Age of Youth in Argentina Read online

  This second juncture in the “age of youth,” spanning the period 1966 to 1974, was characterized by diverging attempts to bring about radical social change. The Onganía regime had in fact tried to impose a sweeping makeover of Argentina society: “liberalize” its economy, deregulate social relations, and reconstitute hierarchies in all spheres of social life (including the universities). As evidence of its failure, in May of 1969 a series of concatenated revolts took place in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba. There young people, mostly students, fought alongside workers and the lower and middle classes in protesting the Onganía regime and its social policies. May of 1969 represented the finale for that regime and the emergence of a new and expanding dynamics of societal politicization, whereby youth was a key protagonist. Young people engaged in unprecedented ways with student, political, and guerrilla groups (five of which had a national presence in 1970). In that context, the military began negotiations with the exiled Perón, which ended with a call to elections in 1973. Peronism now attracted a youth constituency, which envisioned that movement as a “national road” to Socialism. In the short “democratic spring” of 1973, first Héctor Cámpora and then Juan Perón presided over the dreams of national and social liberation, which for many seemed close at hand. Those dreams lasted but a short time, though.

  As the 1970s continued, a broad array of cultural actors and political forces coalesced into a project whose purpose was to respond to that culture of contestation embodied by youth. From Catholic conservatives to right-wing Peronist groups, these actors and forces embarked on an “authority-reconstitution” project propelled by the ideas and concerns that had limited the scope of the modernizing dynamics unfolding since the mid-1950s. A new juncture, marked by this overtly reactionary project, started in 1974 and deeply transformed the conditions for the sociability, sexuality, and politics of youth. That year the Peronist government promoted legislative developments that restricted the distribution of the birth control pill; increased penalties for the trafficking and consumption of so-called illegal drugs (and authorized the monitoring of spaces where young people met up); and started shutting down schools and universities as legitimate sites for political activism. The last dictatorship (1976–83) amplified the “authority-reconstitution” project and promised to bring “order” to Argentina’s society—fulfilling an apparent collective desire. Ideologically and culturally, that order would be based on upholding mottoes such as “family, fatherland, and God.” More tragically but less overtly, the project for disciplining Argentina’s society entailed the enforcement of state terrorism and the massive deployment of kidnapping, torturing, and “disappearing” the regime’s “enemies.” People aged sixteen to thirty at the time of being kidnapped accounted for 70 percent of the estimated 20,000 “disappeared.” Most of them had participated in the multilayered culture of contestation that signaled the pinnacle of youth in Argentina’s sociocultural and political life. With them, the age of youth had ended tragically.

  Writing the History of Youth

  As an investigation of the age in which both youth as a category and young people as actors came to occupy a prominent position in Argentina’s public life, this study engages with the emergent scholarship on youth around the world. A relatively new field of inquiry, the study of this “age” has afforded historians with the chance to connect multiple analytical levels (social, cultural, political, sexual) and to start an interrogation of the mutually constitutive making of “youth” and “transnationality.” As a sociocultural category, youth became prominent in the twentieth century. The psychological, educational, and social science discourse on youth circulated transnationally, embedding the category of youth with key traits of modernity. Youth represented an in-between age and signaled a passage, thus standing for transition and movement.8 While the discourse on youth moved across borders, the sociocultural conditions that allowed women and men to occupy that category—like the expansion of the education system and the rise of mass culture, to name the obvious—also moved across the world, yet with different identities, modalities, and timing.9

  As a cultural, political, and sexual history of youth, this book does not engage in the study of any particular generation—terms that have become so entwined that they are often conflated. In the humanities and social sciences, the term “generation” leads to the work of Karl Mannheim, who wrote that age groups, “like social classes,” endow “the individuals sharing them with a common location in the social and historical process . . . limit them to a specific range of potential experience . . . and predispose them for a certain characteristic mode of thought.”10 The heuristic possibilities of this admittedly seductive concept are nonetheless limited for historical analysis. Membership in a common age group is hardly sufficient to ensure a unified perspective and experience. Even if large-scale events, like wars, provide an age group with a shared reference, its members would cut across so many cultural and social axes (such as class, gender, race, and religion) that the significance of their shared temporal coordinates would vary greatly. While surely aware of these problems, many historians continue tying youth to generation and at times they take generations for granted, failing to recognize the representational work they presuppose.11 As cultural critic Leerom Medovoi has argued when analyzing the American “beat generation,” it came into existence when it was named, that is, when the media and vocal members of an age group represented it.12 In 1960s Argentina, for example, writer David Viñas claimed that he was part of a “frustrated generation,” purportedly as a result of its common experience of intolerance toward the Peronist regime and of “betrayal” vis-à-vis the failed attempts to democratize and develop Argentina as embodied by President Frondizi.13 That representation, and others that pop up in the 1960s, did not prosper beyond intellectual milieus. While I do not deploy a generational frame to study youth, I use at times the word “intergenerational” to refer to the relations among age groups, such as between adults and youth.

  From midcentury to the late 1970s, the age groups that made up “youth” varied according to the institutions, regulations, or groups defining the parameters. Law 17771 reformed the Civil Code in 1968, for example, and established definitively twenty-one as the threshold of legal adulthood, but defined in a peculiar way the status of those between eighteen and twenty-one as “minors-adults,” who could legally establish labor contracts, have full dominion over their earnings and possessions, and cast their vote. Meanwhile, in psychological practice and discourse, which was very influential in the public imagination, “youth” intermingled with “adolescence.” In terms of age, in 1958 the Center for Developmental Psychology at the University of Buenos Aires declared that only individuals between fourteen and twenty-one would be eligible to undergo treatment. In 1972, the head of the Adolescent Psychology Department in a model public hospital said those between twelve and twenty-two could be treated. In that same year, when numerous competing groups merged into the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth), they engaged in a serious debate to figure out the appropriate age limits for their membership and finally established the age of thirty as the upper limit.

  The malleability of who counted as “youth” serves to remind us that, far from a biological stage in life, youth is a historical construct intrinsically linked to modernization. In the wake of the global revolts of 1968, John Gillis and Paula Fass, historians who pioneered the study of youth, located the emergence of a discrete youth experience in the context of changing demographic, socioeconomic, and educational patterns. The development of capitalism and consumer culture in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and in the 1920s in the United States, Gillis and Fass respectively argued, set the conditions for the differentiation of one segment of the population who remained for a longer period in the educational system, postponed starting their own families, and eventually gained access to a disposable income.14 As a globalizing force, neither capitalist development nor the consumer culture it generated were continuous in time and pl
ace. In the peripheral setting of Argentina, those modernizing dynamics acquired further social significance by becoming part of the “democratization of well-being” that Peronism delivered for broad sectors of Argentina’s population.15 It was in the midcentury, then, that a mass of young women and men began to occupy the category of youth.

  The rise of youth as a visible category in Argentina was framed into debates touching upon democracy, authoritarianism, and modernization that transpired in local political and cultural venues. However, both the terms of the conversation and the rise of youth per se were part of a movement that, from the end of World War II and well into the 1960s, swept across the globe. As a burgeoning scholarship has begun to reveal, over these transformative decades the rise of youth paved the way for societies to reconfigure the concepts through which they imagined their futures. The work of historian Richard Jobs on postwar France, for example, offers a detailed analysis of how youth symbolized the promises of reconstruction and epitomized the thirst for newness.16 Those metaphors, including the centrality of youth, reverberated in debates unfolding in post-Peronist Argentina, which shows how indebted domestic conversations were to European intellectual and cultural landscapes as well as how simultaneous the rise of youth was. Furthermore, in both countries the public conversation about youth brought irrevocably to the fore ideas of change in several so-called controversial terrains. As happened in British Canada and Tanzania, in France and Argentina, talking about youth implied talking about sex, and vice versa.17

  The recent historical research focusing on youth and sexuality in the immediate postwar period and the 1960s has engaged in a revision of the ways of addressing “sexual revolutions.” The works of Beth Bailey, Ann-Marie Sohn, and Dagmar Herzog on the United States, France, and West Germany shift the focus away from the exclusive attention to the most vocal groups (such as women’s liberation and gay rights’ movements) and from the calls to “free love” to emphasize an often unacknowledged yet crucial phenomena: in fact, they all identify the public acceptance of premarital sex as the cornerstone of the sexual revolutions.18 Along with historian Isabella Cosse’s work, which judges this occurrence as part of a “discreet sexual revolution,” this book contends that the same held true for Argentina.19 However, while premarital sex became publicly normalized in the intersection of the 1960s and 1970s, it had been a key subject of familial and cultural concern for over a decade, especially with regard to young women. The handling of premarital sex sheds light on the embattled dynamics of sociocultural modernization that Argentines experienced, as do the tensions between an eroticization of visual culture (based upon the rising display of the young female body) and the persistent and increasing mechanisms of censorship. In this last respect, therefore, the Argentine sixties sharply contrasted with the so-called “permissive moment” which marked the English, West German, or Italian sixties.20

  The 1950s and 1960s in Argentina also ushered in the emergence of youth cultures associated with changes in consumption practices as with almost everywhere else in Western Europe and the Americas. Sociologist Talcott Parsons coined, in 1942, the term “youth culture” to refer to behavioral patterns among American adolescents, which he depicted as based on the “pursuit of ‘having a good time,’” on consumerism.21 In the same period the term “teenager” spread in business reports and the media alike, initially to denote a discrete market: that of the adolescents. A truism for those working on the United States and Europe, the demographics of the “baby boom” together with the mid-term cycle of economic affluence that began in the postwar were pivotal for the ubiquity of the teenager and for the expansion of goods targeting the young.22 These conditions did not occur in Argentina. Although in the late 1940s there was a subtle recovery of the birth rates, it pales when compared with those in North American and West European contexts—as do the figures of the “youth market” in the decades to follow. However, these are not the main reasons why I depart from the most prevalent approaches to youth and consumption. By focusing on the creation of a “youth market” in which young people from all social strata interacted, historians have so far sidestepped a thorough evaluation of the ways in which consumption practices served to enact and shape distinctions among young people. Even the seemingly most homogenizing items, like the pair of jeans, could have been used for the shaping of distinctions: in early 1960s Argentina, for example, while working-class young men wore the locally produced vaqueros, middle-class young men sought out the imported American brands to signal their class-based, cultural distinction.

  As an original case study, this book provides insight to what was foremost a transnational phenomenon. As a “unit” of analysis and experience, youth transcended national borders and, especially after the Second World War, became part of an increasingly interconnected network of ideas, images, and sounds.23 Argentine young people participated in and localized that network. At the same time that they were becoming key political actors, for example, university student leaders rejected any comparison with their European counterparts and understood that “their 68” was insufficiently revolutionary. That happened as French and Italian students invoked Ernesto Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh as their political heroes, vindicating the so-called Third World in the construction of their political identities. The interconnections did exist, but this book seeks to engage in a critical dialogue with the studies of youth in Europe and the United States. In particular, I hope this study will help destabilize the consensus related to explaining how youth developed as a significant cultural and political actor, from the midcentury to the 1970s, in terms of the interaction with postwar economic expansion and liberal democracy. These premises have been accepted as universal, yet they can hardly be sustained when incorporating comparisons with cases such as Argentina, where that “age” unfolded under economic instability and political authoritarianism. As for Latin America, I aim to contribute to the ongoing efforts in positioning youth at the forefront of scholarly attention. Historians have thus far largely focused on university students and countercultural formations in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Nicaragua.24 I expect that this study will add to a better understanding of the dynamics of cultural renewal and political radicalization that made young people the most visible actors and youth the category upon which reverberated the pervading feeling of imminence, of “change about to happen” that characterized the central decades of the twentieth century in Latin America.

  Politics, Culture, and Sexuality in Argentina

  This book “uses” youth as a strategic device to explore political, cultural, and sexual histories of Argentina from the 1950s to the end of the last military dictatorship. It is my claim that those three “levels” scarcely had an independent development, and a multilayered history of youth can offer a privileged vantage point from which to analyze their interactions. The history of Argentina from midcentury to the 1970s has been overwhelmingly narrated through a political lens. This is hardly surprising: the dramatic effects imposed upon Argentine society by the last military dictatorship prompted scholars to investigate how that was possible. Scholars thus have studied the constant crisis of legitimacy once Peronism was politically proscribed between 1955 and 1973; the failed attempts to carry out developmentalist and democratizing projects—such as those tried by the administrations of Frondizi and Illia—and chiefly the role of the armed forces as arbiters of Argentine politics.25 Similarly, political and intellectual historians have investigated the emergence of a “New Left” by paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the Peronist experience undergone by intellectuals and militants as well as to the impact of the Cuban and other “Third World” revolutions in the 1960s.26 Intimately linked with this study, scholars have researched the characteristics of the political radicalization unleashed after the imposition of military rule in 1966, which crystallized in the popular revolts that made the “Argentine May” of 1969 and expanded in the years to follow to include the emergence of multiple guerrilla groups
.27

  The involvement of young people in radical politics was perhaps the single most distinctive occurrence in the global political scenario of the 1960s and 1970s, and Argentina was not an exception. Young women and men, mostly but by no means exclusively from middle-class origins, engaged with the student, party, and guerrilla groups they helped create to shape paths toward social or national liberation (depending on their conception of revolution and Socialism). The engagement with the most extreme variants of militancy—armed struggle—has attracted the most scholarly attention. Recent essays have theorized the ways in which the logics of war may have superseded the logics of politics among groups embracing armed struggle and connected this with the shaping of revolutionary subjectivities permeated by “eschatological components” and a no less certain cult of political martyrdom.28 Instead of insisting on these paths of analysis, I have opted to offer different elements in an effort to shift the focus away from the experiences of the “vanguard” guerrilla combatants. This study shows that the political coming of age of youth in the 1960s and early 1970s was both a part of and a reaction to the dynamics of cultural and social modernization. In their political socialization, young people came to conceive of Argentina as part of a rebellious political geography, that of the Third World. That belief did not only lead many to reject what a modernizing country would have to offer (an individually based path of social mobility, for example) but also to the conviction that, as a Third World country, Argentina had only one choice: speed up the political times to shape a revolutionary future. That belief in practice involved an increasing corporeal engagement with politics. Unlike previous leftist traditions, this one focused prominently on the body as a carrier of revolutionary practice, and especially of the pervading sense of imminence that, as cultural critic Diana Sorensen has argued, entailed “an anxious, sometimes optimistic sense of arrival about to take place, or to be voluntaristically ushered in.”29