exactly the opposite of school life.

  While most students made it clear that they did not want to stay in the schools, they did create new, peer-based social life around the experience of attending school. Quite literally, the corners of schools became a frontier zone, where both students and state officers claimed “sovereignty.” Novelist Bernardo Verbitsky, for example, vividly narrated how the school corners became the “students’ kingdom” and described how in the City of Buenos Aires, where schools were not coeducational, corners turned into “boxing rings” for boys and girls, who made “eye contact” and began to talk.35 The da
ily practice of spending time on the corners expanded as much as the enrollment rates. For boys and girls, gathering on the corners entailed removing themselves from the adult gaze, at least for a brief time period, every day. As the practice became more popular, however, the Directorate of Secondary Education insistently asked the school principals to inspect what students did on the schools’ surrounding areas but—again—this very insistence speaks of the principals’ inability to do so.36 For the most part, students kept the corners as their territory. They also had one day as their own: September 21, the beginning of spring, was “Students’ Day.” From the mid-1950s onwards, students from public and private schools occupied plazas, forests, and central streets and also organized picnics and dance contests.

  For a rising segment of youths the school experience entailed a chance to shape new forms of sociability, within and outside the classrooms. Furthermore, a majority of these adolescents were first-generation students, and their experience qualified them to discuss issues of authority in the familial realm and to revise entrenched ideals of upward social mobility. A former working-class boy, Carlos, for example, recalls that his parents seemed to respect him for his education, and he learned to “manipulate the situation to have more liberties.” When I asked him how that worked, he told me: “I had decent grades, and then I could do whatever I pleased.”37 Being a first-generation student—and being male—provided Carlos with a chance to negotiate liberties at home. In exchange, though, Carlos and other first-generation students carried heavy burdens. Eduardo, for example, recalls that he felt “the pressure of the entire family in each exam” that he took at school. He knew the economic sacrifice that his parents made putting him through school—instead of his having to go to work at a factory, as his older brother did—and he “did not want to fail.”38 In fact, both families projected onto their sons the desire for intergenerational social betterment.

  Beginning in the Peronist years and continuing well into the 1960s, many Argentines resumed the century-long project of upward social mobility through climbing the educational ladder. They shared an ideal that children could and should be better educated than their parents, primarily so they could be wealthier afterward. This was a crucial component of how successive generations of Argentines imagined the entwinement of their individual advancement with the collective “progress” of the nation. Education, and chiefly that in the secondary schools, was seen as the key to gaining “respectable” jobs. This ideally would allow children of blue-collar workers to move to white-collar positions and thus become a part of the labile “middle classes.”39 In the 1950s and 1960s, lower-middle- and working-class families could afford to have their children in secondary schools, something made apparent by the fact that the participation of boys aged fourteen to nineteen in the labor market dropped from 73 percent in 1947 to 57 percent in 1970.40 A segment of social scientists over the 1960s cast no doubts: the expansion of enrollments in the secondary schools paved the way to social homogenization and cultural modernization.

  Secondary schools, though, did not only represent “affordable” access to the dynamics of sociocultural modernization; they were also venues for institutionalized authoritarianism—which accompanied and conditioned those dynamics. As the students complained, “encyclopedic authoritarianism” prevailed at the schools, which continued focusing on discipline, order, and the enforcement of routines. The schools remained immutable, dissatisfying the students as the 1960s bore on. The students who moved to college, mainly to certain schools, found a different world. From 1956 to 1966, some schools promoted academic experimentation in which students participated in myriad ways. Moving from the secondary school to one of these more innovative schools meant stepping into a world that, in comparison, seemed livelier and more “modern.”

  College Times

  After the ousting of Peronism, a political consensus began to emerge about the need to renovate higher education, a project that entailed creating new national universities and intensifying the research component of the university system to produce knowledge for a “changing society.” Although allegedly all-encompassing, that project was limited to specific schools at particular universities, such as La Plata and the UBA. At the UBA, mainly between 1957 and 1962, professors, alumni, and students agreed upon a series of transformations that resulted in creating a research-focused institution, including rules for establishing an academic career, hiring full-time professors, and opening new programs and careers, chiefly in the natural and social sciences.41 At specific schools, furthermore, students played a leading role in the renovation of university dynamics and in the orientation of their careers. Less formally, they also created new forms of sociability and cultural consumption, becoming the epitome of “modern youths.”

  As it was the case with the secondary level, the growth of university enrollment began during the Peronist years and continued throughout the decades that followed. Total enrollment increased sevenfold between 1945 and 1972, ballooning from 48,000 to 330,000 students.42 The increase in university enrollments was a transnational phenomenon, which spread through other Latin American countries as well. In Brazil, for example, total enrollment almost doubled in only four years, going from 142,000 students in 1964 to 258,000 in 1968, while in Mexico it jumped from 70,000 in 1959 to 440,000 in 1974.43 There was nevertheless a crucial difference between Argentina and its Latin American neighbors. In the early 1960s, the country ranked third in the world with regard to the percentage of university students in the population: there were 756 university students for each 100,000 inhabitants, while in Mexico there were 207, and in Brazil, 117.44 Although a minority, the percentage of university students among the twenty to twenty-four age group steadily grew: 5 percent of that age group was enrolled in 1950; the figure jumped to 11 percent in 1960; and that number rose to 20 percent in 1972.45 In Argentina, the university “penetrated” into larger middle-class segments and gradually incorporated children of small traders, clerks, teachers, and highly qualified manual workers. In the mid-1960s, 70 percent of the college students were first-generation. Further, as happened at the secondary level, the student body became increasingly feminine: at the UBA, young women comprised 26 percent of the students in 1958 and rapidly increased to 41 percent in 1972.46

  In terms of student enrollment, feminization, and cultural visibility, no other site changed as intensely as the “star” of university renewal: the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UBA. This school exemplified the scope and limits of the Reformist-oriented, modernizing projects. The creation of new majors in the biennium 1957–58—such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and education sciences—renewed the school’s impetus, which was reflected in the expansion of enrollments. While between 1958 and 1968 the overall enrollment at the UBA grew 29 percent, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences grew 248 percent. The student body, of which 75 percent were women, went from 2,200 students in 1958 to 8,900 in 1968. In 1968, half of the students were enrolled either in psychology or sociology.47 The school also became a beacon of cultural modernization in the public realm. Some of its professors, such as sociologist Gino Germani or psychoanalyst José Bleger, dominated the intellectual milieu. The areas of study they transformed were endowed with a halo of modernity that helps explain why youths wanted to pursue them, even when they were not certain about their future professional lives. A close look at this unique example, a virtual enclave, helps grasp how “cultural modernization” was perceived and shaped in the early 1960s and how some college students were linked with the desired, and feared, cultural, sexual, and political change.

  Like most of their colleagues in other schools and universities, the students enrolled in the post-Peronist School of Humanities and Social Sciences participated in its overhaul. Initially, the centrality that the students acquired was based upon their role as opponents to Peronism. During Perón’s governments, a handful of Reformist students had kept their student center alive. Sometimes they invited professors who
had been expelled or resigned from their positions in an effort to create a “parallel” university.48 The student center launched strikes opposing the imposition of a class on political formation, and many students were imprisoned.49 When the 1955 coup d’état unfolded, activists occupied the building and then engaged in a controversial initiative: they helped select new professors by evaluating mainly their political pasts, vetoing candidates whose vitae showed “Peronist” signs.50 As it happened in all national universities, a tripartite government of professors, students, and alumni ruled the UBA. From 1957 to 1964, the Movimiento Universitario Reformista (University Reformist Movement) held the student center and the bulk of representatives in the school’s governing council.51 The tripartite government enabled students to participate in the decision-making processes.

  Many students helped shape the curricula and the theoretical developments of their careers. One success story took place in the recently created Psychology Department, whose foundation had entailed compromises among different theoretical approaches, out of which initially the so-called academic psychology prevailed. However, most of the students who flooded into the Psychology Department—which went from 13 in 1958 to 1,450 in 1960—were attracted by the prospects of getting psychoanalytically oriented training.52 Joining some professors, the students made use of their department council, or junta, to request curricular changes. For example, student support was crucial for having one professor, a sympathizer of psychoanalysis, teach the most important class of the department.53 Likewise a group of anthropology students pushed their professors to organize fieldwork regularly, but they did not succeed when requesting social anthropology classes. They thus turned to sociologists, such as Germani, who agreed to invite American anthropologist Ralph Beals to teach seminars.54 Students acted collectively to reorient their careers according to what they thought would be the best theoretical choices. This was in contrast to what happened in Córdoba. There a “traditionalist bloc” of professors prevented the creation of social science majors, which explicitly contradicted students’ wishes. At the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UBA, students generally had their voices heard, which implied recognition of their role in building a “modernized” intellectual realm.