Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  “Yesterday we were the muchachos and the boss of the movement greeted us and honored our dead,” the editorialist of the JP’s weekly stated, “and now, because we are as Perón wanted us to be, we became Socialists or infiltrators.”118 This editorial dramatized the situation that the Tendency faced when Perón expelled them and the rationale of the decision that many young people performed when engaging with Peronism to “connect with the people.” While most may have carried out a symbolic parricide when confronting their familial and cultural backgrounds, a father figure stood: Perón. By inserting themselves as the “youth” in the Peronist movement, thus accepting the place that Perón reserved for them, these revolutionary sectors were also involved in a family romance. As historian Lynn Hunt has pointed out in her analysis of the French Revolution, “notions of familiar order underlie revolutionary politics,” leaving room for imagining relations of authority and power modeled after those between fathers and sons, among others.119 In the Peronist family romance, the sons indeed wanted to share power with the father, who had contributed to their initial empowerment. In contrast to the “elder”—who accepted being the primus inter pares—the muchachos forged their particular brotherhood out of their vindication of armed struggle and refused to comply with the authority of the father when he came back to the country to expel them. “Nobody can throw us out of Peronism,” the editorialist stated, and that “nobody” was Perón himself. The editorialist turned Perón’s words around: because “we are as he wanted us to be,” he betrayed “us,” the muchachos. Yet how to guarantee the persistence of the muchachos when their family name was neglected? As scholars Sigal and Verón have noted, the JP acted as if he was already dead months before Perón died.120

  There would be, however, a final chapter of the Peronist family romance: the May Day celebration of 1974. As recounted in memoirs and scholarly works, the Tendency believed that the first May Day celebration with Perón as president would be like the ones they imagined happening in the 1940s and 1950s: meetings where the leader listened to “the people” and held a dialogue with them. Columns identified under the banners of JP, JUP, UES, and Montoneros arrived at the Plaza de Mayo chanting, “Aquí están los Montoneros que mataron a Aramburu [Here are the Montoneros who killed Aramburu].” When Perón went out to the balcony to address the crowd, the Tendency forced the dialogue, beginning by chanting “qué pasa General/que está lleno de gorilas el gobierno nacional? [What happens, General/that the national government is full of gorillas?].” The General replied, speaking highly of the “union organization, kept alive over twenty years, despite the stupid [people] who shout!” while the Tendency chanted “se va a acabar/la burocracia sindical [The union bureaucracy/will end].” Resuming his argument, Perón went on, “The union organization has remained alive, and now it happens that some of the unbearded [imberbes] who shout want to have more merits than those who have struggled for twenty years!” and he called on everyone to pay homage to the “prudent union leaders . . . who have seen how their fellows fell killed” and once again spoke about “hacer sonar el escarmiento” [teaching them a lesson].” When he finished his words, the imberbes were not listening: in one of the most astonishing events in Argentina’s politics, they abandoned the Plaza.121

  What did this abandonment of the Plaza represent? Scholar Carlos Altamirano argues that the Tendency’s columns went to the Plaza to “force the end,” that is, to deploy the apocalyptical component organizing their practices and imaginaries.122 Coupled with this plausible analysis, if viewed from the perspective of the family romance, this event marked the impossibility of the Tendency’s “killing” the father figure and moving away from a hierarchical relation other than in exclusively literal terms. They could not literally “kill” the father figure but they did challenge his authority while showing a still powerful brotherhood, tied to their vindication of Montoneros’ baptism of fire. However, whereas their chants at that event focused on their opposition to the “bureaucrats” and their identification with armed struggle, these groups seemed to have avoided representing themselves as the muchachos while emphasizing that they represented “the people.”123 Perón cast no doubt: to downplay them and boost the “elders,” he positioned the Peronist revolutionary sectors as youth. The muchachos turned into the imberbes who shouted. This rhetorical makeover of “youth” as the belittling imberbes (defined by their “lack” of maturity, of beard, of virility perhaps) would allow him and the “elders” to recover their political and symbolic authority: the hacer sonar el escarmiento—like what parents said to threaten their children when they misbehave—indicated that this would have an even more dreadful overtone. Perón died two months after May Day, having left to the “elders”—the right—the task of recovering their authority and to the “young” the void that his father figure represented.

  The “authority-reconstitution” project upon which the Peronist right embarked in 1974, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 8, was a response to the destabilizing effects that the politicization of youth had represented in Argentina. I do not mean to imply either that all young people engaged in radical politics or that all who engaged in radical politics were young people, but that the emergence of a revolutionary political culture was sustained by the decisive involvement of young people and by the making of youth as a political category. It was Peronism that offered a way through which youth signified a positive political category, as well as a bridge for young people to “connect with the people.” This was something that the new student activism emerging after the 1966 coup d’état claimed as necessary and which many more began to feel both “real” and imperative since the Argentine May of 1969.

  The Argentine May made apparent the profound transformations cutting across student activism since 1966 and marked the emergence of young people as political actors. Decentering the narrative from the Cordobazo to include it as the last episode of a series of revolts allows for the unraveling of how students had initially constituted the leading forces of the popular revolts in Corrientes and Rosario. Although able to crystallize the desired “worker and student” union, many student leaders understood that the revolts would fall short unless the “working class” led them, and thus they downplayed their own political significance. In this respect, the Cordobazo fulfilled the young activists’ hopes when the students—and youth at large—mobilized alongside yet “behind” industrial workers. While for activists the massive and unprecedented engagement of workers in Córdoba’s streets was a promising surprise, for most observers at the time—the press and Perón himself—the radical novelty came from the visibility of young people.

  The youth who came of age, politically, in the aftermath of that May did so by participating in a revolutionary political culture dominated by the assimilation of Argentina with the Third World. A project articulated in the political press and manifestos and disseminated through a broad range of cultural practices, building up a “Third World Argentina” involved the mobilization of emotions—such as indignation—as well as more traditional ideological components. The belief that the country belonged to a geography marked by “neocolonialism” and “liberating forces” became commonsensical by the early 1970s, which had several effects. First, it allowed for a multilayered confrontation of the narrative indicating that Argentina was socially egalitarian and exceptional vis-à-vis its Latin American neighbors. Contrasting the modernizing epicenters—largely the urban, middle-class cities—to the pockets of social oppression was the “revealing” mechanism whereby the so-called real Argentina was uncovered. In an ethical, political, and emotional move, politicizing young people came to refuse what the “modern” Argentina had to offer them in order to change the conditions that made the “real” Argentina possible. Second, then, that seemingly unbearable real Argentina, in their view, could only be transformed through radical means. The identification of Argentina with the Third World paved the way for naturalizing armed struggle as the appropriate venue for social and political tr
ansformation.

  The making of youth as a political actor and the configuration of a revolutionary political culture were not the only novelties of the 1960s and early 1970s. As a number of scholars have noted, a key development of this period was the engagement of young people—mostly of middle-class origins—in the ranks of Peronism. This engagement was neither “natural” nor could it be taken for granted. At a very basic level, it is obvious that not all young people who engaged in radical politics did so via revolutionary Peronism. Other options, such as the PRT-ERP, amassed a cross-class youth constituency as well, although it was not organized across generational lines. In contrast, Peronism provided a referential frame through which to interpellate young people as “youth” and through which to codify political and ideological differences in generational terms. This entailed both the reaffirmation of “youth” as a legitimate political category and the making of young people as crucial political actors. However, it also implied the possibility of enacting a family romance in which issues of authority were at stake. In that romance, the revolutionary sectors (whether composed of young people or not) were positioned as “youth.” In 1973, Rodolfo Ortega Peña was almost alone when he insisted that “the revolutionary transcends the generational” and recommended that the Tendency “revise how to engage with Peronism.”124 He perhaps understood that political and ideological disputes, when coded in generational terms, would potentially carry heightened effects. Toward 1974, when the resolution of the Peronist family romance occurred, not only the revolutionary sectors (whether Peronist or not, whether young or not) but also young people at large would suffer from the “authority-reconstitution” project that the “elders,” the right, dreadfully endorsed.

  7 Poner el cuerpo

  THE YOUTH BODY BETWEEN EROTICISM AND REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS

  In preparation for the coming of the spring of 1966, an ad for Sportline jackets addressed a male readership with a challenging and alluring statement: “only if you brought together a guerrilla’s audacity and a playboy’s affluence, would you be ready to dress Sportline.” Six years after that ad, Para Ti introduced its young female readers to the changing fashions for the summer of 1972. It produced a photographic report in which two models exhibited new dress items (high-heeled boots and tight short pants) and colors, notably brown and olive green. The title for the report could not have been more explicit: that summer “Guerrilla Fashion” was “in.” These are only two examples of the ways in which youth, eroticism, and revolutionary politics were woven together in Argentina, a dynamics that this chapter aims at unraveling. In doing so, I follow the suggestion of feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz, who proposed understanding the body as both a “surface on which social law, morality, and values are inscribed” and as a lived experience.1

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s Argentina, poner el cuerpo (to put one’s body on the line) acquired manifold, sometimes competing meanings, which taken together help explain how and why youth as a category and young people as actors became so fundamental to defining the politics, culture, and sexuality of the era. Youth, for example, “put the body” at the service of a profound renewal of fashion trends, which reformulated notions and practices of eroticism as well as debates over the limits and meanings of sex and authority. The youthful, largely female body that stood at the center stage of an extended commercialized eroticism was also located at the center of political debates over sex and revolution wherein new actors participated, from the emerging feminist and gay rights groups to the most varied groups of the revolutionary Left of the 1970s. Perhaps not deserving the “revolutionary” adjective (as it was understood at the time), most young women and men did participate in deep transformations of prevailing sexual arrangements, which included a practical redefinition of the legitimate age and sites for sex and the incipient, although embattled, struggle for sexual equality among men and women. Radical social equality was, without a doubt, the central component of the revolutionary projects of the time. As they unfolded in a political culture tied to armed struggle and reliant upon “action,” those projects practically required the shaping of resilient bodies. Young, largely male, and heterosexual, those bodies would be the carriers of a new revolutionary consciousness and the avenues that paved the way for a new time, which many youth envisioned as impending.

  Between Display and Disguise

  As in most Western countries, in Argentina during the second half of the 1960s new fashion and advertising practices located the young, “nude” body at the center of attention. John Berger, in his essay on the representational traditions of the body, famously concluded that to be nude “is to be seen naked by others, to be on display . . . to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hair of one’s own body, turned into disguise.”2 Berger’s idea carries deep implications for reading the body. First, it allows for viewing a continuum, albeit symbolic, between dress and nudity, conceptualizing them as relational rather than oppositional terms. In the 1960s and 1970s, the intermingling of dress and nude paved the way for new senses of eroticism, whose attainment depended on meeting cultural mandates regarding slenderness and fitness, chiefly addressed to young women.3 Second, Berger noted that it was always the female body on display for, presumably male, viewers. Feminist scholars have long analyzed how the female body became a spectacle or, as Laura Mulvey has put it, an object for visual pleasure.4 In Argentina, it turned into a venue for discussing overly public morals as well, which illuminates the scope and limits of authoritarian censorship in an era of transnational, market-oriented eroticism. Third, amid that pervading “commercialization,” Berger’s ideas introduce the interplay between nudity, dress, and disguise. Although formally reacting against the prevailing fads, the young women who engaged with revolutionary politics drew upon clothing items marked by eroticism. Dress, nudity, and eroticism were then part of their disguise for performing the “guerrilla woman.”

  Well before the first guerrilla groups came to the surface, however, the

  Miniskirts in Buenos Aires c. 1967. Archivo Fotográfico, Archivo General de la Nación, Box 850, File 25.

  increased display of young women’s bodies was triggered by the spread of new fashion items, the most legendary of which was the miniskirt. In early 1966, the traditionalist women’s magazine Para Ti informed its readers of the imminent arrival of the miniskirt and invited them to prepare their legs (through gymnastics and depilation), while at the same time predicting it would be a transient fad. Local fashion designers made the same predictions: spring and summer collections of 1966–67 displayed the miniskirt in vacation resort settings but gave little consideration to the idea that it could be worn in everyday contexts, with the exception of the most “snobbish youth.” In fact, right after the military coup d’état led by Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966, only a few exclusive stores sold miniskirts in Buenos Aires. The first consumers were young women involved in avant-garde aesthetic movements or to intellectualized milieus, with the students at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires credited as the “initiators.”5 One year later, however, the miniskirt had reached even the most remote working-class neighborhoods in the metropolitan areas. A survey conducted in July 1967 in Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Rosario showed that 65 percent of young women had purchased at least one miniskirt in the past year. Some of the young women polled reckoned they had felt ashamed when wearing the miniskirt for the first time and had feared of awakening “flirtatious remarks” (piropos) from men.6

  In July 1967, an advertising campaign for miniskirts and blue jeans, the two most important items in youth fashion, incited a small scandal over the perils of over-sexualizing young women’s bodies. The ad for the local brand Lady Far West showed two young women combining “dress” and “nudity”: with their backs turned to the viewer, they wear a denim miniskirt and a denim pant, while their bodies are naked from the waist up. In the week that followed the launching of the ad, moral watchdog organizations complained. The League of
Mothers went as far as organizing a public demonstration against a catwalk where young women showed miniskirts and pants, and its representatives wrote an infuriated letter to the mayor of Buenos Aires to have the Lady Far West ad banned.7 Mayor Eugenio Schettini, one of the most conservative officers within the Onganía regime, readily agreed to ban the ad. In his efforts to “moralize” the city, he had passed an advertising Code increasing the penalties for ads that “damage public morals,” and applied it for the first time to the Lady Far West ad. The ad disappeared from billboards and periodicals, while the advertisers had their license briefly removed.8 Despite his efforts, Schettini could not prevent young women from wearing jeans or miniskirts. Yet the mayor and most of the (male) “public opinion” that newsmagazines insistently surveyed coincided at one point: the new fashion items had an unusual “sex appeal.”9

  Wearing the new fashion items involved further display of the body, which young women attempted to keep thinner. Not by accident, the dissemination of jeans and the miniskirt coincided with the growth of dieting practices, which echoed similar developments worldwide. As the cultural critic Susan Bordo has noted, the idealization of the slender body in the twentieth century coded the tantalizing ideal of a well-managed self through deploying self-management techniques, like dieting and exercising.10 In Argentina, these dynamics exploded in the 1960s. While in 1958 Para Ti recommended to its youth readers that the ideal weight for those five feet four inches tall was 132 pounds (60 kilos), in 1968 it had dropped to 119 pounds (54 kilos). Like other magazines, Para Ti also began to carry advice on dieting practices; and young women wrote letters to complain about how hard it was for them to fit the new ideals.11 It very likely was hard: according to survey data for 1965, the average dieter in urban areas took in 3,450 calories per day, making slenderness difficult to attain.12 Moreover, as journalistic reports showed, sports were only just beginning to be popularized among young women, who would rather “resist temptations [and] suffer to fit into their tight pants and skirts.”13 For observers of daily life, however, changes in actual bodies were apparent. Dr. Florencio Escardó, for instance, compared how young women looked in the early 1950s and in the late 1960s and concluded: “in elegant and humble streets, they show themselves thinner and more confident in their bodies, yet it takes them considerable effort.”14 Wearing the new fashions involved the effort to construct and meet a new ideal of beauty.