The “circus” did not easily fit into how the political was conceptualized in the early 1970s, and some left-wing intellectuals and journalists asked them to “ideologize” their practices. Rock poets and musicians, in fact, insisted on labeling rock as “a new sensibility,” the dominant idea unifying an anthology of rockers’ testimonies published in 1970. Commenting on that anthology, left-wing intellectual Germán García found that by identifying rock as sensibility, rockers avoided ideology, which they conceived of as “vulgar.” García pointed out that the testimonies were flush with political metaphors such as “we live in a dictatorship of hypocrisy,” which ultimately emptied the meaning out of the political language they deployed.108 What was at stake in the dichotomy opposing sensibility vs. ideology was a battle over how to get the politicization of unaffiliated rockers along with a consistent effort to “ideologize” what both García and the influential rock journalist Jorge Andrés already dubbed “rock nacional.” In his music columns for the prominent daily La Opinión, for example, Andrés constructed a schema for analyzing records in which he evaluated, primarily, the degree of “ideological definition.” Thus, he plainly rejected the work of Arco Iris, which he took as example of the “dreamlike attitude” that characterized rockers’ “ideological emptiness.” He valued instead the projects showing an “evolution toward ideological clarification,” such as the duo Pedro y Pablo’s work. Andrés thought that rockers should clarify their positions, which meant removing themselves from the domain of “dreaming” to enter that of the one of “ideology.” Musicians’ and poets’ definitions were all the more important to Andrés because he saw that rock attracted a massive constituency. As seekers of some sort of “liberation,” he wrote, rockers had “marginalized themselves from the political process” and, in doing so, they limited “the scope of their liberationist attitude.”109
Rock musicians’ and poets’ responses to the request for “ideologizing” their practices were diverse. In fact, some had long participated in a “protest” trend within rock music. That was the case with duo Pedro y Pablo, whose “La marcha de la bronca” (The Hatred March), denounced police and military violence, cultural censorship, and “social exploiters” alike. The single of “La marcha de la bronca” was a hit, selling eighty thousand copies in three months, to the point that Pelo stated that the song had replaced “La Balsa” as the anthem for rockers.110 Moreover, filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer—linked to the ERP—chose the song as the soundtrack for the images of the 1969 popular revolts in his film Los traidores (The Traitors, 1972), a prime example of militant cinema. As the 1970s went on, other rockers “ideologized” their practices, usually through making political references in the song lyrics. The jazz-rock band Alma y Vida dedicated a song to Che Guevara, and soloist Roque Narvaja—ironically, the former leader of the beat band La Joven Guardia—also wrote a song to Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos and another one to Luis Pujals, a leader of the ERP killed in 1971.111
In March of 1973, amid the euphoria incited by the triumph of a Peronist ticket in the presidential elections after an intense campaign carried out by the ever-growing JP, time seemed ripe for celebrating in a “youth way” and testing rockers’ keenness to engage in political endeavors. Alleging that a majority of the “rock boys” had voted for the Peronist ticket (which was possible because 50 percent of the voting population had done so), rock producer Jorge Alvarez organized a mega-festival to celebrate the triumph and to honor president elect Héctor Cámpora as well as to express “rockers’ wish for a return of Juan Perón to the country soon.” On March 31, all the major rock bands were onstage, including Luis Alberto Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso, Sui Géneris, La Pesada, and Pappo’s Blues. Although it was a rainy evening, twenty thousand people attended the “Festival of Liberation.” In attendance were “boys from every working- and middle-class corner of Buenos Aires,” as Jorge Andrés depicted them, also noting that while the JP tried to draw chants from the audience, the “rock boys acted as if they were untouched by the political overtones of the festival.”112 A rather atypical episode, this nonetheless demonstrated the eagerness to articulate the strands that made a youth culture of contestation under the umbrella of left-wing Peronism, as well as the attendant difficulties of doing so.
Intellectuals and journalists with the Montoneros-oriented JP combined a respectful attitude vis-à-vis rock culture and its male constituency and requests for its “ideological definition.” The Montoneros, like other Latin American revolutionary groups, developed a cultural politics centered on the vindication of the aesthetics of “the people,” which in musical terms entailed the appreciation of folkloric traditions and the politically committed “New Song” movement.113 Soon after Cámpora won the election, some Montoneros leaders participated in the writing of lyrics to songs that narrated their history through vignettes focused on their guerrilla activities. Recorded by the folkloric group Huerque Mapu, the LP titled “Montoneros” was presented at a festival that the JP organized to celebrate the end of 1973, which included the performance of a folk ballet.114 These political and aesthetic preferences did not preclude the attention of journalists who wrote for the Montoneros’ daily Noticias and valued rock culture. Commenting on a recital by Aquelarre, one journalist wrote that the band “represented the best of our rock,” pointed out the quality of the music, and praised the “boys in the audience,” who were “attentive and demanded quality.” He nonetheless criticized Aquelarre and Arco Iris because of their “irrational lyrics.”115 Montonero intellectuals were perhaps not confident about the rockers’ chances of “overcoming ideological weaknesses” while recognizing that rock was the best venue to reach youths’ attention. Because of that, a group of Montoneros intellectuals themselves produced a single geared to secondary school students. One of its songs called on them to “use their youth to struggle against dependence” and help to “our country’s liberation.”116
While not “ideologized” in ways in which leftist intellectuals and militants wished, many rockers did “define” themselves at a crossroads marked by the keywords “liberation” and “revolution.” Hence, they were called to give their opinions in mid-1973, when promises of “national and popular” liberation seemed close to fulfillment. Spinetta, for example, stated that rock had enabled many youths like himself to begin a process toward liberation, albeit a liberation from “the patriarchal and social process of edu-castration in which we were raised.”117 Spinetta appropriated the notion of “liberation” but used it to signal the significance, which he thought of as ineludible, of both personal and eventually generational reactions against deep-seated and repressive “castrations.” An editorialist for Pelo, meanwhile, stated that the Argentine rockers who stood for revolution pursued “a total reorganization of the world: a Psychic Revolution, a revolution of mores, of values.”118 This proposal for a “total revolution” received the support of many readers. Some of them stated that the new political juncture could be a good “starting point” because the police would not “harass us anymore,” or because of its promise of enhancing “social justice.” Yet it was not “enough.”119 The “circus” was faithful to the search for “authenticity” that had fueled rock culture. Their pervading antiauthoritarianism, the vague pacifism, and the commitment to carve out individual forms of liberation may have prevented many young men from engaging with the guerrilla-oriented revolutionary Left.
In turn, the revolutionary Left in Argentina largely refused to seriously consider the demands for “micro” or “individual” liberations as well as other politics that could center on erasing patriarchal (or other) forms of “castration.” As scholars have shown with regard to the emergent feminist and gay-rights movements, while the revolutionary Left in Argentina advocated for an abstract notion of equality, it downplayed gender and sexual politics as legitimate sites for organizing and belonging.120 The revolutionary Left’s explicit positions vis-à-vis rock culture worked similarly. That is, it did not recognize the legitimacy o
f rock culture’s antiauthoritarian claims that gave an individually and culturally inflected meaning to the notion of liberation. In contrast to what happened with its Mexican or Chilean counterparts, however, the Argentine revolutionary Left (especially that of Peronist origins) did not accuse rock culture of representing the “tip of the iceberg” of cultural imperialism. This speaks to the success that rock musicians, fans, and journalists achieved in linking rock to other forms of popular music. Equally important, militants and intellectuals discerned that rock culture was a cross-class mass phenomenon. While acknowledging its “national” credentials and its potential for articulating protest, intellectuals and militants denigrated rock as a form of cultural politics. The request for “ideologizing” rocker’s practices merged with their belittling of the sensibility that it entailed. Yet loopholes existed between the mandates and rules set within the revolutionary Left and the practices of many young people. Youths participated with different degrees of commitment in revolutionary politics and rock culture, the crucial cornerstones that made the basis of a youth culture of contestation in Argentina. The zones of overlap and the very possibility of forging a culture of contestation decreased as a rightist backlash that started in 1974 put an end to the promises of “liberation” in its multiple meanings.
Beginning in 1974 and escalating with the imposition of the last and most dramatic military dictatorship (1976–83), a wide-ranging “authority-reconstitution” project started, whereby state institutions and a broad range of civilian actors tried to put an end to the threats of social, cultural, and political disorders epitomized in the youth culture of contestation. Rock’s basic contribution to that culture of contestation in the late 1960s and early 1970s related to the ways in which it gave expression to young people’s discontent with authoritarianism at the same that it offered them a symbolic space for shaping fraternal bonds while challenging patriarchal arrangements and enacting alternative forms of “being a man.” The fraternity of long-haired boys appropriated strands from transnational, music-based countercultural practices and bodily styles and created forms of sociability centered on leisure and enjoyment. This was at odds with the cultural conservatism that crossed through the Argentine 1960s and the values that premised the hegemonic arrangements of masculinity. The rockers’ fraternity neither unanimously endorsed an egalitarian vision of gender relations nor avoided misogynist and ultimately hierarchical views of women. It did, however, offer many young men the possibility of deploying alternative models of masculinity that centered on the figure of the pibe. It also focused on the notions of creativity, authenticity, and “human individuality,” which were the basis for making of Argentina’s rock a cultural politics.
In building a rock culture, young men confronted in practice the values enforced in the boys-will-be-men dynamics as well as the rules governing “manners and morals,” the keystones for preserving a hierarchical and patriarchal order. As cultural critic Lawrence Grossberg points out, there is nothing intrinsically political in rock music: “rock’s politicization resulted not from its own activities but from the attacks which it elicited: rock was politicized behind its back.”121 Rock in Argentina became the site of a cultural politics that privileged the pursuit of hedonism, individual “liberation,” and expression while it met and faced a pervasive societal and state-led authoritarianism and repression. Amid that process, the performance of rock music expanded and diversified. Rockers—journalists, fans, musicians, and poets—created their own, also gendered, hierarchies to categorize their movement; and rock culture kept attracting a vast and cross-class constituency composed of, largely, young men.
“In my collection, I had Almendra’s and [Uruguayan “protest” singer, Daniel] Viglietti’s records and on my bookshelf I treasured Artaud and Perón: it was such a mix, wasn’t it?,” Emilio, a former member of the JP, asks rhetorically when he recalls “all these images that we had around us.”122 Emilio’s “we” refers to his fellow secondary school militants within the JP. Just like other youths, Emilio and his friends participated, with differing degrees of commitment, in both the sensibilities encapsulated in rock culture and the practices and groups that made the revolutionary Left. They may have felt the tensions between disciplining oneself to favor a collective project of social liberation and the desires of carving out forms of “liberating oneself, one’s Eros, one’s mind,” as Luis Alberto Spinetta argued while commenting that this liberation did not have any “ideological sign whatsoever.”123 Respecting rock culture and its constituencies, militants and intellectuals within the revolutionary Left strove for “ideologizing” its practices: they witnessed its potential for articulating social protest and for giving expression to young people’s antiauthoritarianism, but they belittled what rock represented as cultural politics. Meanwhile, many rockers within the “circus” would have no doubt about deeming as authoritarian or decidedly militaristic those practices and values that the revolutionary Left endorsed, especially after mid-1974 when the ERP and Montoneros resumed armed struggle. By that time, as I will discuss in Chapter 8, a broad and dreadful Rightist backlash had been activated that targeted young militants and rockers alike as supposed links in a chain that included, in the Rightists’ perception—and in the eyes of many Argentines—drug consumption and “subversion.”
6 Close to the Revolution
THE POLITICIZATION OF YOUTH
How did young women and men become involved with the most radicalized variations of Argentine politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Which ideas and images helped propel and shape that involvement? And, finally, why was Peronism the political movement that seemed to benefit the most from the politicization of youth? There is a common theme that cuts across the possible answers to these three overarching questions, namely, the ways in which middle- and working-class youth questioned the ideological and political bases of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization that Argentines went through in the 1960s. The cohort of youth that engaged with politics had been exposed to expanded educational and labor opportunities, the rising cosmopolitanism of Argentina’s cultural life, and the concomitant chance of participating in a transnational repertoire of ideas, images, and sounds. Their experiences were also shaped by the pervasiveness of authoritarianism in the intimate, cultural, and political milieus epitomized by, but by no means confined to, the regime of General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70). Yet while the young men attracted to rock culture iconoclastically confronted the cultural and gendered components of the modernizing project, the young women and men that embraced revolutionary politics contested the narrative of a socially modern and egalitarian Argentina that they perceived as unreal and unjust. For these youths, Argentina belonged to the Third World, and for its “liberation” it required an urgent and drastic process of revolutionary change.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s young people became key political actors and the bearers of a new, revolutionary political culture marked by Third World perspectives. This chapter begins by reconstructing the situation of 1968–69 to show that it was in the context of the concatenated popular revolts in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba in May of 1969 when young people, chiefly university and secondary school students, became visible political actors. Those revolts made apparent profound political and ideological transformations that cut across the student movement that had risen after the 1966 coup d’état. The new student activists were even more connected with the most radicalized Peronist unions and, in some cases, infused with the renovated ideas and practices stemming from the Second Vatican Council. They did not recognize themselves in what they perceived were the motives of their European counterparts. One year after the French student uprising of May 1968, when the Argentine students were engaged in popular revolts, many of them posited the sentiment that “ours is different.” The difference, as student leaders explained, consisted of how the local students were subsumed into “the people.”
The centrality of “the people” formed part of the political cu
lture that young people helped build when embracing revolutionary projects. Shared beliefs, values, vocabulary, and representations of the past broke through a broad spectrum of political groups and reached young people at large, sometimes propelling them to engage in political activism.1 One crucial component of that political culture was the political and cultural assimilation of Argentina to the Third World. That identification both allowed for the confrontation of the modernizing narratives of an egalitarian country and intermingled with it a pervading sense of imminence that, as cultural critic Diana Sorensen has argued when analyzing the 1960s in Latin America, entailed “an anxious, sometimes optimistic sense of arrival about to take place, or to be voluntaristically ushered in.”2 For the youths who participated in that political culture, given that the revolution was increasingly close at hand, armed struggle became not only “necessary” to push the military but also to pave the way for a liberated, Socialist fatherland. Many young people in Argentina, as many others throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, endorsed armed struggle as a means to start a society anew in the shortest possible time. People in their twenties were the bulk of the combatants within the five national guerrilla groups that had surfaced by 1971, when the last president of the so-called Revolución Argentina, General Alejandro Lanusse (1971–73) initiated negotiations with the exiled Juan Perón to resume democratic rule.
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