Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  Conclusion

  Soon after the imposition of the military junta in 1976, diverse organizations domestically and abroad started campaigning to denounce the massive, state-led violation of human rights. These organizations publicized the implementation of the mechanisms of kidnapping, torturing, and “disappearing” thousands of people. Amnesty International and the Argentine Commission on Human Rights abroad, the Argentine League for Human Rights and the incipient Mothers of Plaza de Mayo at home, all produced rosters listing “disappeared” people. They organized the rosters by occupational criteria (like disappeared lawyers or university students) and demographic data, including one of “disappeared adolescents.” Both during the dictatorship and immediately after the resumption of democratic rule in 1983, human rights organizations downplayed the political commitments of the victims of state terrorism to focus on other aspects of their biographies.1 Their appealing to age markers, notably of youth and adolescence, symbolically mobilized notions of innocence, idealism, and virtue.

  In the aftermath of the dictatorship, the imagery surrounding the “young victim” galvanized public attention. A key example was the sweeping impact of the movie La noche de los lápices (The Night of the Pencils, dir. Héctor Olivera, 1985), which depicts the “true story” of ten secondary school boys and girls from La Plata, most of them affiliated with a Peronist youth group, all kidnapped from their homes on September 16, 1976. The movie and the two pieces on which it is based (a chapter of the Report of the National Committee on Disappeared People titled Never Again and María Seoane and Héctor Ruiz Núñez’s journalistic essay of the same name) blurred the political dimension of their young lives and deaths, perhaps aiming at inciting a particular sort of public indignation. Since La noche de los lápices represented a lethal regime coming from nowhere to murder idealist adolescents, viewers could feel horror but rest in peace: they had not had “anything to do” with what they saw. But the military regime did not come from nowhere and both built upon and heightened a widespread demand for “order” perhaps shared in 1976 by many of the viewers of the movie.2 While it continued to permeate memory writings in the 1990s (through the romanticization of the “idealistic youth”), the building of the “young victim” as a strategic trope was fundamentally a product of the 1980s in both public culture and human rights activism.3 That may have sensitized the population to dictatorial crimes, but it did little to captivate the historical dimensions of state terrorism whose main victims were defined less by their—certainly young—age than by their involvement in revolutionary militancy.

  The last military regime, however, did mark an end to an age in which youth, as a category evoking change, and young people as actors had come to occupy the center stage. I would like to come back to the first moment when youth began to rise in the public arena as a device that helped shape the discussion of the scope, limits, and characteristics of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization in Argentina. Youth as a category gained ascendancy along with the collective perception that post-Peronist Argentina underwent a critical juncture marked by rapid political, social, and cultural change, a time of sweeping instability of institutions, values, and norms, which sociologists and the media, among others, encapsulated in the phrase “crisis of our time.” In that context, myriad actors (Catholic leagues, psychological professionals, the media, and educators) maneuvered with the category of youth they were helping craft. Intensified in the voices of the Catholic leagues, one position conceived of youth as the epitome of the disorders that the “crisis” entailed in terms of the erosion of patriarchal authority; other voices, dominant in the public sphere, believed that youth had the potential to expunge authoritarianism from the familial, cultural, and eventually political milieus. As the psychological professionals repeatedly stated, through living their individual, “biologically based crisis” at a critical social and cultural time, young people would help erase the harsher forms of patriarchy and other “atavisms” and taboos. The category of youth was a key to discuss the future, an argument dominated by a paradoxical attitude toward change, both feared and, seemingly, longed for.

  How did young people interact with the “change” that they, or the category they inhabited, symbolized in the public imagination? In reconstructing the daily experiences of young men and, chiefly, young women by looking at different milieus where they took place (families, schools, leisure spaces, political and cultural groups) and by looking at them through a gendered prism, it was possible to illuminate how embattled sociocultural change was. These findings complicate the usual narratives of a “society pushing for change” suffering from top-down “authoritarian blockades,” which have pervaded the scholarly assessment of the Argentine 1960s. It is worth recalling, hence, the moral panic around the runaway girls early in that decade. In a heightened, dramatic fashion, that panic made apparent one central occurrence: it was young women who more fully embodied and shaped sociocultural modernization. They practically contested prevalent ideas of domesticity and destabilized deep-seated notions of patriarchal authority by remaining longer in the education system, fully participating in the labor market, helping shape entirely youthful leisure activities, and experimenting with new courtship conventions. The moral panic, which arose around the Penjerek case of 1963, stemmed from daily tensions that those changes in young women’s expectations and experiences had generated in the familial and cultural milieus (that is, not from a “blockade” from above). That panic as well as successive “morality campaigns” served as occasions when a wide range of actors (Catholic leagues, for sure, but also myriad “unaffiliated” parents, cultural producers, and politicians) attempted to discipline young women and men by decreasing the autonomy that they were gradually gaining and thus recover what they regarded as their vanishing authority.

  Unintentionally, that moral panic of the early 1960s also served to catapult discussions about youth and sexuality into the spotlight, making visible emerging attitudes and practices. The cohorts of women who came of age in the 1960s were the first ones to gradually voice their approval of premarital sex in the public arena, and—like many young men—they did so in the framework of a discourse connecting sex with love and responsibility, which represented the novelty as “modern” and prudent at the same time. In many respects, the young women and men who came to occupy the category of youth in the late 1960s and early 1970s built on the effects of these previous challenges to prevalent familial and sexual arrangements. As the debate over the extinction of the piba de barrio suggested, in the early 1970s middle- and working-class young women did not face the same degree of parental controls that their predecessors did, although it bears noting that (as many female political militants recalled) they did not have the same degree of freedom from parental supervision that their male peers had either. Meanwhile, premarital sex had become largely normalized in the broad public culture. An incipient new understanding spread among working- and middle-class youth, namely, the disengagement of sexuality from marriage or its horizon. This implied a relocation of the legitimate site for heterosexuality, which also helped set in motion a conversation about sexual equality and the extent of the persistence of a double standard. The emerging gay rights and feminist groups did denounce that persistence, as well as the development of a “moral of replacement” that ended by making patriarchy and male domination alluring and “sexy.” Part of the voices that advocated for a “revolution”—in their case, a noncommodified sexual revolution—these groups were silenced when the “authority-reconstitution” project systematically started in 1974. Besides the imposition of restrictions to the access to contraception—framed in a conservative sexual politics whose practical results were uneven—in the sexual realm the “authority-reconstitution” project did not mark a shift. On this terrain, times had certainly changed.

  In the late 1960s, however, what changed the most had been the ways in which many young women and men articulated a vocal, iconoclastic, and multilayered culture of contestation, whic
h called into question different dimensions of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization. One of the avenues for that articulation was rock culture. Unlike the contestations to patriarchal authority and domesticity that young women and girls had produced since the late 1950s, the middle- and working-class young men attracted to rock culture produced an overtly oppositional questioning of the hegemonic construction of masculinity. Rockers’ cultural politics revolved almost entirely around their criticism of the sites, institutions, and values that punctuated the boys-will-be-men dynamics in 1960s Argentina, including sobriety, responsibility, respect for hierarchies, and consumerism. Rockers’ questioning was eminently practical and embedded into the bodily styles and daily practices through which they created a homosocial fraternity of long-haired boys. That fraternity incited an intense homophobic reaction when it erupted in the public arena, which conditioned the ideological and gendered components of rock culture. On the one hand, that reaction, as epitomized in the form of police and civilian harassment and persecution, helped consolidate antiauthoritarianism as a crucial element of rockers’ ideology. On the other hand, the permanent threat of repression to rockers’ cultural practices contributed to reinforce the perception that this was a male-only territory, unsuitable even for the young women who wanted to engage with it. Equally important, the exclusion of young women was also reinforced by a powerful misogynistic strand that cut across rock culture, which perhaps enabled rockers to symbolically assert their senses of masculinity while countering the “homosexual blackmail” to which they were subjected. Yet it was within the countercultures connected to rock whereby some young men, and women, deployed their radical versions of gender egalitarianism. Limited in their constituency and cultural impact, those experiences represented one visible refusal to the modernizing expectations, heightening the anticonsumerism and antiauthoritarianism that swept across rock and its politics of cultural, while gendered, rebellion.

  Rock culture was only one strand of the youth culture of contestation that burgeoned in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While there was a broad gray zone for their intersection, rock culture and revolutionary politics remained separate constellations of discourse and practice aimed at interpellating youth. However, viewed from the vantage point of the “age of youth” these can be connected as two strands of the vocal youth culture of contestation. First, both strands contributed to the recrafting of the category of youth in public culture, associated ever more with radical change and cultural rebellion. Second, these two strands shared a lexicon of contestation, although rockers and revolutionary militants produced different meanings out of the keywords of that lexicon, “liberation” and “revolution.” In Argentina, as these two key terms spread among young women and men, they signaled the expansion of the “properly political” subset of that youth culture of contestation. The youth that made up the base of Argentina’s “New Left” in the early 1970s, neither viewed rockers’ cultural politics as political nor thought seriously about their claims for expunging capillary forms of authoritarianism, as rockers proposed, even when they enjoyed cultural practices related to rock. Although from today’s viewpoint we can conflate those strands as part of a “New Left,” as historian Eric Zolov has proposed based on 1960s Mexico, the case of Argentina shows that contemporaries drew a clear line between the cultural rebellion attached to rock and the countercultures and the quest for radical sociopolitical change permeating the revolutionary militancy.4

  The cohorts of young people that massively engaged with revolutionary politics brought two key novelties that helped solidify the “newness” of the Left: the certainty that Argentina was part of the Third World and a willingness to poner el cuerpo in order to accelerate the political times for a revolution that many thought was impending. The association of Argentina with the Third World entailed a practical and ideological questioning of the narratives of modernization, chiefly the portrayal of Argentina as undergoing a homogenizing, socially democratizing, and forward-looking process toward social improvement. Being themselves the outcome of modernization, most youth in the process of becoming revolutionary militants emphasized instead the markers of the country’s Third World status—the enduring and extreme social oppression, the regional and social inequalities, and the dependent nature of Argentina’s economy and culture, for example. That project was predicated on the practical engagement with the geographical markers of Argentina’s Third World nature (as youths who traveled to the northwestern regions of the country soon discovered) and with renewed cultural consumption, including reading, musical, and even fashion practices. The encounters with those cultural practices and, chiefly, with those geographies and their inhabitants were incorporated into a new emotional frame dominated by feelings such as indignation and hatred, which propelled many young people to “act.” Along with these cultural and literal displacements, politicizing young women and men who were usually secondary school or university students tried to erase the markers of their youthfulness and their student condition to merge into the broader “people.” Although they replicated similar developments worldwide, those participating in the Argentine May of 1969, for example, insisted on their originality vis-à-vis their European counterparts, who they viewed as politically self-centered and ultimately naïve. These claims remind us that even amid one of the most transnational junctures in the twentieth century (“1968”), events, interpretations, and actions were encoded into national or regional categories and preoccupations.5 The Argentine May marked the beginning of mounting youth politicization, framed into a profound discontent with political authoritarianism and with social modernization. In the view of politicizing young people, that juncture acted as a reminder of the apparent need to prepare one’s body and put it at the service of a revolutionary project to hasten political times and speed up social and national “liberation.”

  Peronism as a political force had both informed and benefited most from young people’s politicization. It was in this realm where youth was most forcefully framed as a legitimate political category and where young people sought to find a bridge to “connect with the people.” As a political category it reflected the increasing amounts of radicalized young people who entered en masse the ranks of the Juventud Peronista or its related organizations via their identification with the Montoneros. In the Peronist family romance that started when Juan Perón returned definitively to the country in mid-1973, the deployment of generational-based language allowed for the positioning of the revolutionary sectors (whether composed of young people or not) as “youth.” The ideological and political disputes in that force carried heightened cultural and political meanings when coded as familial ones. Toward 1974, when the resolution of the family romance occurred, not only the revolutionary sectors (whether Peronist or not, whether young or not) but also youth at large would suffer from the “authority-reconstitution project” that the right-wing sectors (the “elder” in the family romance) unleashed. The passing of legislation on contraception and so-called illegal drugs as well as the restrictions on political activism in schools and universities, all pointed to the production of a figure of an “enemy within” that had a young face and conflated ideas of sexual, cultural, and political disorder.

  One way or another, all the preceding chapters showed that between the midcentury and the mid-1970s, youth as a category, and young people as actors, stood at the center of discussions, and questionings, on how relations of authority were thought of, built up, and enforced at the familial, cultural, and political terrains. The enforcement of authority and hierarchies in the relations between parents and children, between women and men, between teachers and students, between high and popular culture, between the state and its (young) citizens, between the body and the “mind,” all of them were called into question, often simultaneously. Youth offered a window to look at those questionings and to assess their multilayered effects on Argentina’ society and culture. Over these two decades, youth stood for change, and the cohorts of young women a
nd men that occupied that category experimented and crafted cultural, political, and sexual change. They were the last cohorts that embodied the dreams of generations of Argentines vis-à-vis the attainment of social and cultural improvement (for example, through ascending the educational ladder), dreams nurturing the image of an “exceptional” country amid its Latin American neighbors (a nation that was supposedly richer, whiter, and opener). When politicizing youth questioned those dreams and focused instead on collective projects of radical political change for Third World Argentina, they rejected the country’s “exceptionalism” and, ironically, anticipated what the “authority-reconstitution” project accomplished.6 The military junta came to put an end to those dreams and to most modernizing dynamics, including the dismantling of the education system as a ladder to social mobility.

  In many respects, in amplifying the “authority-reconstitution” project initiated in 1974, the junta responded to the perception that, over the prior decades, youth had brought destabilizing (meaning disorderly and chaotic) effects to Argentina’s politics, culture, and society. The regime was not isolated in that perception, since millions of anonymous Argentines believed the same in 1976, and—as political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell suggested—seemed willing to sympathize with initiatives that allowed them to reconstruct their “vanishing authority” at the most intimate levels of the family or the school.7 The military certainly met opposition, in political and countercultural venues alike, although not all youth responded in the same way to attempts by the regime to discipline that segment of the population. Notwithstanding the thousands assassinated as victims of state terrorism, “authority-reconstitution” was an incomplete project. It was successful in one point, though: the “age of youth” reached an end when the words “order” and “chaos” replaced “change” in its attachment to the category of youth.