Age of Youth in Argentina Read online

  The Age of Youth in Argentina

  The Age of Youth in Argentina

  CULTURE, POLITICS, AND SEXUALITY FROM PERÓN TO VIDELA

  Valeria Manzano

  The University of North Carolina Press

  Chapel Hill

  © 2014 The University of North Carolina Press

  All rights reserved

  Designed and set in Calluna and Calluna Sans by Rebecca Evans

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Manzano, Valeria.

  The age of youth in Argentina : culture, politics, and sexuality from Perón to Videla / Valeria Manzano.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4696-1161-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-4696-1163-1 (ebook)

  1. Youth—Political activity—Argentina—History—20th century. 2. Youth—Argentina—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Counterculture—Argentina—History—20th century. 4. Social change—Argentina—History—20th century. 5. Politics and culture—Argentina—History—20th century. 6. Argentina—Politics and government—1943–1955. 7. Argentina—Politics and government—1955–1983.

  I. Title.

  HQ799.A7M36 2014

  320.40835—dc23 2013041152

  Portions of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in “The Blue Jean Generation: Youth, Gender and Sexuality in Buenos Aires, 1958–75,” Journal of Social History 42:3 (Spring 2009): 657–76, and “Rock nacional, Revolutionary Politics, and the Making of a Youth Culture of Contestation in Argentina, 1966–76,” The Americas 70:3 (January 2014), and are reprinted here with permission.

  18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR MAURO AND LUCIO

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  THE AGE OF YOUTH

  1 Carving Out a Place for Youth

  2 The World of the Students

  3 Surfing the New Wave MUSIC, LEISURE, AND CONSUMPTION

  4 She’s Leaving Home YOUNG WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY

  5 A Fraternity of Long-Haired Boys ROCK AND A YOUTH CULTURE OF CONTESTATION

  6 Close to the Revolution THE POLITICIZATION OF YOUTH

  7 Poner el cuerpo THE YOUTH BODY BETWEEN EROTICISM AND REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS

  8 Youth and the “Authority-Reconstitution” Project

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  The girls of the UES, Esto es, 1954 27

  Shot from Los jóvenes viejos 37

  Shot from El Club del Clan, Palito Ortega 81

  Cartoon of náufragos, Atlántida, 1967 135

  A new fatherhood, Buenos Aires Rock Festival, 1971 146

  Juventud Universitaria Peronista rally, Buenos Aires, 1973 180

  Waiting for Perón’s return, Ezeiza airport, 1973 186

  Miniskirts in Buenos Aires, c. 1967 195

  “Let’s put the house in order,” Gente, 1976 232

  Advertisement for Flecha sneakers, Gente, 1976 234

  Acknowledgments

  This book was started during my time at Indiana University. My greatest debt is to Danny James. I will be always grateful for his intelligence, hospitality, and friendship. I would also like to thank Arlene Díaz, Jeff Gould, and Peter Guardino, who were friends and professors all along. They all nurtured my understanding of Latin American history and were living examples of how to conduct historical research. At the beginning of my graduate studies, I had also the fortune of working closely with Joanne Meyerowitz, who contributed to shape my understanding of the history of sexuality and gender in numerous ways.

  Research for this book was completed with fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council, Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences, and especially the American Council of Learned Societies, which, with the support of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, awarded me one of its Early Career and New Faculty fellowships. While I was conducting research in Argentina, I found the guidance of many librarians, archivists, and private collectors. Among all of them, I would like to single out José Robles, in charge of the Archive of the Facultad of Filosofía y Letras at the University of Buenos Aires, and Daniel Ripoll, who preserved a magnificent collection of Argentine rock. Like most archivists in Argentina, their work is based more on personal sacrifice and commitment than on institutional support, and I truly appreciate their generosity in making their materials available to me. I am also greatly indebted to the many people who shared with me their memories of “being young” in the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina. Elaine Maisner at the University of North Carolina Press has been encouraging and constructive, even when this book was no more than a project. Readers will surely appreciate the editing that has been done by Ron Maner and John Wilson.

  A great many other colleagues and friends provided support, encouragement, and ideas over the years. Besides being pioneers in the study of youth issues in the Latin American 1960s, Eric Zolov and Patrick Barr-Melej were superb and generous interlocutors. The same holds true for Ben Cowan and James Green. In the United States, many other people read or heard portions of this manuscript and made enriching and valuable comments. They include Paulina Alberto, Dain Borges, Christopher Dunn, Eduardo Elena, Paul Gootenberg, Donna Guy, Temma Kaplan, Rebekah Pite, Margaret Power, Karin Rosemblatt, and Mary Kay Vaughan. Matthew Karush and an anonymous reviewer, both assigned by the University of North Carolina Press, made wonderful suggestions for the manuscript, which helped substantively improve this book. I am particularly thankful to two people in Argentina: Juan Carlos Torre and Alejandro Cattaruzza. At times when I was doubtful of the significance of this project, Juan Carlos convinced me that it was important to study the “era of youth,” as he calls it. Alejandro was close to this project from its inception: he made me think twice in order to circumvent truisms, and he was always willing to share ideas and memories. This project also benefited enormously from informal and formal conversations with, and the insights of, Omar Acha, Pablo Buchbinder, Lila Caimari, Adrián Gorelik, Mirta Lobato, Mariano Plotkin, María Ester Rapalo, Juan Suriano, and Hugo Vezzetti. I could not be more fortunate than having had two fellow travelers in studying the “sixties otherwise”: my friends and colleagues Isabella Cosse and Karina Felitti.

  Friends and family collaborated with this project in myriad ways, basically by making my life better. Many thanks to my friends and colleagues Cristian Aquino, Pablo Ben, Leandro Benmergui, Irene Depetris Chauvin, Ariel Eidelman, Laura Ehrlich, Katharine French-Fuller, Paula Halperin, Marlene Medrano, Mollie Nouwen, and Elena Scirica. Although for years we have been thousands of miles apart, my parents and my sister, Virginia, have succeeded in making the distance shorter. Because my parents themselves were young people in the 1960s, my conversations with them about this project were a constant reminder that it was worthwhile. Most crucially, their love and companionship were a bastion for me. As an example of a scholar, as a source of motivation, and as a loving elder sister, Virginia has always remained close.

  Lastly, I thank Mauro Pasqualini who contributed to this book in countless ways. Mauro neither read every word I wrote nor tolerated all my obsessions when writing this book, and I thank him for that. I also thank Mauro for his unfailing confidence, for his intelligence and sense of humor, and for enriching my life. Our son Lucio arrived in this w
orld when this book was close to an end. Life has been more rewarding ever since.

  The Age of Youth in Argentina

  Introduction

  The Age of Youth

  In September 1966, the weekly magazine Confirmado published a long “report on youth” to explore whether or not a “unified youth consciousness and experience” had spread in Argentina like, the reporter posited, it had in postwar Europe. The answer was not conclusive. On the one hand, the reporter claimed that “only by fantasizing could one view a link between Rubén, twenty-five, a construction worker who migrated from Santiago del Estero to the Greater Buenos Aires area, and Ricardo, twenty-one, an entrepreneur from downtown Buenos Aires.” Moreover, he found even fewer connections between them and Ana, seventeen, a secondary school student from the lower middle class. On the other hand, the reporter did find commonalities. First, although their choices differed, the interviewees showed a particular engagement with “young music idols” and were willing to “spend their money and time following them.” Second, while the construction worker had stated his “fondness toward Peronism,” and the entrepreneur his taste for “social democracy,” the reporter thought that young people held a similar “moderate and rational” attitude toward politics. Third, if there was one realm about which young people agreed (and diverged from their elders), it was sexuality: “they accept premarital sex without prejudices,” the reporter argued, “but they keep tying sex to love and marriage.”1 Only one among a myriad of reports the media ran throughout the 1960s, this one was unique in its interrogation of the category of youth (la juventud) by pointing out class and gender differences among young people (los y las jóvenes). As most reports did, however, this one also emphasized three key aspects that “youth” invoked and that young people helped transform in Argentina: culture, politics, and sexuality.

  Youth as a category and young people as actors had at times a potent presence in Argentina’s politics and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Argentina was the cradle of the University Reform Movement, launched in 1918 and largely coded as an antihierarchical youth revolt against what reformist students identified as the academic and political conservatism of most professors, their elders. Besides generating the conditions for a self-ruled university system, the reform movement paved the way for increasing student engagement with politics and helped fuel the creation of the youth branches of the Socialist and Communist Parties (in 1919 and 1921, respectively). Yet the language of youth revolt vanished as Reformism became a platform for the building of a cultural and political identity for the “progressive” middle class that cut across party and age lines.2 On a different level, the expansion and diversification of mass culture ushered in the spread of specific youth fashions and leisure practices. The transnational “modern girl”—the slender, short-haired, independent young woman that Americans labeled the “flapper”—had its Argentine embodiment. At least magazines and tango lyrics produced that imagery and incited concerns about the sexual mores of youth in the modernizing Buenos Aires of the 1920s and 1930s.3 Moreover, in the late 1940s, groups of middle-class boys, the petiteros, challenged patterns of neighborhood sociability in cafes, street corners, and social clubs where men of all ages interacted. Pouring into downtown Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Rosario, the petiteros shaped a stylized fashion, listened to jazz instead of tango, and avoided intergenerational intermingling altogether.4 By the mid-twentieth century, Argentines were familiar with the politicized university student, the “modern girl,” and the iconoclastic boy among other youth figures that evoked challenges to the prevalent political, cultural, and sexual order. Yet it was only in the mid-1950s that an age of youth really began.

  This book studies how youth became a crucial cultural and political category, and one of the most dynamic cultural and political actors in Argentina, from the 1950s to the 1970s. With an equal focus on the adults who spoke about and interpellated youth (from psychologists, educators, parents’ leagues, and politicians to music producers and advertisers) and on young women’s and men’s experiences, the book investigates what the making of youth reveals about how Argentines imagined themselves during times of sweeping cultural transformation and political turmoil, which were suffused by a yearning for newness and change. It shows that youth, as a concept, embodied hopes and anxieties projected onto claims for change, and that young people inhabited, with varying degrees of intensity, that politically and culturally loaded category. Over those decades, the working- and middle-class women and men who occupied the category of youth, albeit in different ways, became the bearers of the most significant aspects of Argentina’s dynamics of sociocultural modernization. By reconstructing the cultural, sexual, and political histories that shaped and were shaped by youth, this book unpacks those dynamics.

  Youth was the carrier of sociocultural modernization and its discontents, as expressed in cultural rebellion and political radicalization. Beginning in the 1950s, young people benefited from a renewed social confidence in the virtues of accelerated change, which reverberated in the dramatic expansion of enrollment in secondary schools and universities. Young people’s involvement with modernizing dynamics acquired more diffuse meanings as well: they created new spaces and styles of sociability; reshaped consumption practices; and challenged deep-seated ways of social and familial interaction. It was amid this transformative sociocultural process that youth helped to change gender relations, alter sexual mores and behaviors, and redefine the meanings of eroticism. Collectively and on their own, these experiences and practices incited contentious situations at the familial, cultural, and social levels—however different their degree and timing. Looking at both the drives for sociocultural and sexual change, and the oftentimes vocal reactions against them, gives us a means of grasping the embattled nature of modernization. Discontent was also nurtured by a transnational repertoire of images, sounds, and ideas that swept across the world. While one segment of the women and men who occupied the category of youth iconoclastically questioned the authoritarianism that set limits to sociocultural modernizing dynamics, others confronted the socially exclusionary traits of modernization and identified Argentina as a part of the rioting Third World. These discontents were embodied in a culture of contestation to which many actors forcefully tried to put an end. Propelling the converging movements in this age of youth, the unifying thread was how Argentines thought of, built up, and enforced authority in its political and cultural meanings.

  This book highlights major junctures in the multilayered “age of youth.” The first of these junctures occurred in 1956. In the wake of the coup d’état that overthrew Juan Perón’s regime (1946–55), myriad actors projected onto youth their hopes for reconstructing a post-Peronist Argentina, imagined as rational, modern, and democratic. In that year, for example, the psychologist Eva Giberti started her successful “School for Parents,” an experience created to teach parents new methods of socialization in the family milieu, including a reformulation of intergenerational relations and the erasure of the harsher forms of patriarchy. In 1956, also, the growing body of secondary school students became exposed to a controversial class of “democratic education,” designed to expunge the effects the previous regime allegedly had on the moral and political values of youth. University students, meanwhile, embarked upon projects to make universities into showrooms for the country’s sociocultural and economic “takeoff.” Equally significant, 1956 marked the arrival of rock music in Argentina, around which youth organized new leisure and consumption activities.

  Permeated by failed democratizing projects, the cultural substratum for the decade that began in 1956 was marked by longing for, and fears of, the new. The political projects that arose after the coup d’état that overthrew Perón were flush with democratic rhetoric but based upon the proscription of the most significant political force, namely, Peronism. The banning of Perón and his movement took place during the military government of the so-called Revolución Libertadora (1955–58). This m
ilitary government also tried to reverse the social legacies of the previous regime, most notably the redistribution of wealth favoring the workers. When Arturo Frondizi assumed the presidency (1958–62), he promised to focus on national economic development in an effort to draw the Peronist constituency to his project. This meant in actuality the arrival of foreign investment to areas ranging from the automobile to the entertainment industry. Frondizi’s “developmentalism,” his attempts to court the workers, and his willingness to set the stage for a democratic process fell short. After the brief interlude of José María Guido’s de facto presidency, Arturo Illia (1963–66) confronted similar dilemmas. Political instability only hastened the unfolding of deep sociocultural transformations, all of which pointed to the celebration of the “new.” As the authority attached to the past was being symbolically and practically contested, the category of youth became a metaphor for change, echoing similar developments in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas.5 As students, cultural consumers and producers, practitioners of a new sociability, and forgers of new sexual mores, young people became carriers and targets of modernization: as sociologist Juan Carlos Torre has aptly put it, they were modernization’s “most significant symptom.”6

  By 1966, major shifts had occurred at various layers of the “age of youth,” which together marked the beginning of a new juncture. In that year, for example, the trio Los Beatniks recorded “Rebelde” (Rebel), signaling the emergence of a vernacular rock culture. Most of the musicians, poets, and fans who built up this culture contested well-entrenched arrangements of masculinity while shaping a forceful antiauthoritarian ideology at odds with the moralistic ethos that the military regime led by General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70) tried to enforce. Also in 1966 new fashion items spread among young women, notably miniskirts and tight pants, which were just as shocking as the male rockers’ iconoclasm. These items sparked heated debates about sexual mores and, more broadly, were conduits for young women to redefine eroticism. Most famously, also in 1966, the Onganía regime intervened in autonomous public universities in an attempt to depoliticize the student movement. Rather than fulfilling its goal, the intervention helped radicalize a broader segment of students, who were captivated by the revolutionary wave that was sweeping across the world. The rocker, the revolutionary militant, and the “eroticized” young woman did not exist as separate figures when viewed from the vantage point of the “age of youth.” Rather these figures interacted (at various times in one individual’s trajectory, or in the various groups into which she or he was inserted) in the emergence of a manifold culture of contestation, which both built upon and called into question key aspects of the dynamics of sociocultural modernization that Argentines lived through, chiefly the persistence of political and cultural authoritarianism.7