Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  The juvenilized mass culture became the terrain for the unfolding of battles over cultural taste, reverberating in a keyword: mersa. The term mersa entered the popular vocabulary in the mid-1950s to designate “people of the lowest condition,” and was connected with marginal groups related to gambling or theft.80 In the early 1960s, its usages shifted from these connections to become an adjective that qualified people and consumption practices considered in “bad taste.” The magazine Tía Vicenta(Aunt Vicenta) played a vital role in shaping the new meanings. As the editor Landrú recalled, he placed the word mersa in the context of upper-class youth characters, or caqueros, who used it to designate the “taste” of the lowest classes, and he aimed to make fun of both.81 In 1964, Landrú included a column where two young upper-class sisters—María Belén and Alejandra—dictated what was “in” in fashion, nightclubs, cars, or music by providing details of brands or singers, along with an array of expressions that marked their class and cultural standing. More important, they also stipulated who or what was “out,” or mersa. Violeta Rivas, her haircuts, and her clothes; Palito Ortega, his songs, and his gestures; the clubs where they performed; the girls that made up the fan clubs: they were all labeled mersa.82 The term achieved such success that Landrú launched contests to choose the “ideal mersa,” encouraging people to cast their vote: Ortega and Rivas were at top of the lists.83 As a journalist noted, Tía Vicenta—which sold 400,000 issues weekly—had encouraged a scavenger hunt where “all want to find mersa clothes, words, and attitudes among their friends, but no one admits that they belong to that category.”84

  The ways in which the term mersa was used and disseminated signaled two concurrent dynamics. On the one hand, as in other contexts of rapid sociocultural change, humorists made this cultural fluidity visible by exaggerating it; they also attempted to grasp cultural novelties through the invention of new labels. The term mersa was loaded with derogatory meanings, indicating the ways in which the upper and middle classes elaborated their distinction vis-à-vis what they envisioned as “plebeian” cultural practices in a fast-changing mass culture. On the other hand, since mass culture had become juvenilized, the struggles over cultural taste were played out largely in the territory of youth cultural consumption. It was not accident that María Belén and Alejandra, in their early twenties, deemed mersa the practices of their generational peers. In Tía Vicenta, the example was “Mirna Delma,” Maria Belén and Alejandra’s sibling. She represented a “neighborhood girl” from the lower middle class, who tried to be sophisticated by using the language of romance novels and wore “inappropriate” clothing and colors. Further, she idolized Ortega, and when the “twist mood” had passed, she kept dancing it.85 In its most common usage, then, the term mersa pointed to the attempts to set hierarchies within the class-inflected heterogeneity of youth cultural consumption.

  By the mid-1960s, in musical terms, the heterogeneity of youth consumption was apparent and shifts were on their way. By 1965, record sales of the “new wavers” decreased and the successful soloists—Ortega and Violeta Rivas—spent most of their time touring Latin America, renovating their repertoires to better fit into what was then called “melodic song.”86 At the same time, as almost everywhere else in the world, Beatlemania hit Argentina. This contributed to the making of a new aesthetics that sharply differed from the one previous pop idols endorsed. In fact, in some neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba, passers-by could easily detect droves of young men who grew their hair longer and began to construct in bodily terms a more contesting attitude toward “manners and morals.” Some of these long-haired young men had participated in the “new wave,” though. Born to a family of musicians in Rosario, Félix Nebbia Corbacho—aka Litto Nebbia—came down to Buenos Aires with a neighborhood band in late 1963 to perform for the television program Escala Musical. In the same year Alberto Iglesias, aka Tanguito (1945–72), son to a working-class family from Caseros in the Greater Buenos Aires area, had recorded an LP of covers with a band called The Dukes. Neither of them had succeeded in the framework of the “new wave.” Protagonists of a bohemia of long-haired young men hanging around downtown Buenos Aires, in 1967 they famously met and composed “La Balsa” (The Raft), which would be first anthem of the emergent rock culture. As I discuss in Chapter 5, that culture affirmed itself in opposition to the “new wave” (which does not preclude the fact that Nebbia and Tanguito participated in both of them).

  The “new wave” had been at the center of deep changes of mass culture, of its criticisms, and of the struggles over cultural taste. El Club del Clan, as the epitome of the “new wave,” became the face of a whole media ensemble that acquired a juvenilized façade and gave young idols and fans unprecedented visibility for the first time. The conformist “sweetened optimism” that El Club del Clan advocated also became a target for criticism fueled by left-wing militants and cultural critics who denounced the “imperialist menace” behind the movement and the perils of “cultural alienation” it represented. In fact, El Club del Clan—the “machinery” behind idols and fans—incited the first systematic criticism of mass culture at the time of its sweeping expansion and change. It was on the terrain of a juvenilized mass culture that new cultural struggles took place. The term mersa organized the struggle over cultural taste and served to address broader anxieties among the upper and middle classes regarding the shaping of their own cultural distinctions. The realm of “youth” fashion amplified these struggles.

  Fashioning the “New Wave”: Vaqueros or Blue Jeans?

  Beginning in the mid-1950s, blue jeans—like rock music—came to epitomize youth in Argentina (and in most places in the West). As sociologist Fred Davis has asserted, dress acts as a visual metaphor for identity and for noting the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate among and within identities.87 In Argentina, jeans were the first dress item worn exclusively by youths, who increasingly dressed differently from the older generation. The jeans, though, served also to signal and reinforce distinctions among youth. Jean styles, brands, and “nationalities” were subtle venues for elaborating and displaying intragenerational differences, something that was codified in the opposition between (local) vaqueros and (imported) jeans and that added one more layer to the disputes between mersas and caqueros. One crucial difference, however, was that until the late 1960s young women were not important consumers of jeans, but they nonetheless found other ways of fashioning their “new wave-ness.”

  On September 1, 1958, Clarín carried a full-page ad. In capitalized letters and boldface the ad announced: “Far West has arrived.” The ad stated that the “authentic vaquero” was a “joyful, durable” item and informed its readers that it could be worn “at home, to go to the club, and even to go to work.” A drawing of jumping, doubtlessly masculine legs with rolled-up vaqueros dominated the ad, conveying a sense of dynamism and youthfulness. It targeted the pants to working- and middle-class young men inasmuch as it emphasized still another trait of the new item: it was cheap.88 Although promoted as an American good and endowed with an American label, the Fábrica Argentina de Alpargatas locally produced the Far West vaqueros. The company was one of the largest textile factories in Argentina and produced the slipper-like, rustic shoes—alpargatas—worn by rural workers.89 In the early 1950s, perhaps to emulate the original use of blue jeans in the United States, the company began to produce denim fabric in a failed attempt to provide rural workers with pants. A chance to use the denim appeared in 1957, when the rock teenpics began to make their way into Argentina and showed the potential of creating and exploiting a market other than rural workers. In relaunching denim pants, the company had the support of the local representatives of the oldest advertising agency in the United States, J. Walter Thompson.90 In 1957, Thompson helped Alpargatas’s executives choose a label with American resonances and target a new market: young men.91

  Until working-class young men dared to wear the jeans—in fact, vaqueros—their clothing and that of their middle
-class counterparts largely replicated their parents’ dress code. As in many other Western countries at that time, boys experienced a rite of passage to adulthood when they achieved the right to wear long pants, preferably suits. Although psychologists such as Eva Giberti began to advise parents that the rite needed to be rethought in an era when boys wanted to be adolescents before becoming adults, the tradition persisted.92 The jeans came to break with that tradition as well as with intergenerational dressing codes: it made visible an age that was neither that of a child nor an adult but a young person. Working-class boys were the vanguard of vaquero consumers. Carlos, a former working-class youth from the Greater Buenos Aires area, for example, still remembers when and how he purchased his first pair. “I was fifteen or sixteen,” Carlos said, “and I was paid 250 pesos per week as an apprentice in Campomar [a local textile factory], so I gave 150 pesos to my family, kept 70 as pocket money, and could only save 30 per week. A vaquero cost almost 350 pesos. I didn’t go to the movies or to soccer matches for a while, but I had my vaqueros at the end.” His detailed memoirs reveal that Carlos is still proud of having purchased his first Far West as he did, by saving from his meager salary as an apprentice. When I asked why he put so much effort into getting those vaqueros, Carlos simply said, “To think I only had those old grey pants; with the vaqueros you felt like a new person.”93 For working-class young men, like Carlos, the new pants conveyed a sense of renewal. As it happened with rock music, wearing them was a venue for connecting the consumption of Argentine youths with their peers abroad. At the same time, however, that consumption awoke stigmatizing reactions.

  Representations of vaquero consumers blended sociocultural and sexual anxieties. In one of the few studies of a “gang” in the Greater Buenos Aires area, for example, one sociologist focused on its members’ self-presentation, which included “an exhibition of their virility on the street corners, wearing their ever-tighter vaqueros.” In this study, as in others around the world, the sociologist linked jeans consumption to ideas of social and sexual disorder.94 This was also apparent in other representations of young men in jeans. In the popular film La patota (dir. Daniel Tinayre, 1960), a group of men, all of whom wear jeans, rape a young female teacher when she arrives at the working-class neighborhood where they live. While, in this representation, vaquero consumers were depicted as committing sexual violence, in others they were linked to homosexuality. One of the first surveys of the gay scene in Buenos Aires, for example, stated that “homosexuals assume the same styles of present-day irascible youths [jóvenes iracundos]: blue jeans and white shirts, to the point that it is extremely hard to distinguish them from each other.”95 Leftist writer David Viñas, for his part, coined the expression “Marlon Brando category” to refer to working-class boys who hung around “tightening their bluyíns [blue jeans], waiting to sell their ass to the best payer.”96 The “Brando boys” who exhibited their bodies to conquer other men constituted, in Viñas’s view, plebeian sexual deviants who contributed to bringing the moral hypocrisy of a bourgeois society to the surface. In any case, vaqueros metonymically evoked working-class boys, depicted as socially and sexually threatening.

  By 1963–64, however, American jeans had begun to make in-roads into Argentina, and the local market expanded by incorporating new consumers. Jeans made by Lee and Levi Strauss became particular luxuries: they were imported in small lots, sold on the most exclusive shopping streets, and priced four times higher than local brands.97 The consumption of Levis or Lee jeans required a certain shopping expertise: first, to find them, and second, to determine their authenticity. Middle-class young people were developing such expertise and could afford imported brands. As the media reported, middle-class youths were increasing their consumption of consumer goods. Aside from records and record players, other products such as soft drinks were consistently targeted to young people. When Pepsi arrived in Argentina in 1961, it triggered an advertising “war” with the already established Coca-Cola. Pepsi created an advertising campaign with the slogan “To Live with the Pepsi Generation.” Advertising agencies recognized the potential of the young consumer and began to conduct surveys to determine their tastes and choices.98 In terms of clothing, though, their choices were already obvious: middle-class young men were expert “hunters” of Lee and Levis. A fifteen-year-old boy, for instance, reported that he regularly checked for the arrival of new “models” in a store whose name he refused to reveal to “keep the exclusivity.” When asked how to distinguish imported jeans from locally made ones, he just answered, “You have to look at the rivets, and at the pockets.”99

  Alpargatas’s executives reacted negatively to the suggestion that a “national” brand could not hope to reach a large segment of blue jean consumers. Although proud of having sold 902,405 pairs of Far West jeans in early 1966, Alpargatas asked its marketing and advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, to conduct a survey to determine how to appeal to the blue-jean consumers who had never purchased a pair of vaqueros. Thompson’s representatives conducted interviews with five hundred middle- and upper-middle-class young men to examine their consumption choices. When asked about their blue jean preferences, most judged the local vaqueros as “excessively blue, rustic, and tight” when compared with the “faded-blue, finely finished, and loose-fitted” Lee and Levis.100 Targeting that segment, depicted as composed of “young men eager to succeed in life,” the firm launched a second brand called Super Far West. Alpargatas paid for an unusually intense and original advertising campaign, but Super Far West was a fiasco: middle- and upper-middle-class young men did not even go to the retail stores to try the new brand.101

  Wearing American brands of blue jeans was one of the ways middle- and upper-class young men signaled their distinctiveness (and is another example of the uses of “Americanness” within youth cultures). Through well-informed insight into fabrics, colors, and fittings, middle- and upper-class young men went far beyond technicalities: they appealed to aesthetic ideas of elegance and “good taste.” When they did not even try vaqueros, they made apparent that, as noted by Pierre Bourdieu, “Tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by the horror or the visceral intolerance (sick-making) of the taste of others.”102 They projected onto the vaqueros their intolerance of working-class boys’ taste and elaborated a way of emphasizing distinctions. As many Latin Americans before and after them, middle- and upper-class youths in 1960s Argentina invested imports with attributes related to authenticity and cultural renewal.103 Wearing an “authentic” pair of American jeans involved being indisputably included into an international youth culture, while neglecting that belonging to their generational peers that “only” wore national vaqueros. Hence, the experience of a peripheral setting, like Argentina, helps rethink an enduring consensus among scholars of 1960s youth. By studying European youth, scholars have suggested that what was new and seen as “typically American” in the 1950s—rock and jeans—became the repertoire of an internationalized youth culture in the 1960s.104 When looking at the story of the blue jeans in Argentina, that statement could be only partially endorsed. When young men adopted and adapted jeans, the links to “America” had not blurred. The authenticity of American jeans became a sign by which to elaborate distinctions among young men.

  Unlike young men, young women did have chances of differentiating their dressing practices from the ones of previous generations of women. On the eve of the 1960s, women’s magazines suggested renovating the predominantly opaque colors of tailleurs, tricots, skirts, and dresses and incorporating instead pink, light-blue, and white for “girls age eighteen.” As the 1960s wore on, skirts became increasingly shorter and tighter, and their colors began to include orange and red, which some magazines depicted as the ideal for “dancing the twist and rock,” first, and “the shake,” afterward. Likewise, fashion advisers called for switching to natural fabrics, meaning basically wool and cotton.105 The concept of “natural” became crucial to the advice related to haircuts and makeup as
well. Whether short or long, advisers insisted that “eighteen-year-old women” should under no circumstances dye their hair, just brush it everyday; and similarly in relation to make up: just a fine line to underline the eyes, and pink, rather than red, lipstick.106 By 1963 most magazines carried textile designs—taken from French or Italian catalogues—along with instructions on how to make them at home, a widespread practice among working-class and lower-middle-class families.

  In the early 1960s, pants began to make their way among young women, yet formal and informal dress codes prevented many from wearing them regularly. In 1961, Claudia magazine interviewed men to gain their insights on “women in pants.” They agreed that pants were “convenient” sometimes and that they were to be worn solely by young women. Women concurred: they argued that pants did not threaten the “feminine grace” of young women, if they were worn on the appropriate occasions.107 The mayor of Rosario, José R. Araya, was harsher: he passed a decree prohibiting women from wearing pants on the streets, since it affected “morals and customs.”108 This was an extreme case (whose enforcement is difficult to assess), but other strict, national-level formal dress codes also prohibited girls from wearing pants in secondary schools. They also affected teachers at the primary school level, a profession chosen by many university students.109 Working women in other occupations were not supposed to wear pants either. Manuals for female job seekers advised them not to attend a job interview wearing pants because “not even the humblest workshop would hire you.”110 Young women could only wear pants to perform leisure activities.