Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  In the mid-1960s, the “radicalized students” and the universities at large had become the prime candidates for the creation of a political movement to support a military coup d’état. The “indiscipline” and “Communist infiltration,” political commentators argued, were signs of the impossibility of maintaining formal democratic procedures both within and outside the universities. Journalists and politicians deployed a discourse focusing on order: besides what they hyperbolically conceived of as an excess of politicization that had “radicalized students” as protagonists, the critics argued that the universities had not fulfilled their academic goals.90 From their perspective, the same held true for the country, where Illia’s government was marked by an “excess” of party politics accompanied by inattention and a lack of initiative in facing issues related to economic growth and stability. Most of the press used the same arguments in attacking the university and the government and backed a military coup d’état, which was finally led by General Juan Carlos Onganía on June 28, 1966.91 The press, most political parties, the CGT, and Perón himself welcomed the coup, which had the blessing of the Catholic hierarchies. The UBA was the only institution that opposed it.

  The so-called Revolución Argentina (1966–70) represented what political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell termed an authoritarian-bureaucratic regime. Committed to a project of socioeconomic planning and strong anti-Communism, the regime announced it had goals, but not definite time frames to accomplish them. The first objective was to economically modernize the country, which involved stopping inflation and setting the conditions for increasing foreign investment. To that end, the regime also argued for stifling politics, beginning by suppressing Congress and outlawing political parties.92 Once the parties were neutralized—of whom none complained, except for the Communist Party—the next target was the university. On July 29 the government passed Law 16912, which mandated that the national universities would depend on the Executive Power and thus lose their autonomy. At the same time, the government sent the police to occupy the schools of architecture, sciences, and humanities at the UBA. Police repression reached a crescendo at the School of Sciences, where the dean and a visiting American professor were beaten and taken to police stations, along with 120 professors and students. This became known as the noche de los bastones largos (the night of the long sticks).93

  The intervention and the violence exerted during the noche de los bastones largos confirmed that Onganía regime would not make any concession in its goal of “depoliticizing” the universities, even though it did so at the cost of losing its initial legitimacy at home and abroad. The fact that an American professor was among the beaten led the U.S. State Department to express its “deep concern” to the Argentine authorities.94 The New York Times, for its part, equated the police attacks to “the tactics used by Hitler’s storm troopers in the 1930s.”95 Public opinion did not find other news promising either, particularly the resignation of 1,200 professors at the UBA. Research teams in the most innovative scientific programs went into academic exile, while the psychology and sociology departments were almost totally dismantled.96 To depoliticize university life, the Onganía regime cut short the project undertaken since the end of Peronism. Professors and students who participated in that project recall the decade between the 1955 and the 1966 coups d’état as a “golden era,” a time marked by dynamism and creativity that the universities had not witnessed before or after.97 Contemporaries, mainly those engaged directly with the university or those who had children attending, perceived this loss as it unfolded. Their reactions toward the intervention may help explain why the Onganía regime rapidly lost popularity: an opinion survey showed that the support of the regime among the middle classes had decreased from 60 percent in July of 1966 to 42 percent in March of 1967.98

  The opposition to the Onganía regime grew rapidly among the “radicalized students.” The major opposition movement arose in Córdoba, where the third-largest university was located: its student body swelled to 22,000 students in 1966, one quarter that of the UBA’s. Córdoba, the birthplace of the University Reform Movement in 1918, had begun to forsake Reformism as the force propelling student activism.99 That was plain in August 1966, when the Integralistas fueled the student movement that opposed the intervention and also the way in which Córdoba’s most prominent or “sacred family,” the Nores Martínez family, had achieved major positions in the province and national governments.100 While the students did not attend classes—an old action within the Reformist repertoire—a group of seventy Integralistas began a hunger strike at a parish, whose priest was committed to the Second Vatican Council’s ideals. Meanwhile, students challenging the official ban distributed pamphlets to explain their demands to the neighbors. On August 21, the police repressed one demonstration by first shooting the students and then beating and detaining the nurses and doctors who were aiding the students.101 Rather than discouraging protest, police repression propelled new forms of student organization, like the Coordinating Committee, which joined Integralistas and Reformists and had a leading role in the tragic days of September.102

  On September 7, 1966, Santiago Pampillón was participating in a demonstration when he was shot in the head. Neither the students nor the thirty witnesses who saw the event had any doubt about what happened: the police had shot him. During the five days he lay agonizing in a hospital bed, the Coordinating Committee occupied the Barrio Clínicas, a student neighborhood. The barrio became a “Soviet,” defended from the police with Molotov cocktails, stones, and some guns.103 Although this was not its first occupation, this one showed an ideologically and politically diverse student movement united. The occupation also served as a display of solidarity that the students had received from the local chapter of the CGT.104 The alliance between students and workers was embodied in Pampillón. He was a twenty-four-year-old second-year student of aeronautical engineering who worked at the automobile factory Kaiser, where he acted as a delegate to the mechanics union. Without being an activist at the university, Pampillón went to the streets in the context of the military intervention. He sympathized with a Reformist group, but he was nonetheless a fervent Catholic. As he fought for his life, priests and Integralistas prayed, Integralistas and Reformists barricaded an entire neighborhood, and neighbors helped with food.105 Students in Buenos Aires, La Plata, Tucumán, and Rosario mobilized when news of his death spread.106

  Amid the extensive displays of grief after Pampillón’s death, Córdoba’s governor stated that he was “sorry for this one, and for the deaths that will come,” thus showing how the Onganía regime at large was planning on coping with dissent. Yet Pampillón’s death and especially the mobilization in which it had taken place also marked other crucial changes. First, the epicenter of student and labor organization was transferred from Buenos Aires to other major cities, where further political articulations crystallized, some of them around radicalizing Catholics. Second, for the first time in decades, the student groups shared the same situation with others “outlawed” in the political spectrum. For many students, it became apparent that there was not a solution for the “university problem” outside a “solution” for the “country’s problem.” That solution did not cut across Reformist ideals anymore. Student political radicalization, which had been an “issue of the few,” actually began when Onganía sought to eradicate politics from the university.

  In 1965, student activists within the TAU produced a reflection on their “status.” They claimed that, as students, they constituted a “marginal sector within the capitalist society” inasmuch as they were not “subservient to the system” to make their living. Moreover, they could be unattached to the social class to which they belonged by birth and had “more autonomy than the intellectuals to act politically.” In a would-be generalized interpretation, the TAU activists conceived of their status as both marginal and empowered. From the vantage point of marginality vis-à-vis the class structure of Argentina, they thought it possible to cooperat
e with different segments of society—the working class and, to a lesser extent, the middle class—to become the vanguard of a bloc they envisioned as necessary to liberate the country from its “economic, social, and cultural dependency on the imperialist forces.”107 Out of the “transitory irresponsibility” that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, characterized the condition of youth and students, TAU activists cultivated a major responsibility: nothing less than becoming a vanguard for liberating the country.108 They were, of course, a few activists who embodied the “radicalized student,” a pervasive trope among the observers of the student world as the 1960s went on. That world encompassed more than student politics, though. The student world connected broad sociocultural and political dynamics that at the same time expressed and contributed to the modernization Argentines underwent in the 1960s.

  I have tried to grasp some aspects of that modernization by looking at the world of the secondary school and university students. To begin with, in the 1950s and 1960s, enrollment and matriculation at the secondary and university levels increased dramatically. The student world quantitatively expanded, and that expansion acted as an avenue for cultural modernization Argentines experienced in different realms. It was reflected, for example, in how power relations and authority were negotiated in many families. Drawing again on Bourdieu, most secondary and university students were “first generation” rather than “inheritors.”109 In a society that valued education as a privileged means of climbing the social ladder as well as showing sociocultural betterment, the “first generation” of secondary school and university students acquired a sense of empowerment vis-à-vis their parents and possibly a greater sense of mission and responsibility. These first-generation students embodied the resumption of longstanding projects of sociocultural advancement, now coded in terms of modernization.

  The experience of school and college attendance, though, offers a unique glimpse at the ways the educational field reflected the ambivalence of sociocultural modernization. By looking at the example of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UBA, an “extreme” modernizing case, I showed that the students who gained access actually participated in the process of academic renovation, theoretical discussions, and political activity. Equally important, they became the cornerstone of a broader cosmopolitan atmosphere that encompassed other spaces of sociability. In many accounts, the 1960s thrived in those areas and had that school’s students as main protagonists. That “modern spirit” nonetheless had its limits, as the Correas affair shows. In the larger educational context, which includes the secondary level, those limits were even more prominent. The secondary schools had nothing in common with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences that epitomized the 1960s. Rather, the secondary schools remained largely tied to old pedagogical styles and goals, marked by what was known as “encyclopedic authoritarianism.” The rigidity of the school system sharply contrasted with the emergence of a burgeoning youth culture. In fact, as many protested, the secondary school students underwent a “double life,” as youths and as students. It is not surprising that ever-increasing numbers of secondary school students criticized the school and the routines it entailed. It is not surprising either that, when they saw a loophole, they actively participated in student politics.

  The secondary school and the university students, however intermittently, loudly occupied the streets. In 1958, during the laica-o-libre episodes, students became crucial political actors. The governmental and congressional support to the libres came as a shocking surprise to the Reformist-oriented groups. In fact, the story that began in 1958 and ended in 1966, in this respect, was the story of the demise of Reformism as the organizing principle of most student political activity. At the universities, Reformism continuously split between rightwing—or moderate—and left-wing factions. As the 1960s continued, the left-wing student activists participated—and ultimately were protagonists of—debates that cut across the Left regarding the reevaluation of Peronism; the desirability of a cross-class, anti-imperialist bloc; and the viability of the “Cuban road” toward revolutionary change. Gradually less willing to cooperate with a university modernizing project that the student activists regarded as “pro-imperialistic” in its alleged scientificism and more committed to building new alliances, the new student movement left the Reformist and non-Reformist, lay and Catholic, and Peronist and anti-Peronist divides behind. Composed of the “active few” in most national universities, the new student movement was publicly encapsulated in the figure of the “radicalized student.” Catholic and military ideologues, the media, and politicians from divergent political parties: they all increasingly projected onto that figure the fears of a “Communist infiltration” that jeopardized the university and the country alike. Endowing itself with the task of “dismantling the state of subversion and the factors that sought to transform the universities into foci of public perturbation,” the military that led the 1966 coup d’état put an end to the Reformist project within the universities.110 The military paved the way for a much broader and more radical turn among the students of the era by discontinuing university autonomy and the tripartite government, exerting physical violence over professors and students, and attempting to make the university—and more broadly, the educational spaces—centers for fostering a “Christian and Occidental personality.”111

  3 Surfing the New Wave

  MUSIC, LEISURE, AND CONSUMPTION

  In February of 1963, Argentina’s oldest women’s magazine, Para Ti, published a test for its readers to determine whether they belonged to the nueva ola, or “new wave.” The test asked the readers, among other questions, whether they preferred dancing to the twist and listening to rock more than other musical styles, going out in peer groups rather than with just a couple of friends, and wearing blue jeans and sweaters instead of skirts and blouses. If the responses were positive, the reader belonged to the “new wave,” which was “healthy and normal” for those under twenty-two years old.1 Doubtless, most young women and men under that age would have responded positively to that test: they had become “new wavers.” The term “new wave,” in fact, began to spread to the journalistic and popular vocabulary by the early 1960s. Perhaps as a translation of the French expression nouvelle vague, the “new wave” label was applied to the new musical styles, which were venues for the transformation of youth cultural consumption, leisure activities, and fashion. The term “new wave” signaled renewal and served as shorthand for the changes within an increasingly juvenilized mass culture that were crucial markers of the sociocultural modernization Argentines underwent in the 1960s.

  This chapter reconstructs the emergence of that “new wave” by focusing on the spread of youth-led music, leisure practices, and consumption. These realms became pivotal to the ways in which young people constructed a sense of generational belonging at the time they erupted, as youth, into the public arena. Secondary school and university students, working young women and men: they all participated in leisure and consumption practices that were exclusively youthful, and that helped juvenilize mass culture—a phenomenon that echoed similar developments worldwide and that signaled the transnational character of youth consumption.2 However, in their consumption and leisure practices young people also built up a renewed, class-inflected sense of cultural distinction. The territory of a juvenilized mass culture was the social space where—drawing on Pierre Bourdieu—the groups that engaged competed for the definition of taste, as it related to music idols, sites of entertainment, or fashion items, such as blue jeans.3 While looking at this competition in a juvenilized mass culture, we will discuss some of the prevailing accounts of the history of youth in its connection to consumption. By focusing on the creation of a “youth-led market” in Europe and the Americas in which youths from all social strata engaged, scholars have tended to sidestep a thorough evaluation of the ways in which consumption practices served to enact and reshape distinctions among young people.4 Those dynamics complicate any understanding of “youth
culture” as a homogeneous category.

  Let’s Dance

  In February of 1957, La Razón informed its readers that rock had already achieved “Argentine citizenship.” The reporter portrayed the first dance contest at the Luna Park stadium; depicted the winning couple as composed of two “criollo-type youths”; and acidly asked what “the people in their pagos [the interior provinces] would say if they knew their children were abandoning traditions.”5 The report touched on several traits of the arrival of rock in Argentina: it came as a dancing practice, it was embraced by young people, and it incited anxieties related to the lost of “tradition.” Rock, as a cultural form, initially cut across class and gender lines to help youths construct a sense of generational belonging and connect their cultural consumption to youths worldwide. As in other settings, in Argentina rock sparked vociferous reactions related to the dangers it allegedly posed to the sexuality of youth and to the national cultural fabric alike. This opposition emerged from different cultural and political sites—state officers, Catholic groups, and left-wing parties—and routinely surfaced in the public arena, but could not diminish the pervasiveness of rock among youths, favored by the tolerance of parents and fueled by the culture industry.

  Like in the United States, rock gained full access to the Argentine cultural milieu through movies.6 Historians of rock have singled out Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955) as pivotal to inciting the rock furor, since Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” played over its opening credits. The movie helped introduce rock music while connecting it to the worrisome behavior of the working-class schoolboys, whose relationship with the “heroic” white teacher is the crux of the movie. It was followed by a series of cheaply produced, teenage-led movies known as teenpics, which depicted a much more candid world of rock where boys and girls—mostly middle-class and white—claimed their right to enjoy themselves through dancing or singing.7 Rock teenpics flooded into the Argentine theaters at a time of change in the movie business. In January of 1957, state officers discontinued regulations that, passed during the Peronist governments, had restricted the release of foreign movies in order to promote the local industry. In that year, 701 foreign movies were screened, 397 of which were American-made—including Rebel without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955).8 Perhaps because of the expansion of the offerings, 1957 marked a record in attendance: at the 206 movie theaters in Buenos Aires alone, 75 million tickets were sold.9 Youths were the most assiduous moviegoers. While Argentines went to the movies seven times a year on average, youths went fifty times.10