Age of Youth in Argentina Read online

  Youth was crucial in the project of reconstructing a “de-Peronized” Argentina. As part of this attempt, the libertadores issued a decree—the infamous 4161—that prohibited even mentioning the name of Perón publicly. One of its first violators was Marta Curone, the last president of the feminine branch of the UES, who spent months in prison.33 Along with that vengeful repression, the executive power issued a youth-oriented decree, this time to create a program of Democratic Education geared “to safeguard, with efficacy and haste, the civic spirit of the new generations.” Conceptually centered on the assumed dichotomy between totalitarianism and democracy, the program mandated that first-year students discuss the value of individual rights and then learn about the “annihilation of the individual personality in totalitarian regimes” by drawing on examples from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, and Peronist Argentina. Second-year students would focus on how totalitarianisms manipulated the education system and propaganda. Finally, third-year students would learn how Peronism “exalted the masses,” “discontinued liberties and rights,” “persecuted opponents,” and “subverted hierarchies.” Specifically, they would discuss how Peronism “mobilized and deceived youth in state-sponsored organizations,” an obvious reference to the UES.34

  At the same time that the emergent and market-oriented youth culture bourgeoned with the kind of leisure activities and sociability that the UES had offered to its members, that “youth state-sponsored” organization became a dirty word in Argentina’s public culture. Between 1956 and 1973, adolescents in all secondary schools were required to study the Democratic Education program. It is hard to imagine how youths who came from Peronist families handled the obsessively anti-Peronist tone of the Democratic Education program, especially those who in the second half of the 1950s had created multiple “Peronist Youth” groups in contexts of semi-legality and repression; and those who engaged with and tried to “revolutionize” Peronism in the early 1970s.35 More generally, the youths exposed to that program could contrast the abyss between a formal democratic rhetoric at school, and the absence of democratic practice in their ordinary lives, since Argentina was ruled by the military for eleven out of the seventeen years the program was taught. The program of Democratic Education was out of place from its inception, yet it responded to the anxieties and fears that broad segments of the cultural and political elites manifested in the immediate aftermath of Peronism.

  The program of Democratic Education constituted still another layer within the larger debates over youth initiated with the creation of the UES. The debates that surrounded the experience of the UES, before and after the overthrow of Perón, helped to place youth at center stage. In this respect, besides the expansion of educational possibilities, another legacy of Peronism involved rising concerns over youth and its connections with politics, culture, and sexuality. On the eve of the 1960s, many of the organizations and intellectuals that had consistently opposed Peronism actively participated as experts in the emergent professional study of youth. Catholic groups for the “defense of the family,” as well as psychologists, psychiatrists, and educators that helped build an anti-Peronist bloc, then attempted to understand and regulate youth.

  Youth, “Crisis,” and the Shaping of the Sixties

  Between 1958 and 1961, La Razón, the most widely read daily in the country, informed its readers of 170 public lectures, conferences, and roundtables that revolved around the topic of youth. Taking place in schools, theaters, churches, and union headquarters spread throughout Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Rosario, the events brought together thousands of participants. Educators, psychologists, and priests were the most frequent speakers.36 Most of those “experts” connected their worries over youth to the perception that Argentina had come to a critical juncture marked by rapid political and sociocultural change, a time of sweeping instability of institutions, values, and norms. Youth served to address the anxieties generated by the awareness of change and became a segment of society upon which state officers, Catholic groups, and psychological professionals tried to act. All these actors were crucial in generating representations, images, and policies that spoke to the dynamics of sociocultural modernization at the dawn of the 1960s.

  The crisis-of-our-time motif spread through journalistic and expert commentary alike. It was nevertheless systematized in the work of sociologist Gino Germani, who in 1956 framed what would become one of his most famous pieces of interpretation of Peronism against the backdrop of “an era of vast transformations not only of the circumstances surrounding us but also of us, of the ways we think and feel.” The crisis affected the economy and the structuration of society, morals, culture, and politics; however, these layers did not align. When analyzing the way the crisis worked at the level of morals and culture, Germani specified that “people do not believe in traditional norms anymore, and are not willing to consciously and rationally choose what they before accepted without hesitation.” The crisis thus implied a transition from so-called traditional to modern norms, values, and social forms, a process that Germani evaluated positively because it entailed “the elevation of the power of reason vis-à-vis the nonreflexive approval of what tradition and the past dictate.” Yet the transition itself generated dilemmas sometimes expressed in politics: the masses, he argued—by following Erich Fromm—feared freedom, and that was the terrain from which “totalitarian experiences,” like Peronism (from his perspective) emerged.37

  How to guarantee that this transitional crisis unfolded into modern—rational, secular—social forms and values? One of the venues was to democratically socialize individuals at the most basic level: the family. This was a general goal shared by Germani and his collaborators, as well as by most of the psychological professionals that discussed youth and family issues in the public arena. Germani carried out research on the traits of the family in a “changing society” and found that, within the urbanized middle and working classes, families tended to be nuclear and smaller than the families of the recent migrants to Buenos Aires from rural areas. Equally important, the “modern families,” he observed, showed “a more egalitarian climate, the decrease of paternal authoritarianism, and the greater importance of the wife and the children.”38 Those families were at the same time the product of a positive, ongoing transition and the means for rearing the coming generations into nonauthoritarian socialization, or the building blocks of a modern, rational, and democratic society. The model of a nonauthoritarian family, which left behind harsher forms of patriarchy, was further constructed and diffused through the work of the most prominent psychological professionals. These professionals, chiefly the psychoanalytically oriented, acquired prominent visibility by the late 1950s. As historian Mariano Plotkin has noted, psychoanalysis had become an “interpretative key” through which many middle-class Argentines tried to unlock the meaning of the rapid political and cultural changes they experienced.39 Psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists contributed influential discourses on, and practices for, youth and its relation to the familial and cultural spheres.

  Two psychological professionals acquired a major role: Telma Reca and Eva Giberti. Reca was one of the most renowned childhood and adolescence psychiatrists. She was pivotal to the training of the first cohorts of psychologists at the UBA where she taught a required course on adolescence that provided students with valuable practical orientation.40 From 1959 to 1966, Reca was head of the Center of Developmental Psychology and Psychopathology, an organization that provided practical outreach for students, offering free treatment to children and adolescents.41 Reca also organized public discussion of youth, holding conferences and giving lectures to explain the traits of the “new youth.” Along the same lines, psychologist Giberti initiated her project of the Escuela para padres (School for Parents), a program she developed through the media and public workshops. Along with her husband, Florencio Escardó (a Socialist pediatrician who served from 1958 to 1961 as the vice-rector of the UBA), she promoted ideas for renovating, or mo
dernizing, the family.42 She wrote advice columns in women’s and childrearing magazines and also in La Razón. As Giberti recalls, her success among parents and teachers was perhaps not only related to the fact that she was capable of writing and talking in a jargonless yet “scientific” language, but also to the fact that there was an existing audience anxious to learn how to “parent” who were worried by the changes they noted in their families.43

  These psychological professionals connected their understanding of the “adolescent crisis” to the sociocultural “crisis of our time,” and they believed that one would ideally help solve the other. Reca reminded parents that the adolescent crisis had hormonal and endocrinological as well as psychic roots. Along with sexual awakening, the adolescent crisis created a “normal state of rebelliousness” that generated conflict with parents who still relied upon the idea of “obedience based upon tradition.” These clashes, however, were to be welcomed: through living their normal rebellion in a deeply critical time, youth helped push against “the authoritarianism that we, adults, still display,” paving the way for a more “rational” society.44 Giberti, for her part, stated that the adult generation embodied “the last echelon that separates the patriarchal from our modern times,” represented in youth. While youths’ role was to question the established norms, adults might cooperate through building up a democratic sense of authority at home, which would be the basis for a “democratic culture.”45 In tying youth to adolescence, and adolescence to hormones and rebellious conduct, these professionals made youth an involuntary agent for familial and cultural change.

  The psychological experts projected onto youth the promise to modernize Argentina’s society. Their project resembled what cultural critic Leerom Medovoi notes in his analysis of the figure of the “rebel” in the United States of the 1950s. While many voices panicked, Medovoi shows that psychoanalysts and sociologists such as Erick Erikson and David Riesman vindicated youth rebellion, which they thought of as both a key moment of identity-building and a means to keep the principles of questioning alive in an otherwise conformist society.46 The psychological experts in Argentina also celebrated a normally rebellious youth. In their view, youth would become agents to a cultural modernization that Argentines needed to pass through in their own transition to a modern society, like the one that Germani foresaw. In contrast to contemporaneous developments in the United States and Western Europe, though, the Argentine sociologists were silent in almost all discourse concerning youth. They neither found nor constructed the “deviant subcultures” that their English or Italian counterparts did, nor were they interested in analyzing the patterns of consumption and sociability that their American peers were.47 As if a division of labor were taking place, the Argentine sociologists did not challenge psychologists as experts in youth issues. Yet psychological professionals were not alone in the discussions about youth.

  The League of Mothers accounted for one of the most active Catholic groups in favor of the defense of the patriarchal family and especially of its youngest members, purportedly threatened by the attendant forces of “liberalism” and Communism. Created in 1951, the League of Mothers aimed at protecting the family from the supposed pernicious effects of dynamics such as the incorporation of women into the extradomestic labor force, the pervasiveness of the new media, and the concurrent decrease in authority of the father over his wife and children.48 As with other Catholic groups formed by lay people, the league gained influence after the 1955 coup d’état, when it became one of the leading moral watchdog organizations. In 1957, the League of Mothers fueled the creation of a Family Front to coordinate efforts to pass pro-family legislation, including increased penalties for adultery and abortion.49 Meanwhile, the league’s counselor, Father Manuel Moledo, gave as many lectures as the psychological professionals, but he focused on how youth lived in troubled homes and launched themselves ill-equipped to interact with “sensualist music, literature, and movies.”50 For those conservative groups, that environment was cause and consequence of the hedonism and materialism linked with the “atheistic liberalism,” the first step in the weakening of morals that made the terrain ripe for “Communist infiltration.”51 The conservative Catholic groups waged a Janus-headed war on “liberalism” and what they viewed as its logical continuation, Communism, just as Vatican-oriented family groups in postwar Italy (whose structure and agenda the Argentines tried to emulate) did. The war was one in which youth’s “moral well-being” came to occupy a dominant rhetorical and political role.52

  The conservative Catholic groups amassed a substantial constituency and gained remarkable political influence in response to their perceived “crisis.” In contrast with Reca and Giberti, these groups posited that only the reconstitution of patriarchal authority could fix the ongoing crisis. Thus, when the League of Mothers began its own “school”—aimed at emulating Giberti’s—the first workshop was entitled “Authority and Liberty.” While it called for learning how to combine both, the coordinators did not harbor doubts: authority should prevail.53 Parents could hear the school’s advice on prime-time radio, since the League of Mothers was given free radio space, and it also gained access to popular television programs.54 A sizable number of women attracted by the prospect of defending their families and children from the propagandized cultural and political perils flocked to conservative Catholic groups (as also happened in Mexico and Brazil at the same time).55 In 1962, the League of Mothers claimed an affiliation of eighty thousand women who were organized by parish in middle- and working-class neighborhoods in the largest cities.56 The league also developed a notable ability to exert pressure on successive governments, whether they were civilian or military. Either by participating directly in state institutions or by lobbying the executive power or Congress, the League of Mothers and other conservative Catholic groups helped shape public policy, especially in cultural and educational arenas.

  Conservative Catholic groups had the majority of seats in the only state-run institution devoted to youth created during Frondizi’s administration. In the eyes of many political actors, Frondizi synthesized the aims of democratizing politics, developing the economic structure, and modernizing the sociocultural spheres, which were thought of as crucial for the “takeoff” that would put the country on the road to development.57 In the refoundational rhetoric he used in his electoral campaign, Frondizi referred to youth as the “oil that will fuel the takeoff.”58 Yet the series of policies that touched upon youth carried out during his administration illustrates the limits of that modernizing project. Besides his administration’s controversial educational policy (which I discuss in the next chapter), the government’s only guidelines consisted of reorganizing the Consejo Nacional de Protección de Menores (CNPM, National Council for the Protection of Minors) to patrol the “moral well-being” of youths, conceived of as minors. Created to manage the thus-far chaotic system of institutions for reeducating children and adolescents deemed abandoned or “delinquent,” the CNPM would also perform so-called preventive tasks, including the policing of the media and cultural “environment” surrounding all underage youth.59

  The CNPM and the conservative Catholic groups contributed to the enforcement and institutionalization of censorship in the name of the “moral well-being of minors,” thus making the Argentine 1960s different from the “permissiveness” experienced in some European countries.60 While legislative developments in England and Germany decriminalized homosexuality and discontinued the legal category of obscenity, in Argentina the opposite happened.61 Old edicts regarding “public order” and new anti-Communist legislation paving the way for “detentions for checking penal antecedents” (passed in 1958 and 1965) informed the persistent persecution to which homosexuals were subjected. Likewise censorship was mounted to block “politically subversive” and “morally harmful” materials alike.62 The CNPM and the Catholic groups exerted pressure on district attorneys and judges to prosecute those who violated Article 128 of the Penal Code, which prohibited th
e diffusion of obscene printed materials. The list of prohibitions included Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Henry Miller’s Nexus along with pornographic and popular magazines that incorporated semi-nude photographs. As the 1960s progressed, in addition, two-dozen Argentine writers and publishers were prosecuted.63