Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  The screening of rock teenpics initiated the rock furor and also the first reactions against it. During the summer of 1957, youths were known to dance in the aisles and on the seats in movie theaters. Just a month after the first releases, moviegoers found that their “frenetic dances” would not be allowed. In Buenos Aires, the owner of the Ambassador Theater called in the police to stop the dancing. A group of youths opposed to the decision were expelled from the theater but kept dancing on the streets and chanting against the police. As a result, three were detained and charged with police edicts of vagrancy and resistance to authority. At the entrance of the Normandie Theater, some blocks away, twenty-five couples danced after the screening of Will Price’s Rock, Rock, Rock. There the police accused them of interrupting traffic and took them to the police station. Similar scenes occurred in Córdoba, Mendoza, and Bahía Blanca.11 In this last city, too, an “anti-rock” group (supposedly composed of tango fans) provoked the wrath of dancers by interrupting a contest at a social club while shouting that “rock is a degenerate form of music” and calling rockers “a degeneration of humanity.”12

  The ideas of degeneration and moral disorder shaped the criticism rock received in its early days, culminating in the prohibition of public dancing in Buenos Aires. In late February of 1957, presumably pressured by the Catholic Leagues of Mothers and Fathers, the mayor issued a decree that prohibited dancing “through exaggerated contortions that affect the normal development of dance meetings, or in ways that could affect morals, or when it generates collective hysteria.”13 The mayor’s decision reenacted a long-standing approach to music in general, and dancing in particular. As musicologist Susan McClary has noted, Western thought has long maintained a hierarchical dichotomy of mind and body, and music was usually associated with the “lowest” side. From Plato onwards, she asserts, music and its promise of opening up new bodily practices were conceived of as a locus of sexual and cultural disorders.14 In late 1950s Buenos Aires, that tradition manifested itself in the fears of collective “hysteria” and contortions that “affected morals.” Yet it bears noting that these feelings pointed to what was becoming a youth practice par excellence. Argentines had long performed “sensual dances” (tango, of course, and Caribbean rhythms such as mambo and cha-cha-cha were very popular also in the 1950s), but even when it took time for them to gain respectability, no decree had been issued to prohibit them. In contrast to the United States or Germany, where rock awoke fears of “sexual miscegenation” and social disorder that might be incited by black, African, working-class rhythms, in Argentina race and class worries went unmentioned.15 Rock stirred concerns about the perils of overt sexuality and the defiant attitudes it generated among youth.

  Youths indeed challenged the enforcement of the municipal decree by claiming what they perceived as their right to enjoy themselves. At least one hundred youths launched themselves into the streets after viewing Fred Sears’s Don’t Knock the Rock, a teenpic that, besides showing Little Richard perform “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti,” tells the story of rock’s triumph over conservatives in a small American town who tried to prohibit live rock acts but were bested by youths, helped by rock promoter Allan Freed. Possibly identifying with their peers on screen, the young moviegoers symbolically took over the plaza surrounding the Obelisk, the central landmark of the City of Buenos Aires, and just danced.16 Interviewed by a daily, three “rioters” that had spent the night in a police station stated that they liked dancing and doing what “youths do everywhere.” When asked what they found so persuasive in rock, they responded that they enjoyed “the feeling, the movement: it is rapid, it is new.” They did not think of abandoning other dancing practices; instead, they wanted to take advantage of a rhythm that was their own.17 The “rioters” avoided any politicized criticism of the mayor’s decree. Instead, they focused on their claim to take pleasure from music and dance that they conceived of as uniting them with their peers abroad. They implied that, like the conservatives in the movie they had just seen, the mayor was outdated. In fact, popular and women’s magazines concurred. As one magazine asserted, rock was a “harmless fashion for today’s youth.” Endorsing the idea that certain childrearing practices led toward greater familial understanding, these magazines suggested parents tolerate their children’s leisure options and, in doing so, helped to “familiarize” rock.18

  A growing segment of the culture and entertainment industries attained a prominent role in making rock “familial” and respectable. Multinational and local companies collaborated to create a circuit of distribution, promotion, and production of rock in the second half of the 1950s. The subsidiary of Radio Corporation of America (RCA)—which had operated in the country since 1931—imported or locally pressed rock records in its catalogue, including Elvis Presley’s, and Coral, the distributor Decca Records, imported Bill Haley’s singles. Meanwhile Escala Musical—a local firm created in 1954—promoted rock music on its television and radio programs as well as within the network of dances it organized in social clubs. In its programming, Escala Musical integrated rock and other dancing styles—from rumba to tango—and addressed the novelty to the young in the family.19 This strategy resulted from two challenges the entrepreneurs faced. First, they strove to remove any linkage of rock to disorder by making of it a “familial” musical style. Second, although the offering of recorded rock was guaranteed, the entrepreneurs did not find enough local talent to make all-rock dances at a time when syndicated musicians exerted pressure to have live acts in every dance hall.20 The solution was to find local rockers.

  Between 1957 and 1960, a first wave of rockers emerged in Argentina: they poured into the dance halls and the radio stations, sometimes selling more than the American artists they covered in English or Spanish versions. This was a common occurrence in other countries as well, from Mexico to France.21 In Argentina, Eddie Pequenino and Billy Cafaro (whose Spanish cover of Paul Anka’s “Pity, Pity” sold 300,000 copies in 1960) acquired celebrity status. Pequenino’s story is worth telling because it resembles others and illustrates how multinational firms changed their business strategies to adapt to and shape the local markets. Pequenino, son of a lower-middle-class Italian family, developed a passion for jazz: he was a trombonist and, by the mid-1950s, had achieved some recognition while playing with the orchestra of Lalo Schiffrin. As a way of making a living, Pequenino switched to rock.22 To this end, he created his own band, Mr. Roller y sus Rockers, and signed a contract with a subsidiary of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) to produce a record with covers of Bill Haley, like “See You Later Alligator,” whose titles were translated into Spanish while the lyrics were not. Ironically, while in the late 1950s CBS did not produce rock ’n’ roll records in the United States, in a peripheral setting like Argentina it was the first company to produce local rock talent.23

  Cultural and entertainment entrepreneurs attempted to endow the local and international artists they promoted with a halo of youthfulness and a sense of sexual and cultural containment, of change within tradition. In that frame, Bill Haley fit better than Elvis Presley. In May of 1958, Haley went to perform in Buenos Aires, an event for which Pequenino’s combo served as supporting band. Hundreds of youths escorted Haley and his Comets throughout his visit. The tickets to his performances sold out quickly, and youths crowded the surrounding areas of the theater as well.24 He was received as an idol for the entire family and chiefly for its youngest members. Haley’s personal characteristics—he was thirty-two years old, married, and “straight” in terms of clothing and on-stage attitudes—had made him an unsuitable candidate to occupy the throne of rock in the United States, but the same traits opened the door to success in Argentina. A women’s magazine interviewed Haley, who was quoted as saying that his only defect was “not to be able to be away from my family.” Fanzines likewise portrayed Haley as a celebrator of other traditions: a cover of Antena showed him drinking mate and wearing a poncho.25 With Haley there was nothing to be afraid of: he would
help integrate Argentine youths into a transnational culture without jeopardizing family values or even breaking with national traditions.

  Youths developed new leisure practices around rock while the media and entertainment made it an acceptable musical style for the young, within the family. Psychologists and educators expressed concern about the lack of leisure options available to youths and noted the declining attendance figures at sport clubs, church groups, or extracurricular activities at school. In a rather paternalistic way, some experts proposed that the government devote funding to create youth recreation programs.26 They failed to recognize that when adult supervised leisure programs did exist—like the school clubs promoted by the Ministry of Education—youths avoided them, choosing instead to stay among peers in, for example, barritas—groups of boys and girls. In a roundtable, a boy explained that his barrita (composed of a dozen youths from nearby schools) did not accept “adult norms” and had “its own values and tastes.”27 The barritas were a visible novelty, mainly among the middle classes, becoming a major institution in the organization of youth sociability. Besides going together to the movies and bars, Mabel G. recalls that her barrita organized parties at private homes. The boys provided the beverages for those big house parties (called asaltos) and the girls handled the food. They all brought records, and Mabel pointed out that, almost invariably, these were rock records.28 The asaltos were a frontier zone: they took place in family settings yet were controlled by youths, and the “lousy” rock served to keep adults away from the party.

  While the private parties served to shape the leisure practices of middle-class boys and girls, other, older youths helped reconfigure public nightlife in the major cities. Beginning in the early 1950s, a series of nightclubs appeared on the northern banks of the Rio de la Plata, in upper-class neighborhoods relatively far away from downtown Buenos Aires. Those nightclubs attracted a youth audience endowed with enough spending power to purchase cars. Rather than rock, young women and men listened and danced to “authentic” jazz and Brazilian bossa nova. The press used to link these nightclubs to the “caves” in Paris or, with reference to Federico Fellini’s 1960 movie, to a hedonistic and sensualistic lifestyle termed“Dolce Vita.”29 While only a small fraction of youths gathered in these nightclubs, they became highly visible. Besides the press, movies of the “Generation of 1960”—like David Kohon’s Tres veces Ana (1961), or Rodolfo Kuhn’s Los jóvenes viejos (1962)—used them as filming locations and helped make them the epitome of the revamping of sexual mores, since they suggested premarital sex and therefore the end of the “taboo” of female virginity until marriage. More immediately, though, these nightclubs expanded the sites available for youth leisure. By 1963, a report stated that adults had abandoned nightlife, which had become a youth territory.30

  Just as stylish nightclubs and asaltos served to organize the weekend leisure of middle- and upper-middle-class youths and adolescents, social clubs acted as the sites of leisure for many working-class youths. Early in the twentieth century, the sports clubs and social clubs had become crucial components of social life in the neighborhoods of the largest cities. For a low fee, members had access to sports facilities, informal educational practices, and libraries. The social clubs also cemented local sociability by organizing kermises and family-oriented parties.31 Although the 1930s and 1940s might have been the golden years of many clubs, the City of Buenos Aires still registered 560 clubs in 1964.32 Since these clubs attracted working-class youths—mainly as sports practitioners—the FJC (Communist Youth Federation) insisted that its members affiliate with them and claimed, in 1964, to have active members at 250 clubs in Buenos Aires. The FJC’s leaders conceived of the clubs as an arena where Communists could help offset the “decadent cultures of rock ’n’ roll,” which they identified as a way through which “yanqui imperialism” acted to “colonize youth’s minds.”33 Ironically, the social clubs had redefined themselves as the primary locus of youths’ rock-based leisure, becoming fully integrated into a circuit dominated by Escala Musical and the music business.

  In the triennium 1960–62, the combination of changing economic policies and expansion of multinational firms resulted in an unparalleled growth of the record industry. During Arturo Frondizi’s government (1958–62), the development of basic industries—iron, steel, and oil—in order to avoid dependence on foreign supply became an urgent task. Frondizi and his aides thought it vital to attract foreign investment to finance the industrial takeoff and, to that end, in 1959 Congress passed a new law that benefited foreign companies by cutting their taxes and allowing them to remit more of their revenue to their home countries. Coupled with that regulation, the country faced a sharp trade-balance crisis in 1959 and again in 1962. To combat the imbalance they limited all imports not essential to industrial production.34 Records were part of the nonessential imports. In this context, the U.S.-based firms already established in Argentina—RCA and CBS—began a sustained expansion. The welcoming conditions for foreign investment might have been key to CBS, which in 1959 chose Argentina as the location for record production for other South American markets (while Mexico served Central America and the Caribbean).35 In 1961, moreover, CBS opened its new recording studios in Buenos Aires, which was the “most modern in Latin America.”36 The growth of RCA, by contrast, seemed modest, although it resulted in a major landmark for youth music: in mid-1960, RCA relocated its artist-and-repertoire man, Ricardo Mejía, from Mexico to Buenos Aires with the aim of launching a “new wave.”37

  The shaping of that “new wave” fueled the expansion of the record business. Although complete data do not exist for this time period in Argentina, the available information suggests that 1961 marked the takeoff: while in 1960 record sales reached $6.7 million, in 1961 they rose to $9 million.38 That rise might be attributed in part to the substantial introduction of simple (i.e., two-sided vinyl) records and, largely, to business strategies of the companies that shaped that “new wave.” When he arrived in Buenos Aires, Mejía began his search for “talent”—an endeavor that bore fruit some years later—targeted at young people because they were the niche market for increased record sales.39 The growth of record sales went hand in hand with the increase of sales of record players. In 1961 there were fourteen firms producing record players using foreign licenses. Yet it was a local firm, Winco, that dominated the local market and exported to South America as well. Its success came when it launched its automatic record player, Wincofón. While its ads at first targeted a family audience, they soon began to address youth: a Christmas ad in 1961 showed a boy and a girl claiming their Wincofón. In 1962, an ad read simply: “Wincofón is twist-tested.”40

  The twist was not the only newcomer to the musical landscape in 1962, nor was it the most successful: folkloric music seemed to win the battle against the twist. The engagement of young people with folklore helps explain the heyday that music enjoyed in the early 1960s. Folkloric music—a label that covered several rhythms—made solid in-roads among urban audiences. Its progress was helped by mass migrations from the interior provinces to the cities. Beginning in the 1930s and accelerating during the Peronist years, the entertainment sites that attracted the recent migrants to Buenos Aires were conduits for the expansion of folkloric music and dances, while radio and movies publicized folkloric artists and the government amplified a perceived relation between folklore and nationhood through its diffusion at schools. Folkloric music was well suited for collective singing, and educational authorities promoted the creation of school choruses.41 In 1961, though, while secondary school students avoided engaging in the chorus contests organized by the Directorate of Secondary Education, they participated en masse in singing contests on a television show.42 In that year, also, RCA signed a contract with Los Chalchaleros, a prominent band that, by February of 1962, shared top chart rankings with Chubby Checker, the “king of twist.”43 Folklore’s preeminence can be seen beyond record sales. In 1962, La Razón informed its readers that the local supply of g
uitars was insufficient to meet the increasing demand fueled by youths. To the reporter, the conclusion was simple: folklore had won the war against twist by winning the favor of the new generation of Argentines.44

  It is possible that a twist-versus-folklore war never existed, yet the way in which both musical styles resonated with young people elucidates some traits of the relationship between youth and music. First, as three girls interviewed in 1962 pointed out, they could sing folklore and dance the twist: there was no incompatibility between the two.45 Many youths negotiated their use of popular music in a situational fashion: depending on where they were or when it was, they could switch among different musical styles. While many made use of rock ’n’ roll and the twist to build up purely youthful leisure practices, other youths enjoyed folkloric singing. Second, while a significant segment of youths navigated the choices among rock/twist and folklore, others rejected what they perceived to be “foreign rhythms” out of anti-yanqui sentiments. The FJC, for example, insistently endorsed folklore as the most suitable music for youths’ leisure time.46 Extreme as they were, the FJC’s stances surely reverberated among unaffiliated youths as well. Finally, in contrast to other Latin American settings, the record industry soon attempted to “localize” rock/twist as it shaped the youth market. While in Mexico, as historian Eric Zolov has shown, rock was contained by producing songs in Spanish after some initial years of “cultural disruption,” in Argentina that containment was carried out by integrating rock into a series of other dancing or singing rhythms.47 Rock/twist not only was geared to the young members of the family, it also did not conflict with “tradition.” That double integration enabled the immense success of El Club del Clan.